Book I. Part I. p. 2.

  But though my conscience would trouble me when I sinned, yet divers
  sins I was addicted to, and oft committed against my conscience; which
  for the warning of others I will confess here to my shame.

  1.  I was much addicted when I feared correction to lie, that I might
  scape.

  2.  I was much addicted to the excessive gluttonous eating of apples
  and pears, &c.

  3.  To this end, and to concur with naughty boys that gloried in evil,
  I have oft gone into other men’s orchards, and stolen their fruit,
  when I had enough at home, &c.

There is a childlike simplicity in this account of his sins of his childhood which is very pleasing.

Ib. p. 5, 6.

And the use that God made of books, above ministers, to the benefit of my soul made me somewhat excessively in love with good books; so that I thought I had never enough, but scraped up as great a treasure of them as I could. * * * It made the world seem to me as a carcase that had neither life nor loveliness; and it destroyed those ambitious desires after literate fame which were the sin of my childhood. * * * And for the mathematics, I was an utter stranger to them, and never could find in my heart to divert any studies that way.  But in order to the knowledge of divinity, my inclination was most to logic and metaphysics, with that part of physics which treateth of the soul, contenting myself at first with a slighter study of the rest:  and there had my labour and delight.

What a picture of myself!

Ib. p. 22.

  In the storm of this temptation I questioned awhile whether I were
  indeed a Christian or an Infidel, and whether faith could consist with
  such doubts as I was conscious of.

One of the instances of the evils arising from the equivoque between faith and intellectual satisfaction or insight.  The root of faith is in the will.  Faith is an oak that may be a pollard, and yet live.

Ib.

  The being and attributes of God were so clear to me, that he was to my
  intellect what the sun is to my eye, by which I see itself and all
  things.

Even so with me;—­but, whether God was existentially as well as essentially intelligent, this was for a long time a sore combat between the speculative and the moral man.

Ib. p. 23.

  Mere Deism, which is the most plausible competitor with Christianity,
  is so turned out of almost all the whole world, as if Nature made its
  own confession, that without a Mediator it cannot come to God.

Excellent.

Ib.

  All these assistances were at hand before I came to the immediate
  evidences of credibility in the sacred oracles themselves.

This is as it should be; that is, the evidence ‘a priori’, securing the rational probability; and then the historical proofs of its reality.  Pity that Baxter’s chapters in ‘The Saints’ Rest’ should have been one and the earliest occasion of the inversion of this process, the fruit of which is the Grotio-Paleyan religion, or ‘minimum’ of faith; the maxim being, ‘quanto minus tanto melius’.