142 ON NOVEL OPINIONS ecclesiastical history, must know that in the most flourishing ages of the church, even when Christianity was best under- stood and most successfully practised, errors of opinion most readily started up, the ephemeral fungus of a luxuriant soil; they were frequently the suggestion of fanciful and mistaken, rather than of immoral men. Our great spiritual ad- versary, who successfully employs the vicious as the corrupters of morals, knows it to be a stale and fruitless device to make them his agents for misleading the judgment and bewildering the imagina- tion ; and therefore, by a refinement- of ingenuity, prompts the more virtuous to the accomplishment ofspiritual mischiefs. Moral men are his selected instruments for broaching novel, enticing, and clan: gerous opinions. These moral but wayward persons seem to have overlooked the fine supplication of the Apostle, for his converts that God would " stablish, strengthen, settle them." These terms, which indeed
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