Temporaries. In an "exhortation to all new beginners, and so to all
others," "Be sure," Shepard says, "your wound for sin at first is deep
enough. For all the error in a man's faith and sanctification springs
from his first error in his humiliation. If a man's humiliation be
false, or even weak or little, then his faith and his hold of Christ are
weak and little, and his sanctification counterfeit. But if a man's
wound be right, and his humiliation deep enough, that man's faith will be
right and his sanctification will be glorious. The esteem of Christ is
always little where sin lies light." And Hopeful himself says a thing at
this point that is quite worthy of Shepard himself, such is its depth and
insight. He speaks of the righteous actually _loving_ the sight of their
misery. He does not explain what he means by that startling language
because he is talking all the time, as he knows quite well, to one who
understood all that before he was born. Nor will I attempt to explain or
to vindicate what he says. Those of you who love the sight of your own
misery as sinners will understand what Hopeful says without any
explanation; while those who do not understand him would only be the more
stumbled by any explanation of him. The love of the sight of their
misery, and the unearthly sweetness of their sorrow for sin, are only
another two of those provoking paradoxes of which the lives of God's true
saints are full--paradoxes and impossibilities and incoherencies that
make the literature of experimental religion to be positively hateful and
unbearable to Temporary and to all his self-seeking and apostate kindred.

3. But even where the consciences of such men are occasionally awakened,
proceeds Hopeful, in his so searching discovery of Temporaries, yet their
minds are not changed. There you are pretty near the business, replied
his fellow; for the bottom of all is, for want of a change of their mind
and will. Now, one would have been afraid and ashamed for one moment to
suspect that Temporary's mind was not completely changed, so "forward"