And generally, no sufficient stress was ever laid by theologians on the value and necessity of personal virtue,--of religious and moral goodness. It was believed that Christians would _have_ goodness of some kind, in some degree,--that they would be, on the whole, in some respects, better than the ungodly world; and there was a feeling that they _ought_ to be so: but it was rare to meet with a preacher or a book that put the subject in any thing like a Scriptural Christian light. No one contended that goodness was everything, that it was the one great all-glorious object for which the world was made, for which the universe was upheld, for which prophets spake, for which the Scriptures were written, for which God became incarnate, for which Jesus lived and labored, for which He suffered and died, for which He founded His Church and appointed and endowed its ministers, for which Providence planned, and for which all things continued to exist. No one taught that goodness was the only thing for which God cared, the only thing which He esteemed and loved, and the only thing He would reward and bless. Books and preachers did not use to tell us, that faith, and knowledge, and feeling,--that repentance, conversion, and sanctification,--that reading the Scriptures, and hearing sermons, and singing hymns, and offering prayers,--that church fellowship, and religious ordinances, were all nothing except so far as they tended to make people good, and then to make them better, and at last to perfect them in all divine and human excellence. No one taught us that goodness was beauty, that goodness was greatness, that goodness was glory, that goodness was happiness, that goodness was heaven. The truth was never pressed on us that the want of goodness was deformity, dishonor and shame,--that it was pain, and wretchedness, and torment, and death,--that goodness in full measure would make earth heaven--that its decline and disappearance would make earth hell. Yet a careful and long-continued perusal of the Scriptures left the impression on my mind, that this was really the case. When I compared the eternal talk about all our goodness being of no account in the sight of God,--of all our righteousness being but as filthy rags,--with the teachings of Scripture, I felt as if theologians were anti-christ, and their theology the gospel of the wicked one. I have no wish to do injustice to theology, or to theologians either; but the more I knew of them, the less I thought of them. And even when the Christian and theologian got blended, as they did, to some extent, in such men as Baxter and Wesley, I pitied the theologian while I esteemed and loved the Christian. Theological works are poor contemptible things. It would have been no great loss to the world if nineteen-twentieths of them had been burnt in the Chicago fire.