Can you trace
whence it came and how it came? Can'st thou by searching find out
God? Can'st thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?--it is high
as heaven; what can'st thou do? deeper than hell; what can'st thou
know?'" To the council's inquiry whether we believed a statement
because it was in the Bible or because it was true, my father
replied partly with a quotation from the celebrated Platonist
divine, John Smith, of Cambridge--"All that knowledge which is
separate from an inward acquaintance with virtue and goodness is of
a far different nature from that which ariseth out of a living sense
of them which is the best discerner thereof, and by which alone we
know the true perfection, sweetness, energy, and loveliness of them,
and all that which is [Greek text], that which can no more "be known
by a naked demonstration than colours can be perceived of a blind
man by any definition or description which he can hear of them."
This pamphlet was written in 1852, three years after I entered
Cheshunt College, when my father declared to me that "a moderate
Calvinism suited him best". In 1852 he was forty-five years old.
He had not hardened: he was alive, rejecting what was dead, laying
hold of what was true to him, and living by it.
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