opposition to God and fierce rebellion, expressed in language which
appalls the very soul,--followed, at length, by mysterious elevations of
faith and reactions of confiding love, the result of Divine
interposition, which carried the soul far above the region of the
intellect, into that of direct spiritual intuition.

President Edwards records that he was once in this state of
enmity,--that the facts of the Divine administration seemed horrible to
him,--and that this opposition was overcome by no course of reasoning,
but by an "_inward and sweet sense_," which came to him once when
walking alone in the fields, and, looking up into the blue sky, he saw
the blending of the Divine majesty with a calm, sweet, and almost
infinite meekness.

The piety which grew up under such a system was, of necessity,
energetic,--it was the uprousing of the whole energy of the human soul,
pierced and wrenched and probed from her lowest depths to her topmost
heights with every awful life-force possible to existence. He whose
faith in God came clear through these terrible tests would be sure never
to know greater ones. He might certainly challenge earth or heaven,
things present or things to come, to swerve him from this grand
allegiance.

But it is to be conceded, that these systems, so admirable in relation
to the energy, earnestness, and acuteness of their authors, when
received as absolute truth, and as a basis of actual life, had, on minds
of a certain class, the effect of a slow poison, producing life-habits
of morbid action very different from any which ever followed the simple
reading of the Bible. They differ from the New Testament as the living
embrace of a friend does from his lifeless body, mapped out under the