False.  We are told by Bunyan and his editors that the conscience can never find relief for its disobedience to the Law in the Law itself;—­and this is as true of the moral as of the Mosaic Law.  I am not defending Calvinism or Bunyan’s theology; but if victory, not truth, were my object, I could desire no easier task than to defend it against our doughty Barrister.  Well, but I repent—­that is, regret it!—­Yes! and so you doubtless regret the loss of an eye or arm:—­will that make it grow again?—­Think you this nonsense as applied to morality?  Be it so!  But yet nonsense most tremendously suited to human nature it is, as the Barrister may find in the arguments of the Pagan philosophers against Christianity, who attributed a large portion of its success to its holding out an expiation, which no other religion did.  Read but that most affecting and instructive anecdote selected from the Hindostan Missionary Account by the Quarterly Review. [4] Again let me say I am not giving my own opinion on this very difficult point; but of one thing I am convinced, that the ’I am sorry for it, that’s enough’—­men mean nothing but regret when they talk of repentance, and have consciences either so pure or so callous, as not to know what a direful and strange thing remorse is, and how absolutely a fact ‘sui generis’!  I have often remarked, and it cannot be too often remarked (vain as this may sound), that this essential heterogeneity of regret and remorse is of itself a sufficient and the best proof of free will and reason, the co-existence of which in man we call conscience, and on this rests the whole superstructure of human religion—­God, immortality, guilt, judgment, redemption.  Whether another and different superstructure may be raised on the same foundation, or whether the same edifice is susceptible of important alteration, is another question.  But such is the edifice at present, and this its foundation:  and the Barrister might as rationally expect to blow up Windsor Castle by discharging a popgun in one of its cellars, as hope to demolish Calvinism by such arguments as his.

Ib. p. 35, 36.

  “And behold a certain lawyer stood up and tempted him, saying, Master,
  what shall I do ’to inherit eternal life’?”

  “He said unto him, ‘What is written in the law?  How readest thou?’”

  “And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy
  heart, with all thy soul, and with ‘all thy strength’, and with all
  thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.”

  “And he said unto him, Thou ’hast answered right.  This do, and thou
  shall live.’”

  Luke x. 25-28.