Faraday to an unidentified relation   1859¹

The Revivals², &c., cannot trouble the Christian who is taught of God (by His Word and the Holy Spirit) to trust in the promise of salvation through the work of Jesus Christ. He finds his guide in the Word of God, and commits the keeping of his soul into the hands of God. He looks for no assurance beyond what the Word can give him, and if his mind is troubled by the cares and fears which may assail him, he can go nowhere but in prayer to the throne of grace and to Scripture. No outward manifestation, as of a revival, &c., can give either instruction or assurance to him, nor can any outward opposition or trouble diminish his confidence in "Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the Greeks foolishness; but to them who are called, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God."³ If his attention is called to the revivals, it cannot be that he should feel instruction there or assurance there, other than what he finds in the Scriptures, without reference to them; and it seems to me that any power they may have over his mind other than the Scripture has, must be delusion and a snare.

That man in his natural state is greatly influenced by his fellow-creatures and the forms of emotion which are amongst them, is doubtless true, even when it concerns what he considers his eternal welfare. How else would the wonderfully varied and superstitious forms of belief have obtained in the world? What carries the Mormons into the desert, surrounded by trouble and the enmity of those around them? What sustains a spiritual dominion like the Papacy, aided by the nations around it, to proclaim the name of Christ whilst it contradicts His Word - refuses it (the record of the Spirit) to the people - and crushes out with all intolerance the simple obedience of the truth? Man's natural mind is a very unstable thing, and most credulous, and the imagination often rules it when reason is thought to be there. Mesmerism has great power over it; so has poetry; so has music; so has the united voice of the multitude; so have many other things: but these things are, so to say indifferent as respects the character of the object they may be used to sustain, and are just as powerful in favour of a bad cause as a good one. Among the contradictory and gross systems of religion, or the numerous and opposed systems of political government, any one of them may be sustained by the use of agencies as these.

The Christian religion is a revelation. The natural man cannot know it. He, not knowing it, is liable in respect of religion to all the influences before mentioned, finds in them snares and delusions, and either becomes an infidel or is subject to every wind of doctrine. The Christian religion is a revelation, and that revelation is in the Word of God. According to the promise of God, that Word is sent into all he world. Every call and every promise is made freely to every man to whom that Word cometh. No revival and no temporal teaching comes between it and him. He who is taught of the Holy Spirit needs no crowd and no revival to teach him; if he stand alone he is fully taught, for the Comforter (the Spirit) taketh the things of Christ and showeth them to His people. And if in the mercy of God it should please Him that one seeing the commotion about him should be led to examine his ways, it will only be in the Word of testimony, the Word of God, that he will find the revelation of the new and living way by which he may rejoice in hope of entering the Kingdom of Christ.