t
mystery, as it is the main curse of time. The idea of it--of its
exceeding sinfulness--haunted and oppressed him. He used to say of John
Foster, that this deep and intense, but sometimes narrow and grim
thinker, had, in his study of the disease of the race, been, as it were,
fascinated by its awful spell, so as almost to forget the remedy. This
was not the case with himself. As you know, no man held more firmly to
the objective reality of his religion--that it was founded upon fact. It
was not the pole-star he lost sight of, or the compass he mistrusted; it
was the seaworthiness of the vessel. His constitutional deficiency of
hope, his sensibility to sin, made him not unfrequently stand in doubt
of himself, of his sincerity and safety before God, and sometimes made
existence--the being obliged to continue to be--a doubtful privilege.

[22] In his own words, "A personal Deity is the soul of Natural
Religion; a personal Saviour--the real living Christ--is the
soul of Revealed Religion."

When oppressed with this feeling,--"the burden and the mystery of all
this unintelligible world," the hurry of mankind out of this brief world
into the unchangeable and endless next,--I have heard him, with deep
feeling, repeat Andrew Marvel's strong lines:--

"But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariots hurrying near;
And yonder all before me lie
Deserts of vast eternity."

His living so much on books, and his strong personal attachment to men,
as distinct from his adhesion to their principles and views, made him,
as it were, live and commune with the dead--made him intimate, not
merely with their thoughts, and the public events of their lives, but
with themselves--Augustine, Milton, Luther, Melancthon, George Herbert,
Baxter, Howe, Owen, Leighton, Barrow, Bunyan, Philip and Matthew Henry,
Doddridge, Defoe, Marvel, Locke, Berkeley, Halliburton, Cowper, Gray,
Johnson, Gibbon, and David Hume,[23] Jortin, Boston, Bengel, Neander,
etc., not to speak of the apostles, and above all, his chief friend the
author of the Epistle to the Romans, whom he looked on as the greatest
of men,--with all these he had personal relations as men, he cordialized
with them. He had thought much more about them--would have had more to
say to them had they met, than about or to any but a very few living
men.[24] He delighted to possess books which any of them might have held
in their hands, on which they had written their n