Books
and preachers did not use to tell us, that faith, and knowledge, and
feeling,--that repentance, conversion, and sanctification,--that reading
the Scriptures, and hearing sermons, and singing hymns, and offering
prayers,--that church fellowship, and religious ordinances, were all
nothing except so far as they tended to make people good, and then to
make them better, and at last to perfect them in all divine and human
excellence. No one taught us that goodness was beauty, that goodness was
greatness, that goodness was glory, that goodness was happiness, that
goodness was heaven. The truth was never pressed on us that the want of
goodness was deformity, dishonor and shame,--that it was pain, and
wretchedness, and torment, and death,--that goodness in full measure
would make earth heaven--that its decline and disappearance would make
earth hell. Yet a careful and long-continued perusal of the Scriptures
left the impression on my mind, that this was really the case. When I
compared the eternal talk about all our goodness being of no account in
the sight of God,--of all our righteousness being but as filthy
rags,--with the teachings of Scripture, I felt as if theologians were
anti-christ, and their theology the gospel of the wicked one.
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