When Satan is at work in power among men, the human mind will religiously believe any lie. It will act so as even nature and natural conscience left to themselves would condemn. He that killeth you will think that he doeth God service, was one instance of this: the strong delusion to believe a lie in the latter day is another. The human mind-nature—natural conscience left to itself-could hardly justify Saul's persecution of Stephen and the Church: it never could justify man's treatment of the Lord's Christ-nor will it attempt to do so, when man stands in the light, and has to judge himself. Passion, lust, prejudice, will go a great way; but Satan will lead, will push, a great deal further.
It seems to me, that, on the subject of the holiness and catholicity of the Church, nature would give a judgment against a good deal which nature, when blinded by Satan, holds hereon. Doth not nature say, that if God be personally present, all that which is identified with Him must be really so, and be so in all its individual parts. It is unreasonable, contrary to common sense, unnatural-as men speak- to think, or to talk of association with God, of conduct the result of our being drawn after or led by Him,-without the presence of "reality," and of individual surrender to Him, being, as it were, granted, presupposed. The thing said, "that I am led of God," assumes that He really has appropriated me individually. Now, one of the things which is constantly meeting us, is talk about "holiness" and " catholicity," where the conduct, where the thoughts of the speaker, give no token of the consciousness of the reality of God's presence, of individual personal walking with Him.
This is emphatically the case in Romanism, and wherever the conscience is morbidly at work, under the enemy, upon the notion of the Church.
True is it, also, that it is God only who can, by the Spirit and the faith, enable the conscience to act truly as to and in the things of God. Reason, common sense, nature, can detect inconsistencies; but they can neither shut out Satan nor bring in God or His wisdom.