story is told of a spendthrift who, having ruined himself by
his extravagances, went out of doors to meditate on his own folly and
misery, and in the course of a few hours returned home a determined
miser, and was for the rest of his life remarkable for covetousness and
penuriousness. This is not more extraordinary than the fickleness of
mind just now described. In like manner, men sometimes will change
suddenly from love to hatred, from over-daring to cowardice. These are
no amiable changes, whether arising or not from bodily malady, as is
sometimes the case; nor do they impart any credit or sanction to the
particular secular course or habit of mind adopted on the change:
neither do they in religion therefore. A man who suddenly professes
religion after a profligate life, merely because he is sick of his
vices, or tormented by the thought of God's anger, which is the
consequence of them, and without the love of God, does no honour to
religion, for he might, if it so chanced, turn a miser or a
misanthrope; and, therefore, though religion is not at all the less
holy and true because he submits himself to it, and though doubtless it
is a much better thing for _him_ that he turns to religion than that he
should become a miser or a misanthrope, still, when he acts on such
motives as I have described, he cannot be said to do any honour to the
cause of religion by his conversion. Yet it is such persons who at
various times have been thought great saints, and been reckoned to
recommend and prove the truth of the Gospel to the world!

Now if any one asks what test there is that this kind of sudden
conversion is not from God, as instability and frequent change are the
test, on the other hand, in disproof of the divinity of the conversions
just now mentioned, I answer,--its moroseness, inhumanity, and
unfitness for this world. Men who change through strong passion and
anguish become as hard and as rigid as stone or iron; they are not fit
for life; they are only fit for the solitudes in which they sometimes
bury themselves; they can only do one or two of their duties, and that
only in one way; they do not indeed change their principles, as the
fickle convert, but, on the other hand, they cannot apply, adapt,
accommodate, modify, diversify their principles to the existing state
of things, which is the opposite fault. They do not aim at a perfect
obedience in little things as well as great; and a most serious fault
it is, lo