, no
economical reserve, no delicacy or prudence. "Ye must be born again,"
is the simple, direct form of words which she uses after her Divine
Master; "your whole nature must be re-born, your passions, and your
affections, and your aims, and your conscience, and your will, must
all be bathed in a new element, and reconsecrated to your Maker, and,
the last not the least, your intellect." It was for repeating these
points of her teaching in my own way, that certain passages of one of
my volumes have been brought into the general accusation which has
been made against my religious opinions. The writer has said that I
was demented if I believed, and unprincipled if I did not believe, in
my statement that a lazy, ragged, filthy, story-telling beggar-woman,
if chaste, sober, cheerful, and religious, had a prospect of heaven,
which was absolutely closed to an accomplished statesman, or lawyer,
or noble, be he ever so just, upright, generous, honourable, and
conscientious, unless he had also some portion of the divine
Christian grace; yet I should have thought myself defended from
criticism by the words which our Lord used to the chief priests,
"The publicans and harlots go into the kingdom of God before you."
And I was subjected again to the same alternative of imputations,
for having ventured to say that consent to an unchaste wish was
indefinitely more heinous than any lie viewed apart from its causes,
its motives, and its consequences; though a lie, viewed under the
limitation of these conditions, is a random utterance, an almost
outward act, not directly from the heart, however disgraceful it may
be, whereas we have the express words of our Lord to the doctrine
that "whoso looketh on a woman to lust after her, hath committed
adultery with her already in his heart." On the strength of these
texts I have surely as much right to believe in these doctrines
as to believe in the doctrine of original sin, or that there is a
supernatural revelation, or that a Divine Person suffered, or that
punishment is eternal.

Passing now from what I have called the preamble of that grant of
power, with which the Church is invested, to that power itself,
Infallibility, I make two brief remarks: on the one hand, I am not
here determining anything about the essential seat of that power,
because that is a question doctrinal, not historical and practical;
nor, on the other hand, am I extending the direct subject-matter,
over which that power has