some
surprise in any one, who may have drawn a hasty inference from the
charges conveyed by the two preceding chapters. Such an one might be
disposed to expect, that they who have very low conceptions of the
corruption of human nature, would be proportionably less indulgent to
human frailty; and that they who lay little stress on Christ's
satisfaction for sin, or on the operations of the Holy Spirit, would be
more high and rigid in their demands of diligent endeavours after
universal holiness; since their scheme implies that we must depend
chiefly on our own exertions and performances for our acceptance with
God.

But any such expectations as these would be greatly disappointed. There
is in fact a region of truth, and a region of errors. They who hold the
fundamental doctrines of Scripture in their due force, hold also in its
due degree of purity the practical system which Scripture inculcates.
But they who explain away the former, soften down the latter also, and
reduce it to the level of their own defective scheme. It is not from any
confidence in the superior amount of their own performances, or in the
greater vigour of their own exertions, that they reconcile themselves to
their low views of the satisfaction of Christ, and of the influence of
the Spirit; but it should rather seem their plan so to depress the
required standard of practice, that no man need fall short of it, that
no superior aid can be wanted for enabling us to attain to it. It
happens however with respect to their simple method of morality, as in
the case of the short ways to knowledge, of which some vain pretenders
have vaunted themselves to be possessed: despising the beaten track in
which more sober and humble spirits have been content to tread, they
have indignantly struck into new and untried paths; but these have
failed of conducting them to the right object, and have issued only in
ignorance and conceit.

It seems in our days to be the commonly received opinion, that provided
a man admit in general terms the truth of Christianity, though he know
not or consider not much concerning the particulars of the system; and
if he be not habitually guilty of any of the grosser vices against his
fellow creatures, we have no great reason to be dissatisfied with him,
or to question the validity of his claim to the name and consequent
privileges of a Christian. The title implies no more than a sort of
formal, general assent to Christianity in the gross,