Clergy -- Fiction; Great Britain -- Fiction; Religious fiction
"I cannot express to you, my dearest Fanny, how anxious I feel
to open my whole heart to you on a subject that has long
occupied us both with, I believe, equal depth and sincerity of
interest;--I mean, as I am sure you will instantly anticipate,
that inward call to especial grace and favour which Mr.
Cartwright taught us to expect would be the sure and certain
consequence of unbounded faith in _himself_; for so only can we
interpret the language he used to us. If I were to live a
thousand years, dear Fanny, I should never cease to regret the
dreadful, but, I thank Heaven brief interval, during which I
firmly believed that I had received this call. While this
frightful and most presumptuous notion had possession of me, I
looked upon my dear and excellent mother--ay, and, to my bitter
sorrow, treated her too, as a being almost unworthy of
communion with me! Is not this of itself enough to prove the
unholy tendency of the doctrine? Now that the madness is
passed, I look back upon it with as much astonishment as
sorrow; and can so clearly trace in it the workings of the most
paltry vanity and egregious self-love, that while remembering
how sincerely I believed myself _the better_ for all the
hateful crimes of impious presumption and filial ingratitude of
which I was guilty, I cannot but think that the most
contemptible follies into which vanity and fine speeches ever
plunged a girl in the ordinary routine of this world's nonsense
must be considered as innocent and respectable, when compared
to those committed (oh! fearful impiety!) in the name of
Heaven.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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