A system of doctrine has risen up during the last three
centuries, in which faith or spiritual-mindedness is
contemplated and rested on as the end of religion, instead of
Christ. I do not mean to say that Christ is not mentioned as
the author of all good, but that stress is laid on the
believing rather than on the object of belief, on the comfort
and persuasiveness of the doctrine than on the doctrine itself.
And in this way religion is made to consist of contemplating
ourselves, instead of Christ; not simply in looking to Christ,
but in seeing that we look to Christ; not in His divinity and
atonement, but in our conversion and faith in Him...
The fashion of the day has been to attempt to convert by
insisting on conversion; to exhort men to be converted; to tell
them to be sure they look at Christ instead of simply holding
up Christ; to tell them to have faith rather than to supply its
object; to lead them to work up their minds, instead of
impressing upon them the thought of Him who can savingly work
in them; to bid them to be sure their faith is justifying, that
it is not dead, formal, self-righteous, or merely moral,
instead of delineating Him whose image, fully delineated,
destroys deadness, formality, self-righteousness; to rely on
words, vehemence, eloquence, and the like, rather than to aim
at conveying the one great idea, whether in words or not.