The right method for a settled peace of conscience, and spiritual comfort in 32…

Having laid down these Marks, I must needs add a few words for the explaining of some things in them, least you mistake the meaning and so lose the benefit of them.

1. Observe that it is your willingness which is the very Point to be tried. And therefore 1. Judge not by your bare knowledge. 2. Judge not by the stirrings or passionate workings of your Affections. • pray you forget not this Rule in any of your self-examinings: It is the heart that God requireth; My son, give me thy heart, Prov. 23.26. If he hath the Will he hath the heart. He may have much of our Knowledge and not our heart: but when we Know him so throughly as to Will him unfeignedly, then he hath our heart. Affectionate workings of soul to God ⟨p. 92⟩in Christ, are sweet things, and high and noble Duties, and such as all Christians should strive for: But they are not the safest Marks to try our states by: 1. Because there may be a solid, sincere intention and choice in and of the Will, when there is little stirring perceived in the Affections. 2. Because the Will is the Master, Commanding Faculty of the Rational soul; and so if it be right that man is upright and safe. 3. Because the Passions and Affections are so mutable and uncertain: The Will can command them but imperfectly; it cannot perfectly Restrain them from vanities: much less can it perfectly raise them to that height, as is suitable to the excellency of our heavenly objects. But the object it self, with its sensible manner of apprehension moves them more then all the Command of the Will. And so we find by experience, that a godly man when with his utmost private endeavour he cannot command one stirring pang of divine Love or Joy in his soul, yet upon the hearing of some moving Sermon, or the sudden receiving of some extraordinary Mercy, or the reading of some quickening book, he shall feel perhaps some stirring of that Affection. So when we cannot weep in private one tear for sin, yet at a stirring Sermon, or when we give vent to our sorrows, and ease our troubled hearts into the