Faith * * causes the soul to find all that is spoken of him in the word, and his beauty there represented, to be abundantly true, makes it really taste of his sweetness, and by that possesses the heart more strongly with his love, persuading it of the truth of those things, not by reasons and arguments, but by an inexpressible kind of evidence, that they only know that have it.

Either this is true, or religion is not religion; that is, it adds nothing to our human reason; ‘non religat’.  Grant it, grant it me, O Lord!

Ib. pp. 104-5.

This sweet stream of their doctrine did, as the rivers, make its own banks fertile and pleasant as it ran by, and flowed still forward to after ages, and by the confluence of more such prophecies grew greater as it went, till it fell in with the main current of the Gospel in the New Testament, both acted and preached by the great Prophet himself, whom they foretold to come, and recorded by his Apostles and Evangelists, and thus united into one river, clear as crystal.  This doctrine of salvation in the Scriptures hath still refreshed the city of God, his Church under the Gospel, and still shall do so, till it empty itself into the ocean of eternity.

In the whole course of my studies I do not remember to have read so beautiful an allegory as this; so various and detailed, and yet so just and natural.

Ib. p. 121.

There is a truth in it, that all sin arises from some kind of ignorance * * *.  For were the true visage of sin seen at a full light, undressed and unpainted, it were impossible, while it so appeared, that any one soul could be in love with it, but would rather flee from it as hideous and abominable.

This is the only (defect, shall I say?  No, but the only) omission I have felt in this divine Writer—­for him we understand by feeling, experimentally—­that he doth not notice the horrible tyranny of habit.  What the Archbishop says, is most true of beginners in sin; but this is the foretaste of hell, to see and loathe the deformity of the wedded vice, and yet still to embrace and nourish it.

Ib. p. 122.

He calls those times wherein Christ was unknown to them, ’the times of their ignorance’.  Though the stars shine never so bright, and the moon with them in its full, yet they do not, altogether, make it day:  still it is night till the sun appear.

How beautiful, and yet how simple, and as it were unconscious of its own beauty!

Ib. p. 124.

You were running to destruction in the way of sin, and there was a voice, together with the Gospel preaching to your ear, that spake into your heart, and called you back from that path of death to the way of holiness, which is the only way of life.  He hath severed you from the mass of the profane world, and picked you out to be jewels for himself.

O, how divine!  Surely, nothing less than the Spirit of Christ could have inspired such thoughts in such language.  Other divines,—­Donne and Jeremy Taylor for instance,—­have converted their worldly gifts, and applied them to holy ends; but here the gifts themselves seem unearthly.