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Yea, I will put it to yourselves, If those many, yea, very many, who thus severely, but with how little ground, is seen by men of God, you deny communion with; are not of as good, as holy, as unblameable in life, and as sound, if not sounder in the faith than many among ourselves: Here only they make the stop, they cannot, without light, be driven into water baptism, I mean after our notion of it: but what if they were, it would be little sign to me, that they were sincere with God.
If wit and humour begin again to relapse into their former licentiousness, they can never hope for approbation from those who know that rallery is useless when it has no moral under it, and pernicious when it attacks any thing that is either unblameable or praise-worthy.
If piety and zeal had been sufficient, I doubt not but that our missionaries possess these qualities in a high degree: for nothing except piety and zeal could engage them in the undertaking. If sanctity of life and manners was the allurement, the conduct of these men is unblameable.
Woe betide the woman who bids you to forget that woman who has loved you: she sins against her sex. Leonora was unblameable. Never think ill of her for what you have suffered. Tasso. Think ill of her? I? I? I? No; those we love, we love for every thing; even for the pain they have given us. But she gave me none: it was where she was not, that pain was. Cornelia.
Wise and virtuous women he loved, and delighted in all pure and holy and unblameable conversation with them, but so as never to excite scandal or temptation. Scurrilous discourse even among men he abhorred; and though he sometimes took pleasure in wit and mirth, yet that which was mixed with impurity he never could endure." A higher conception of duty coloured men's daily actions.
For after he had marked out to him the qualities which were requisite in a labourer of the Society, proper to be sent thither, "That he ought, in the first place, to be a person of unblameable conversation, and that the Japonese would easily be scandalised, where they could find occasion for the least reproach; that, moreover, he ought to be of no less capacity than virtue, because Japan is also furnished with an infinite number of her own clergymen, profound in science, and not yielding up any point in dispute without being first convinced by demonstrative reasons; that, yet farther, it was necessary, that a missioner should come prepared to endure all manner of wants and hardships; that he must be endued with an heroic fortitude to encounter continual dangers, and death itself in dreadful torments, in case of need," Having, I say, set these things forth, and added these express words in one of his letters, "I write to Father Simon, and, in his absence, to the rector of Coimbra, that he shall send hither only such men as are known and approved by your holy charity," he continues thus: "These labourers in the gospel must expect to be much more crossed in their undertaking than they imagine.
But it must be observed, on the other hand, that the persons, to be chosen overseers, are to be by the laws of the society "as upright and unblameable in their conversation, as they can be found, in order that the advice, which they shall occasionally administer to other friends, may be the better received, and carry with it the greater weight and force on the minds of those, whom they shall be concerned to admonish."
On the other hand, there's 'Squire Lath, a proper Gentleman of Fifteen hundred Pound per Annum, as well as of an unblameable Life and Conversation; yet would not I be the Esquire for half his Estate; for if it was as much more, he'd freely pare with it all for a pair of Legs to his Mind: Whereas in the Reign of our first King Edward of glorious Memory, nothing more modish than a Brace of your fine taper Supporters; and his Majesty without an Inch of Calf, managed Affairs in Peace and War as laudably as the bravest and most politick of his Ancestors; and was as terrible to his Neighbours under the Royal Name of Long-shanks, as Coeur de Lion to the Saracens before him.
For since these last would not be converted, nor made turn to God by the convincing glory that has attended their faith in a holy and unblameable life annexed, God has suffered them to fall, that they also might stumble and fall, and be dashed in pieces by their vices. Sixth.
And if there are some things in that career which his country has simply to forgive, we shall not reckon among these the original resolve of that day in St Andrews a resolve which has made Knox more to Scotland 'than any million of unblameable Scotchmen who need no forgiveness.
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