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and not comforted, behold, I will lay thy stones with fair colours, and lay thy foundations with sapphires. And I will make thy windows of agates, and thy gates with carbuncles, and all thy borders of pleasant stones. And all thy children shall be taught of the Lord: and great shall be the peace of thy children. In righteousness shalt thou be established: thou shalt be far from oppression ; for thou shalt not fear: and from terror; for it shall not come near thee. No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper; and every tongue, that shall rise against thee in judgment, thou shalt oondemn. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, and their righteousness is of me, saith the Lord.*

Isaiah liv. 7.

CHAPTER IV.

The influence of the Holy Spirit upon the will.

MAN being by nature in a state of complete darkness and ignorance, so far as relates to spiritual things, the first operation of the HoJy Ghost must necessarily be to remove the veil from off his heart and to enlighten his understanding. This, however, as we have already seen, is of little use, unless the affections be also reclaimed from the love of sin and converted to the love of God. The divine principle, nevertheless, may exist in the heart, even when the

favoured possessor of it least suspects its presence and is almost ready to despair from his supposed deficiency in it. The striking difference between the character of these humble, dejected, self-condemning, believers, and the character of those unhappy men, who know the truth only to hate and reject it, has been sufficiently shown. Whatever degree of reluctance a man may feel in the performance of his duty, yet, if he do perform it, if he daily pray and strive against this reluctance, if, instead of hatred towards the Son of God, he at times be sensible of tender grief from the consciousness of his own obduracy and ingratitude; he may depend upon it, that these emotions, so opposite to the hellish temper of an unrenewed heart, are the first-fruits of that Spirit, whose peculiar office it is to guide the Christian into all truth.

Wicked men indeed have sometimes good wishes. Even Balaam, when obstinately re

sisting the counsel of the Most High, could yet exclaim, May I die the death of the righteous, and may my latter end be like his! But unhappily these wishes only spring up occasionally. There is nothing of that abiding sense of God's presence, that restless desire of a greater degree of communion with him, which every real Christian is wont to experience. In the unconverted, good impressions, however lively at first, soon wear off; and they gradually return to their former habits of irreligion: but, in the children of God, such impressions perpetually acquire fresh vigour and energy; they grow with their growth, and strengthen with their strength, until they imperceptibly become the main spring of every thought and action.

"The foulest hearts," says Bishop Hall, "do sometimes entertain good motions; like as, on the contrary, the holiest souls give way sometimes to the suggestions of evil. The flashes of lightning may be discerned in the

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darkest prisons: but, if good thoughts look into a wicked heart, they stay not there ; as those that like not their lodging, they

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are soon gone. Hardly any thing distinguishes betwixt good and evil, but continuThe light, that shines into a holy heart, is constant, like that of the sun, which keeps due times, and varies not his course for any of these sublunary occasions."*

The Holy Spirit, then, having enlightened the understanding, proceeds, in the next place, to renovate the will and the affections. At first, the change in the inclinations is scarcely to be perceived. Oppressed with a load of superincumbent corruptions, the spark of divine life seems at times almost to approach to utter extinction. But not one word or one tittle of all God's promises can fail. The smoking flax will gradually burst out into a clear flame,

* Hall's Works, p. 1058.

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