When the church and her ministers, when the Scriptures and their anomalies, and when the faults and failings of Christian men are made the subject of mockery and laughter, the reverence, the fear, the awe, the respect that all enter so largely into religion, and especially into the religion of young people, is too easily destroyed; and not seldom the first seeds of practical and sometimes of speculative atheism are thus sown.  The mischief that has been done by mockery and laughter to the souls, especially of the young and the inexperienced, only the great day will fully disclose.

And then, two men of great weight and authority with us, tell us what we who are ministers would have found out without them:  this, namely, that the greatest atheists are they who are ever handling holy things without feeling them.

“Is it true,” said Christian to Hopeful, his fellow, “is it true what this man hath said?” “Take heed,” said Hopeful, “remember what it hath cost us already for hearkening to such kind of fellows.  What!  No Mount Zion!  Did we not see from the Delectable Mountains the gate of the City?  And, besides, are we not to walk by faith?  Let us go on lest the man with the whip overtakes us again.”  Christian:  “My brother, I said that but to prove thee, and to fetch from thee a fruit of the honesty of thy heart.”  Many a deep and powerful passage has Butler composed on that thesis which Hopeful here supplies him with; and many a brilliant sermon has Newman preached on that same text till he has made our “predispositions to faith” a fruitful and an ever fresh commonplace to hundreds of preachers.  Yes; the best bulwark of faith is a good and honest heart.  To such a happy heart the truth is its own unshaken evidence.  To whom can we go but to Thee?—­they who have such a heart protest.  The whole bent of such men’s minds is toward the truth of the gospel.  Their instincts keep them on the right way even when their reason and their observation are both confounded.  As Newman keeps on saying, they are “easy of belief.”  They cannot keep away from Christ and His church.  They cannot turn back.  They must go on.  Though He slay them they will die yearning after Him.  They often fall into great error and into great guilt, but their seed remaineth in them, and they cannot continue in error or in guilt, because they are born of God.  They are they in whom

   “Persuasion and belief
   Have ripened into faith; and faith become
   A passionate intuition.”

HOPEFUL

   “We are saved by hope.”—­Paul