sphemies both against God, Christ, and the Scriptures were poured
upon my spirit, to my great confusion and astonishment. Against the very
being of God and of His only beloved Son; or, whether there were, in
truth, a God and a Christ, or no. Of all the temptations that ever I met
with in my life, to question the being of God and the truth of the Gospel
is the worst, and the worst to be borne. When this temptation comes it
takes away my girdle from me, and removeth the foundation from under me."

"Fool, said my Muse to me, look in thy heart and write."

And John Bunyan looked into his own deep and holy heart, and out of it he
composed this incident of Atheist.

3. It may not be out of place at this point to look for a moment at some
of the things that agitate, stir up, and make the secret atheism of our
hearts to fluctuate and overflow. Butler has a fine passage in which he
points out that it is only the higher class of minds that are tempted
with speculative difficulties such as those were that assaulted Christian
and Hopeful after they were so near the end of their journey. Coarse,
commonplace, and mean-minded men have their probation appointed them
among coarse, mean, and commonplace things; whereas enlightened,
enlarged, and elevated men are exercised after the manner of Robert
Bruce, Thomas Halyburton, John Bunyan, and Butler himself. "The chief
temptations of the generality of the world are the ordinary motives to
injustice or unrestrained pleasure; but there are other persons without
this shallowness of temper; persons of a deeper sense as to what is
invisible and future. Now, these persons have their moral discipline set
them in that high region." The profound bishop means that while their
appetites and their tempers are the stumbling-stones of the most of men,
the difficult problems of natural and revealed and experimental religion
are the test and the triumph of other men. As we have just seen in the
men mentioned above. Students, whose temptations lie fully as much in
their intellects as in their senses, should buy (for a few pence)
Halyburton's Memoirs. "With Halyburton," says Dr. John Duncan, "I feel
great intellectual congruity. Halyburton was naturally a sceptic, but
God gave that sceptic great faith."

Then again, what Atheist calls the "tediousness" of the journey has
undoubtedly a great hand in making some half-in-earnest men sceptics, if
not scoffers. Many of us here to-night who can