life ; and he mentions that the texts inscribed on the church walls of his native town, concerning death, sin, righteousness*, the crucifixion, etc.., produced in him, as a mere child, “ emotions of great joy and peace, and left on him profitable and lasting impressions.” The work of the Spirit of God within him was cherished by the religious ad- vantages which he enjoyed externally, in the pious lessons of his parents. His favourite books in his early life were such works as Arndt’s “True Christianity,” Southon’s “ Golden Jewel,” Gerhardt’s “Sacred Meditations” (in Latin), “Franke’s and Schade’s “Intro- duction to the Holy Scriptures.” But the Bible was the book he loved above every other. Not that he was exempt from the sugges- tions of youthful levity at times, as he confesses himself, but he was mercifully preserved from any serious wandering from his Heavenly Father. Like most earnest thinkers, he was not without doubts as- sailing his understanding, but they only drove him to draw the closer to God in child-like prayer ; and, on his first attendance at the Lord’s table, he experienced such inward peace, that he felt “ a hearty de- sire of departing to be with Christ.” His doubts, too, gave him the greater power to sympathize with others in doubt, instead of repelling them by harshness. A remark of his own is w~ell worthy' of note, though a seeming paradox : “ Conversion easily leads to heterodoxy.” The unconverted man finds no difficulties, for he is indifferent to the whole question. But he who has found the pearl of great price examines it with anxious care ; and, as truth is not to be reached without struggles, in the course of “ proving all things,” doubts will start up, never thought of before : but care and prayer will at last prevail, and faith will be only the more firmly rooted by the storms which agitated it in its early growth.
The variations in the Oxford Edition of the Greek Testament, which at first caused him scruples, were overruled to good, in leading him to prayer, and to the more careful pondering over every nice peculiarity of the Word of God. “The most important of all controversies,” says he, “ are those which we experience within us ; of which there is no end, till the whole man has undergone a change, and struggled into renovation. When this is done, a host of casuistical scruples disappear at once.” In writing subsequently to his pupil Beuss, he remarks, as to the various readings of the Greek Testament, “ Take and eat in simplicity the bread as you have it before you, and be not disturbed if you find in it now and then a grit from the millstone. If the sacred volume, considering the fallibility of its many transcribers, had been preserved from every seeming defect, this preservation would have been so great a miracle, that faith in the Written Word could be no longer faith. I only wonder that there are not more of these readings than there are, and that none in the least affect the foundation of our faith.”1
1 Twenty thousand various readings, for example, have been noticed in the six comedies of Terence.