own notions on such questions had exceedingly little to do with my
spiritual state_. For me it was important and essential to know that
God hated sin, and that God had forgiven my sin: but to know one
particular manifestation of his hatred of sin, or the machinery
by which He had enabled himself to forgive, was of very secondary
importance. When He proclaims to me in his word, that He is forgiving
to all the penitent, it is not for me to reply, that "I cannot believe
that, until I hear how He manages to reconcile such conduct with his
other attributes." Yet, I remembered, this was Bishop Beveridge's
sufficient refutation of Mohammedism, which teaches no atonement.

* * * * *

At the same time great progress had been made in my mind towards the
overthrow of the correlative dogma of the Fall of man and his total
corruption. Probably for years I had been unawares anti-Calvinistic
on this topic. Even at Oxford, I had held that human depravity is
a _fact_, which it is absurd to argue against; a fact, attested by
Thucydides, Polybius, Horace, and Tacitus, almost as strongly as by
St. Paul. Yet in admitting man's total corruption, I interpreted this
of _spiritual_, not of _moral_, perversion: for that there were kindly
and amiable qualities even in the unregenerate, was quite as clear a
fact as any other. Hence in result I did _not_ attribute to man any
great essential depravity, in the popular and moral sense of the word;
and the doctrine amounted only to this, that "_spiritually_, man
is paralyzed, until the grace of God comes freely upon him." How to
reconcile this with the condemnation, and punishment of man for being
unspiritual, I knew not. I saw, and did not dissemble, the difficulty;
but received it as a mystery hereafter to be cleared up.