And thus, if it is your curse and your shame to be as spongy, and soapy, and oily, and slippery as Anything himself; if you choose your church and your reading with any originality, sense, and insight, you need not fear but that you will be let live till you die an honest, upright, honourable, fearless gentleman: no timid friend to unfashionable truth, as you are to-night, but a man like Thomas Boston's Ettrick elder, who lies waiting the last trump under a gravestone engraven with this legend: Here lies a man who had a brow for every good cause.

Only, if you would have that written and read on your headstone, you have no time to lose.

If I were you I would not sit another Sabbath under a minister whose preaching was not changing my nature, making my heart new, and transforming my character; no, not though the Queen herself sat in the same loft.

And I would leave the church even of my fathers, and become anything as far as churches go, if I could get a minister who held my face close and ever closer up to my own heart.

Nor would I spend a shilling or an hour that I could help on any impertinent book,--any book that did not powerfully help me in the one remaining interest of my one remaining life: a new nature and a new heart.