—the principle of humanity;—but yet no less than Calvin or the Tinker declares it a principle most mysterious, the undoubted object of religious awe, a perpetual witness of that God, whose image
it is; a principle utterly incomprehensible by the discursive intellect;—and moreover teaches us, that the surest plan for stifling and paralyzing this divine birth in the soul (a phrase of Plato's as well as of the Tinker's) is by attempting to evoke it by, or to substitute for it, the hopes and fears, the motives and calculations, of prudence; which is an excellent and in truth indispensable servant, but considered as master and primate of the moral diocese precludes the possibility of virtue (in Bunyan's phrase, holiness of spirit) by introducing legality; which is no cant phrase of Methodism, but of authenticated standing in the ethics of the profoundest philosophers—even those who rejected Christianity, as a miraculous event, and revelation itself as far as anything supernatural is implied in it. I must not mention Plato, I suppose,—he was a mystic; nor Zeno,—he and his were visionaries:—but Aristotle, the cold and dry Aristotle, has in a very remarkable passage in his lesser tract of Ethics asserted the same thing; and called it "a divine principle, lying deeper than those things which can be explained or enunciated discursively."
Ib. p. 45, 46.
Sure I am that no father of a family that can at all estimate the importance of keeping from the infant mind whatever might raise impure ideas or excite improper inquiries will ever commend the Pilgrim's Progress to their perusal.
And in the same spirit and for the same cogent reasons that the holy monk Lewis prohibited the Bible in all decent families;—or if they must have something of that kind, would propose in preference Tirante the White! O how I abhor this abominable heart-haunting impurity in the envelope of modesty! Merciful Heaven! is it not a direct consequence from this system, that we all purchase our existence at the price of our mother's purity of mind?
what Milton has written on this subject in the passage quoted in the Friend in the essays on the communication of truth