rejudice, and of peculiarities of mental constitution, that I
conversed and reasoned with them with the greatest freedom and the
utmost confidence. But I found at length that my expectations were vain.
I was conversing once with a colleague who belonged to this class, on
man's natural proneness to evil. He was one of the best and most
enlightened of that school of theologians, and he regarded me at the
time with very kindly feelings. And we were agreed as to the _fact_ of
man's natural tendency to evil, but he had been led to rest his belief
in the doctrine on somewhat different grounds from those on which my
belief rested. And this was enough. He quoted the passage from Isaiah,
"The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint: from the crown of
the head, to the sole of the foot, there is no soundness, but wounds and
bruises and putrefying sores." "Do you think that the Prophet refers in
that passage to man's natural proneness to evil?" said I. "What can he
refer to else?" said he. "I have been accustomed to regard the words as
a figurative description of the miserable state of the Israelites under
the terrible judgments of God," I replied. He instantly became red in
the face, and said, "Do you mean to deny the natural depravity of man?"
I said, "The question is not about the doctrine, but only about the
meaning of that particular passage." But all was in vain. I had roused
his suspicions and his anger, and the conversation came at once to an
end, and he never afterwards regarded me with the same degree of
confidence and friendliness as before.

On another occasion a brother minister quoted, as proof that men in
their unregenerate state cannot do anything towards their own salvation,
the words of Jeremiah, already once referred to, "Can the Ethiopian
change his skin, or the leopard his spots?" "Do you really think," said
I, "that the Prophet is speaking, in those words, of men generally?"
"What else is he speaking of?" was the answer. "He seems to me to be
speaking of a particular class of men, who have been so long accustomed
to do wrong, that they have lost the power to do right--having made
themselves the helpless slaves of their evil habits. He is not, I think,
speaking of the state into which they were _born_; but of the state to
which they had _reduced_ themselves by long persistence in sin. Hence he
says at the conclusion of the passage, 'Then may ye, who are accustomed
to do evil, do well.'" "Oh! I suppose you