gentle and uniform gales which should there impel you heavenward, you encounter mists and calms and tempests, and often find the wind more boisterous and more contrary than before you were professedly. steering towards the land of rest.

But there is something in your case still more peculiar. Not only do you contrast, like other watchful self-examiners, the opinion of human witnesses with your secret knowledge of evils in your own heart, and viewing these with the eye of interior consciousness, through the detecting microscope of God's holy law, find their multitude and deformity and restless force appalling,—but you feel the just demand of your special privileges and exemptions. You were never imbued in childhood by intimate connexions, with prejudices against revealed truth. You saw and felt even then the momentous grandeur of " the things eternal." Providential restraints have surrounded you. You are aware that bodily and mental temperament have ever contributed to deter you from flagrant transgression. And when, amidst these thoughts, you revolve your own unpublished annals, you perceive with dread how much more culpable each offence, of thought, word, and deed, must be in your case, than the gross outward sins of some who were not a thousandth part so enlightened or exempted or favoured. But, above all, as you have advanced

through successive years in a Christian profession, and have experienced, amidst so many relapses, the forbearance of your God, and yet,with these un

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numbered debts and bonds of gratitude accumu lating still, with life hastening to its period, with the great work of sanctification more and still more urgent, with the confirmed opinion of others that your heart must, long ere now, be established with grace,have found irresolution and corruption still prevailing against your principles and hopes,then has the gloomiest and most afflictive of all fears invaded and oppressed you, the fear that you are not in reality" transformed by the renewing of the You have awfully felt, perhaps, what one of our most original writers has thus forcibly stated, that the same sin "committed at sixteen, is not the same (though it agree in all other circumstances) at forty; but swells and doubles from the circum stance of our ages; wherein besides the constant and inexcusable habit of transgressing, it hath the ma turity of our judgment to cut off pretence unto ex cuse or pardon:" that "every sin, the more it is committed, the more it acquireth in the quality of evil; as it succeeds in times, so it proceeds into de grees of badness; for as they proceed they ever multiply; and, like figures in arithmetic, the last stands for more th than all that went before it."*Or (to express

Sir T. Browne, Rel. Med. pp. 100-1. Ed. 1642.) 99

more accurately what seems to be this author's allusion) you shudder to think that each new repetition of the same sin is like a notation of units from the right of the page; where each figure added on the left, though it be only a unit like the former, yet stands for a multiple of the last preceding.Alas (both you and I must say), how fearful yet how true a reckoning! how dreadful a "progression!" How overwhelming and self-multiplying a burden of offences! And my path (you will add) has been always full of light I have been gently drawn, by various attractions, and by distinguished instruments, towards the way of peace; divine Providence has favoured me at once by restraints and incitements :-yet, while the world and the church may have seen little to con demn, I have been consciously "a backslider in heart," and been “ filled with my own way." Worse than all, when a gracious God has seemed to restore" me, and to lead me " for His name's sake' inf paths of righteousness" anew, and the most affecting motives to watchfulness have multiplied while reviewing the pangs of past transgression, and the mercies which allayed them, still, after all this, have I been again and yet again unfaithful, and "a deceived heart hath turned me aside," The spi ritual languor, the want of peace and joy, the strong temptations to utter unbelief under which I labour, seem to be the bitter fruits of all this reiterated

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ungrateful inconstancy: and often does my heart interpret them as the too probable omens of that awful rejection which I may at last experience, when the faithful followers of their Lord shall be received "into everlasting habitations." For if so many and long-continued petitions and desires have not yet availed to procure me" an overcoming faith" and a constraining love; if I have "come short" of conversion through these numerous years of profession, of feeble conflict, and of languid though frequent waiting upon God; what hope can I possess, that, now or hereafter, with susceptibilities blunted by being long conversant with ineffective truth, I shall attain a new heart and a right spirit, and feel efficiently and joyfully" the powers of the world to come."

We must ask, in reply to these dark fears and distressing presages,-what right have you to conclude, that there has been and is no saving efficacy of divine grace upon your mind, on account of the unceasing conflicts of a corrupt and degenerate nature? Or, rather, are you not unmindful of the anti-scriptural and presumptuous views which such a conclusion would imply? By your own acknowledgment, you have offered up many and continued supplications; and the deepest desire of your heart, though doubtless often interrupted and always contended with, has been and still is to attain real communion with God and freedom from iniquity. To what

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then do you ascribe this desire, and all the prayers, confessions, and endeavours, however great their imperfection and defilement, which it still has prompted? You know that one of the earliest divine declarations revealed in scripture was this,—“ the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth ;"* and we are previously told "God saw that the wickedness of man was great,"-" and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually."+ You remember that a prophet, many ages after, solemnly affirmed, in the midst of the only people who possessed a pure faith and worship, "the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked;" you have read the more recent declaration of Him who "knew what was in man,". "from within, out of the heart of man, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within."

and un

Can you then attribute your secret prayers, feigned desires, and even feeblest efforts for holiness and obedience, to your own unassisted nature and will, -without consequences from which you would utterly recoil?—without implying, that "that which is born of the flesh" is not " flesh,"-that "every good and perfect gift" does not specially come down " from the

*Gen. viii. 21.

+ vi. 5.

Mark vii. 21-23.