This mortar, probably they thought, threw the shell straighter than any of the other field-pieces of the church-militant.
Hence it was even in justification of God himself that a party arose to say that a man could believe without the help of God at all, and after believing only began to receive God's help--a heresy all but as dreary and barren as the former.

No one dreamed of saying--at least such a glad word of prophecy never reached Rothieden--that, while nobody can do without the help of the Father any more than a new-born babe could of itself live and grow to a man, yet that in the giving of that help the very fatherhood of the Father finds its one gladsome labour; that for that the Lord came; for that the world was made; for that we were born into it; for that God lives and loves like the most loving man or woman on earth, only infinitely more, and in other ways and kinds besides, which we cannot understand; and that therefore to be a man is the soul of eternal jubilation.
Robert consequently began to take fits of soul-saving, a most rational exercise, worldly wise and prudent--right too on the principles he had received, but not in the least Christian in its nature, or even God-fearing.

His imagination began to busy itself in representing the dire consequences of not entering into the one refuge of faith.

He made many frantic efforts to believe that he believed; took to keeping the Sabbath very carefully--that is, by going to church three times, and to Sunday-school as well; by never walking a step save to or from church; by never saying a word upon any subject unconnected with religion, chiefly theoretical; by never reading any but religious books; by never whistling; by never thinking of his lost fiddle, and so on--all the time feeling that God was ready to pounce upon him if he failed once; till again and again the intensity of his efforts utterly defeated their object by destroying for the time the desire to prosecute them with the power to will them.

But through the horrible vapours of these vain endeavours, which denied God altogether as the maker of the world, and the former of his soul and heart and brain, and sought to worship him as a capricious demon, there broke a little light, a little soothing, soft twilight, from the dim windows of such literature as came in his way.
Besides The Pilgrim's Progress there were several books which shone moon-like on his darkness, and lifted something of the weight of that Egyptian gloom off his spirit.