God's word, the slack pin is our faith, and the weight and the jog are
the heavy burdens and the sudden shocks of life, and down our hearts go,
wall and pin and suspended vessel and all."

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