Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

1 3 ^ Conclusion. CHAP. xr.
interest which does not attach to undisputed truths. The
broad doctrines of revelation are defective in this appeal
and truths which
to our interest, because they are so broad ;
all hold are thought little of comparatively, because all
hold them. What merit is there in
believing what every
body else believes ? We are thrown in the case of such
truths upon the intrinsic gravity and importance of the
truths themselves, to the exclusion of that adventitious
interest which accrues from the really irrelevant and im
pertinent consideration of who hold them that we main
tain and accept them in distinction to others who do not.
Men thus glory in a privilege while they pass over coldly
and slightingly a common benefit. In the case of the
distinctive tenet they feel themselves champions ; the befrienders
of truth, and not its
disciples only; its patrons,
and thrown
rather than its sons. Stripped of this foreign,
back on its own intrinsic interest, truth is apt to be a some
what cold and insipid thing to the majority of men at
least in their average state of mind ; though
sickness or
adversity will sometimes reveal to them this truth, this
solid, this really sublime and native interest belonging to
it. Ordinarily, they are too apt to be little interested in
it, unless supported by some external aid of this kind.
There is again another and a better reason than either of
those which have been given for the disproportionate esti
mate of particular tenets ;
viz. that they really suit, assist,
and support particular mental, as strong medicines do par
ticular bodily, constitutions. But whatever be the reasons
for this disposition, all sects and communions more or less
exhibit it ; and men, and serious and earnest men, come
forward and tell us, that they could not conduct their
spiritual progress without the aid of one or other special
tenet, which they assert, and really imagine to be, the
spring of their energies, and the mainstay of their hopes.
And among the rest, the predestinarian comes forward and
says this. He says that he could not, as a spiritual being,
go on without this doctrine ; that he finds it essential to
him ; that without it the universe would be a chaos, and
the Divine dispensations a delusion ; that he reposes in it