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cient support against the still recurring temptation of adopting, nay, wishing the truth of Spinoza's notion, that the survival of consciousness is the highest prize and consequence of the highest virtue, and that of all below this mark the lot after death is self-oblivion and the cessation of individual being. Indeed, how a Separatist or one of any other sect of Calvinists, who confines Redemption to the comparatively small number of the elect, can reject this opinion, and yet not run mad at the horrid thought of an innumerable multitude of imperishable self-conscious spirits everlastingly excluded from God, is to me inconceivable. Deeply am I persuaded of Luther's position, that no man can worthily estimate, or feel in the depth of his being, the Incarnation and Crucifixion of the Son of God who is a stranger to the terror of immortality as ingenerate in man, while it is yet unquelled by the faith in God as the Almighty Father. Book I. Part I. p. 2. But though my conscience would trouble me when I sinned, yet divers sins I was addicted to, and oft committed against my conscience; which for the warning of others I will confess here to my shame. 1. I was much addicted when I feared correction to lie, that I might scape. 2. I was much addicted to the excessive gluttonous eating of apples and pears, &c. 3. To this end, and to concur with naughty boys that gloried in evil, I have oft gone into other men's orchards, and stolen their fruit, when I had enough at home, &c. There is a childlike simplicity in this account of his sins of his childhood which is very pleasing. Ib. p. 5, 6. And the use that God made of books, above ministers, to the benefit of my soul made me somewhat excessively in love with good books; so that I thought I had never enough, but scraped up as great a treasure of them as I could. * * * It made the world seem to me as a carcase that had neither life nor loveliness; and it destroyed those ambitious desires after literate fame which were the sin of my childhood. * * * And for the mathematics, I was an utter stranger to them, and never could find in my heart to divert any studies that way. But in order to the knowledge of divinity, my inclination was most to logic and metaphysics, with that part of physics which treateth of the soul, contenting myself at first with a slighter study of the rest: and there had my labour and delight. Wh
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