Faith is an oak that may be a pollard, and yet live.
Ib.
The being and attributes of God were so clear to me, that he was to my intellect what the sun is to my eye, by which I see itself and all things.
Even so with me;--but, whether God was existentially as well as essentially intelligent, this was for a long time a sore combat between the speculative and the moral man.
Ib.p.

23.
Mere Deism, which is the most plausible competitor with Christianity, is so turned out of almost all the whole world, as if Nature made its own confession, that without a Mediator it cannot come to God.
Excellent.
Ib.
All these assistances were at hand before I came to the immediate evidences of credibility in the sacred oracles themselves.
This is as it should be; that is, the evidence 'a priori', securing the rational probability; and then the historical proofs of its reality.
Pity that Baxter's chapters in 'The Saints' Rest' should have been one and the earliest occasion of the inversion of this process, the fruit of which is the Grotio-Paleyan religion, or 'minimum' of faith; the maxim being, 'quanto minus tanto melius'.
Ib.p.

24.
And once all the ignorant rout were raging mad against me for preaching the doctrine of Original Sin to them, and telling them that infants, before regeneration, had so much guilt and corruption as made them loathsome in the eyes of God.
No wonder;--because the babe would perish without the mother's milk, is it therefore loathsome to the mother?
Surely the little ones that Christ embraced had not been baptized.

And yet 'of such is the Kingdom of Heaven'.
Ib.p.

25.
Some thought that the King should not at all be displeased and provoked, and that they were not bound to do any other justice, or attempt any other reformation but what they could procure the King to be willing to.