gress exclusively to the reception of the one or the other truth, whereas it has depended upon a number of combining causes, which God has ordered for our good, upon a great variety of means, by which God has been drawing us to Himself, whereof we have seized upon one or two of the principal only. In other cases we may be altogether mistaken. Thus, to take a published instance; a person now living has said of himself that "he read himself into unbelief, and afterwards read himself back into belief." As if mere diligent study could restore any one who had fallen from the faith! Whereas, without considering what circumstances, beside the reading of infidel books, led him to infidelity, or what commencing unsoundness led him to follow up the reading of infidel books, on which he was not competent to judge;—the very fact of reading at one time infidel, at another Christian, writings, implies that the frame of mind was different at each time; so that by his own account, other causes must have combined both to his fall, and his restoration. Again, he himself incidentally shows that, though a sceptic, he still continued to exercise considerable self-denial, for the welfare of others; so that among the instruments of his untried faith, may have been one, which he omitted, that his benevolence, like that of Cornelius, went up as a memorial before God[1]. But if we can be mistaken, even as to the influence of what we have tried, much more assuredly must we, in spiritual matters, be in ignorance of what we have not tried. We may have some intimation with regard to such questions, whether of doctrine or of practice, from the experience of good men; but so far from being judges about them, it will often happen that precisely what we are most inclined to disparage, will be that which is most needful for us. For, since all religious truth or practice is a correction or purification of our natural tendencies, we shall generally be in ignorance beforehand, what will so correct or purify them. Our own palate is disordered, our own eye dimmed: until God then has restored, by His means, our spiritual taste, or our spiritual
- ↑ Knox's Correspondence, t. ii. p. 586, 7. "It has often struck me that probably this good man was rewarded for his fraternal piety by his providential conversion to Christianity."
