cannot now, as formerly, have recourse to false consolations. When I lie down to sleep, it seems as if I was going to appear before the tribunal of God, and receive the sentence of my condemnation. Good God! when I think of it I shudder. Sometimes, it is true, I have a little repose, but after short intervals of hope, the agony returns as acutely as ever. Oh! shall I ever be delivered from these fears that overwhelm me? Is there, Sir, is there grace for me?*

Pastor.-I bless God with all my heart, and thank the faithful Shepherd of souls, who has deigned to lay hold of his poor wandering sheep. I will not yet say to you, what the kind Saviour did to the widow of Nain: "weep not." I will rather say, as he did to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, "Daughters of Jerusalem, weep for yourselves." Yes, weep, give free course to your tears; but at the same time be assured that your case is not desperate; that your "sickness is not

* The extremity of distress here described is not alike felt by every awakened soul: some are drawn by gentler means; but the excess usually prevails where the doctrines of the Gospel have previously been rested upon without the heart-experience of them-in those who have held the truth in unrighteousness. In all cases, however, the false peace of a natural state must be disturbed and broken; for the Saviour does not bestow his peace upon any who do not feel the want of it, and implore it at his hands.

unto death;" that your sorrow is a "godly sorrow;" and that the hour is not far distant, when your Saviour will draw nigh to pardon and console you.

Disciple.-You cannot imagine how great my distress is. It is as though God, in the rigour of his judgments, had already rejected me. What wounds me the most, is my having so often despised his grace, and now, perhaps, it is too late to have recourse to it.

Pastor. By no means, my friend; a proof that you are not excluded from grace is, that the Lord Jesus is now working in you a sense of your misery. He would save you as a “brand plucked out of the fire." You would, indeed, have had much greater reason to despair, had he suffered you to remain in security and hardness of heart; but since he has awakened your sleepy conscience, it is a proof that he will not abandon you.

Disciple.-I well understand all that, but I am nearly in the same state that Jacob was, when they assured him his son Joseph was yet alive; that is to say, my heart can hardly be persuaded of these things, and notwithstanding I begin to believe them to be true.

Pastor. What do you think of doing then? Where will you go with your misery? How do you hope to be delivered from it?

Disciple.-I think the best way will be to correct and amend myself.

Pastor.-See, you have already returned to a confidence in your own works. You are yet without faith, and you would amend yourself! You would invert the order according to which grace constantly acts, that is to say, you are desirous it should sanctify, before it justifies you. You expect to find that in the law which is only to be found in the Gospel, or rather in Jesus Christ himself. In thus acting, you are yourself the principal obstacle to your advancement: you will never attain to a full assurance of faith, and will continually remain without the necessary strength to lead a good life. The first grace you should aspire after is justification by faith; so soon as you shall have obtained it, your light will dawn as the break of day, and your cure, that is your sanctifi cation, will bud forth immediately.

Before having received from on high the power to believe in the Lord Jesus, all that you can do, in your present situation, is to desire to be delivered from the sad condition sin has brought you into. By yourself you cannot go beyond that, the Saviour must set you free, "and if the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed," John viii. 36. But if you have it not at heart to be truly delivered from condemnation and the

dominion of sin, and are willing that only one sin should reign in you, however small it may appear in your eyes, you may believe for certain, that a single sin will be a wall of separation between you and Jesus. Deliverance from sin is the consequence and effect of faith; but to obtain this faith go to him who gives it, and resolve to renounce all that can be called sin. Would you

not call those senseless who, being sick, should send for a physician without a sincere desire to be cured? Would you esteem those to have been wiser, of whom the Gopel speaks, if they had deferred going to the Saviour till they had been healed by themselves, under a pretext that it was not proper to approach him in the condition they were then in? If, then, you feel the weight of your sins, and desire to obtain deliverance from them, flee to Jesus such as you are, and seek pardon of them from him by faith. The moment in which the leprous, the blind, and the other sick, believed in the Saviour, was usually that of their cure. It is in vain that a man, by all kinds of irksome exercises and by his own free will, strives to deliver himself from his prevailing sins, and the inquietude they occasion him; it is in vain to that end, that he multiplies his reading, hears the word, weeps, fasts, gives alms, and lives in solitude. He, only augments his misery, and alienates himself

further from God; because, instead of depending solely upon the work of redemption, and giving al the glory of it to the Son of God, he still relies upon his own works. The more a person is rooted in Christ, the more he perceives that he is incapable of helping himself, and he cleaves more simply to Jesus, in whose name alone he can be saved.

Disciple.-I have more than once experienced the truth of what you say. I have frequently resolved to amend myself, and all my endeavours to that end did but aggravate my misery. What I built one day, tumbled into ruins the next, and my hopes vanished as a shadow.

Pastor. What you state is not uncommon with persons newly affected by grace. Many, after their first awakening, remain in the same state. If they fall into any sin, instead of going humbly to the Saviour for pardon and deliverance from it, they make useless efforts to amend themselves, and not succeeding in overcoming their bad habits, they resume the attempt again and again. What is the consequence? Some fall by little and little into negligence; and others, though more sincere and serious, return to the false opinion, that they possess the power in themselves to correct and amend their lives; so true it is, "that the way of man is not in himself, and it is

not in man that

walketh to direct his steps," Jer. x. 23.

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