that, if there was one young man in all that town of Sincere who kept his
garments unspotted it was just our pilgrim of to-night. Yes, said one
who had known him all his days, if the child is the father of the man,
then Little-Faith, as you so unaccountably to me call him, must have been
all along a good man.

It was said long ago in _Vanity Fair_ about our present Premier that if
he were a worse man he would be a better statesman. Now, I do not repeat
that in this place because I agree with it, but because it helps to
illustrate, as sometimes a violent paradox will help to illustrate, a
truth that does not lie all at once on the surface. But it is no paradox
or extravagance or anything but the simple truth to say that if Little-
Faith had had more and earlier discoveries made to him of the innate evil
of his own heart, even if it had been by that innate evil bursting out of
his heart and laying waste his good life, he would either have been
driven out of his little faith altogether or driven into a far deeper
faith. Had the commandment come to him in the manner it came to Paul;
had it come so as that the sinfulness of his inward nature had revived,
as Paul says, under its entrance; then, either his great goodness or his
little faith must have there and then died. God's truth and man's
goodness cannot dwell together in the same heart. Either the truth will
kill the goodness, or the goodness will kill the truth. Little-Faith, in
short, was such a good man, and had always been such a good man, and had
led such an easy life in consequence, that his faith had not been much
exercised, and therefore had not grown, as it must have been exercised
and must have grown, had he not been such a good man. In short, and to
put it bluntly, had Little-Faith been a worse sinner, he would have been
a better saint. "_O felix culpa_!" exclaimed a church father; "O happy
fault, which found for us sinners such a Redeemer." An apostrophe which
Bishop Ken has put into these four bold lines--