Taylor himself was infected with the spirit of casuistry, by which saving faith is placed in the understanding, and the moral act in the outward deed. How infinitely safer the true Lutheran doctrine: God cannot be mocked; neither will truth, as a mere conviction of the understanding, save, nor error condemn;--to love truth sincerely is spiritually to have truth; and an error becomes a personal error, not by its aberration from logic or history, but so far as the causes of such error are in the heart, or may be traced back to some antecedent un-Christian wish or habit;--to watch over the secret movements of the heart, remembering ever how deceitful a thing it is, and that God cannot be mocked, though we may easily dupe ourselves: these, as the ground-work with prayer, study of the Scriptures, and tenderness to all around us, as the consequents, are the Christian's rule, and supersede all books of casuistry, which latter serve only to harden our feelings and pollute the imagination. To judge from the Roman casuists, nay, I ought to say, from Taylor's own 'Ductor Dubitantium,' one would suppose that a man's points of belief and smallest determinations of outward conduct,--however pure and charitable his intentions, and however holy or blameless the inward source of those intentions or convictions in his past and present state of moral being,--were like the performance of an electrical experiment, and would blow a man's salvation into atoms from a mere unconscious mistake in the arrangement and management of the apparatus. See Livy's account of Tullus Hostilius's unfortunate experiment with one of Numa's sacrificial ceremonies. The trick not being performed 'secundum artem,' Jupiter enraged shot him dead.[A] Before God our deeds, which for him can have no value, gain acceptance in proportion as they are evolutions of our spiritual life. He beholds our deeds in our principles. For men our deeds have value as efficient causes, worth as symptoms. They infer our principles from our deeds. Now, as religion or the love of God cannot subsist apart from charity or the love of our neighbour, our conduct must be conformable to both. Ib. p. 305. Only for their comfort this they might have also observed in that book,--that there is not half so much excuse for the Papists as there is for the Anabaptists; and yet it was but an excuse at the best, as appears in those full answers I have given to all their arguments, in the last edition of that book, among the polemical discourses in folio. Nay, dear Bishop! but such an excuse, as compared with your after attempt to evacuate it, resembles a coat of mail of your own forging, which you boil, in order to melt it away into invisibility. You only hide it by foam and bubbles, by wavelets and steam-clouds, of ebullient rhetoric: I speak of the Anabaptists as Anti-pædobaptists. Ib. s. i. p. 337.