 along wi' Seth, when I was a lad
o' seventeen, and got puzzling myself a deal about th' Arminians and the
Calvinists. The Wesleyans, you know, are strong Arminians; and Seth, who could
never abide anything harsh, and was always for hoping the best, held fast by the
Wesleyans from the very first; but I thought I could pick a hole or two in their
notions, and I got disputing wi' one o' the class leaders down at Treddles'on,
and harassed him so, first o' this side and then o' that, till at last he said,
Young man, it's the devil making use o' your pride and conceit as a weapon to
war against the simplicity o' the truth. I couldn't help laughing then, but as I
was going home, I thought the man wasn't far wrong. I began to see as all this
weighing and sifting what this text means and that text means, and whether folks
are saved all by God's grace, or whether there goes an ounce o' their own will
to 't, was no part o' real religion at all. You may talk o' these things for
hours on end, and you'll only be all the more coxy and conceited for 't. So I
took to going nowhere but to church, and hearing nobody but Mr. Irwine, for he
said nothing but what was good, and what you'd be the wiser for remembering. And
I found it better for my soul to be humble before the mysteries o' God's
dealings, and not be making a clatter about what I could never understand. And
they're poor foolish questions after all; for what have we got either inside or
outside of us but what comes from God? If we've got a resolution to do right, He
gave it us, I reckon, first or last; but I see plain enough we shall never do it
without a resolution, and that's enough for me.«
    Adam, you perceive, was a warm admirer, perhaps a partial judge, of Mr.
Irwine, as, happily, some of us still are of the people we have known
familiarly. Doubtless it will be despised as a weakness by that lofty order of
minds who pant after the ideal, and are oppressed by a general sense that their
emotions are of too exquisite a character to find fit objects among their
everyday fellow-men. I have often been favoured with the confidence of these
select natures,
