your soul." Conviction is not conversion, nor is feeling faith. It might, therefore, be very wrong to conclude that you have "passed from death to life," or been "translated from darkness unto light," merely because you have some sense of your need of this Divine change, and some hope or wish to experience it. You do, however, know something of its nature, and feel occasionally its necessity. You may regret, but you do not "marvel," that you must be born again of the Spirit, before you can enter the kingdom of heaven. You know too much both of heaven and of your own heart, to be surprised, (however you may be offended,) when you are told that you are unfit for heaven. And is this conviction nothing? It may beit is a day of small things, compared with the great searchings of heart, and with the strong cries and tears, which the necessity of being born again is producing in some of your

family or friends. There may be no comparison between the strength of your convictions, and the cry of the Pentecostal converts. Any fear or hope you feel, may be but as the mere shadow of their impressions. What then?

So much the more need you have to take care that you do not despise the approaches of the Holy Spirit to your own heart.

Do not say in answer to this appeal, “I am not at all sure that the Spirit is striving with me, or doing any thing for me." It is easy to utter these words, when an excuse is wanted, on the spur of the moment, for delay or indecision in religion: but you durst not utter them deliberately, after looking fairly at their meaning. Your tongue would cleave to the roof of your mouth, were you to try to say,

"I am one, whom the Spirit of God never once influenced to think or pray. He has been moving upon the face of the waters of the Sanc

tuary where I worship, converting sinners, and consoling penitents, and sanctifying believers ; but he never suggested one good thought in my mind, nor awakened one holy desire, nor shed one ray of light upon my path of duty or interest. However He moved in power or glory, and wherever He wrought, He passed me bylet me alone!"

This would be "lying against the Holy Ghost!" Had even your occasional impressions been fewer, and your past resolutions feebler than you know them to have been, you would not dare to speak thus, lest you should provoke the Spirit of God to let you alone for ever. Why, it is one great reason for any hope you have of ever being called by grace, that you have felt, and do feel, that the Spirit has not let you alone. It is because you are not given up to a seared conscience, nor to a reprobate mind, that you venture to calculate

upon some future "day of power," coming in time enough to prepare you for eternity. Accordingly, were you quite sure that such a day of power would not come, unless, from this moment, you set yourself to act upon your present convictions, you would be very glad to admit that what you have already felt, was, although not the first fruit of the Spirit, the breaking up of "the fallow ground" of the heart, for the good seed of the Word. Well; the Holy Ghost does say, "To day, if ye will hear my voice, harden your heart."

not

Do not evade this warning by saying, "that you would follow the leadings of the Spirit, if He would only lead you, as powerfully and sensibly, as he does some whom you know." You have no more right to dictate to the Holy Spirit the manner in which he shall deal with you, than to dictate to Providence the way in which it shall treat you. Now, you would not

presume to lay it down as an indispensable condition of your giving yourself to the Lord and to the Church, that He should give you whatever temporal blessings you may think best for you. You know that you cannot stipulate with God to have all your own will, in "the things which pertain to life." Why, then, in the things which "pertain to godliness?"

Ponder Paul's solemn question:

"Who hath

known the mind of the Lord, (the Spirit,) that he may instruct HIM?" 1 Cor. ii. 16. Can you, in the face of this caution, say that you will not honour nor own the Holy Ghost, unless He act with you, just as He has done with others? Surely not! It may not, indeed, be altogether wrong to wish for such an awakening as the Jailor's; or for such a flower-like opening of the heart as Lydia's; or for such a rejoicing discovery of the glory of Christ as the Eunuch's; or even for such a constraining impulse from