The Earliest Recorded Apparition of the Blessed Virgin The Antecedent Argument for an Infallible Arbiter of Faith and The Idea of a Saint Lingering Imperfections of Saints; Personal and Temporary I. EARLY RELIGIOUS IMPRESSIONS. WHEN HEN I was fifteen (in the autumn of 1816), I fell under the influences of a definite creed, and received into my intellect impressions of dogma, which, through God's mercy, have never been effaced or obscured. Above and beyond the conversations and sermons of the excellent man, long dead, the Rev. Walter Mayers, of Pembroke College, Oxford, who was the human means of this beginning of divine faith in me, was the effect of the books which he put into my hands, all of the school of Calvin. One of the first books I read was a book of Romaine's; I neither recollect the title nor the contents, except one doctrine, which, of course, I do not include among those which I believe to have come from a divine source, viz. the doctrine of final perseverance. I received it at once, and believed that the inward conversion of which I was conscious (and of which I am still more certain than that I have hands or feet) would last into the next life, and that I was elected to eternal glory. I have no consciousness that this belief had any tendency whatever to lead me to be careless about pleasing God. I retained it until the age of twenty-one, when it gradually faded away; but I believe that it had |
