"Sir, it seems to me that it's doubting the incarnate Word to believe
what you do, because the main plain drift of all He was and did is
contradicted by some few things men supposed Him to mean because they
thought them. But it's not that I would set myself up to know about
doctrines, if it wasn't that this doctrine had driven me to stop
believing and stop caring to do right. I can't just explain it clearly,
but when I came to Him the way you told me, and thought the way you told
me, I just went on and did it and was blessed and happy in the love of
God as I never could have dreamed of; but all the time there was a
something--I didn't know exactly what--that I couldn't bring my mind to;
so I just left it. But when I got tempted, and prayed and prayed, then
it came on me all of a sudden that I didn't want a God who had to do
with such a little part of life as that. You see it had been simmering
in my mind all the days that I stopped doing the things you told me were
wrong and yet went on keeping among the publicans and sinners because
He did. If I'd just stayed with the church-goers, maybe I wouldn't have
felt it; but to think that I couldn't take a hand in an innocent game o'
cards, or dance with the girls that hadn't had another bit of
amusement--all that wasn't very important, but that sort of thing began
it. And then to think that God was in me and not in them! I began, as I
went down the street, wondering who had God in his heart and who hadn't,
that I might know who to trust and who to try to do good to. And then,
most of all, there was all my books that I liked so much. I didn't read
them any more, for when I thought that God had set every word in the
Bible quite true and left all the other books to be true or not just as
it happened, I couldn't think to look at any book but the Bible; for
one's greedy of knowing how things really are--that's what one reads
for. So you see it was all in my mind God did things differently one
time and another, like making one book and not the others, and only such
a small part of things was His; and then when the temptation came, you