26 THE FAITHFUL READER Nevertheless, Crusoe admits that his initial willingness to give God credit for these blessings quickly fades in each instance. He is forced to concede that his “religious thankfulness to God’s providence began to abate” after each provision or protection. His self-centeredness haunts him, even in isolation. After two years lost on that uninhabited island, Crusoe discovers the characteristic of human sinfulness that leads him to be “rescued” from the spiritual separation which had made him a castaway from God. Searching in one of the chests he’d recovered from the shipwreck for something with medicinal qualities, he instead finds “a cure both for soul and body.” Among the few books that had been protected from the surf, he took a Bible, “which, to this time, I had not found leisure, or so much as inclination, to look into.” As he read the New Testament morning and night, he experienced the ability of the Word of God to bring about conviction of sin. “It was not long after I set seriously to this work,” he explains, “but I found my heart more deeply and sincerely affected with the wickedness of my past life.” His chief enemy and the cause of his ruin had been his own sin, not the fault of others or circumstances. The guilt was his own. It is human nature that produces sin, not one’s environment. He realizes that the island prison in which he is confined—pristine, abundant, a perfect environment in many ways—leaves him no excuses behind which to hide. The enemy was within! “I was earnestly begging of God to give me repentance, when it happened providentially, the very day, that, reading the Scripture I came to these words, He is exalted a Prince and a Saviour; to give repentance, and to give remission.” (Acts 5:31, KJV) Claiming the hope of salvation through Christ, Crusoe cries out in repentance and faith to God and experiences deliverance from the spiritual prison of sin! From that point on, he views his confinement in different terms. “As for my solitary life,” he asserts, “it was nothing; I did not so much as pray to be delivered from it, or think of it: it was all of no consideration, in comparison to this [salvation from sin].” And he appeals to readers of his account, “that whenever they come to a true sense of things, they will find deliverance from sin a much greater blessing than deliverance from affliction.” There is a more profound and universal isolation in the human
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