In an evil hour were the doctrines of the Gospel sophisticated with questions which should have been left in the Schools for those who are unwise enough to employ themselves in excogitations of useless subtlety.
But what, at any rate, had Bunyan to do with the Schools? His perplexities clearly rose out of the operations of his own active but unarmed mind on the words of the Apostle. If anything is to be arraigned, it must be the Bible in English, the reading of which is imposed (and, in my judgment, well and wisely imposed) as a duty on all who can read. Though Protestants, we are not ignorant of the occasional and partial evils of promiscuous Bible-reading; but we see them vanish when we place them beside the good.
Ib.
p. xxiv.
False notions of that corruption of our nature which it is almost as perilous to exaggerate as to dissemble.
I would have said "which it is almost as perilous to misunderstand as to deny."
Ib.
p. xli. &c.
But the wickedness of the tinker has been greatly over-charged; and it is taking the language of self-accusation too literally, to pronounce of John Bunyan that he was at any time depraved. The worst of what he was in his worst days is to be expressed in a single word ... he had been a blackguard, &c.
All this narrative, with the reflections on the facts, is admirable and worthy of Robert Southey: full of good sense and kind feeling — the wisdom of love.