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

2. You must understand and well remember, that it is not every willingness that will prove your sincerity. For wicked men may have slight apprehensions of spiritual things, which may produce some slight desires and wishes, which yet are so feeble and heartless, that every lust and carnal desire overcomes them: And it will not so much as enable them ⟨p. 95⟩to deny the grossest sin. But it must be the Prevalent part of your Will that God must have: I mean, a greater share, a deeper and larger room then any thing in the world. That is, you must have a higher estimation of God, and everlasting happiness, and Christ and a holy life, then of any thing in the world: and also your Will must be so disposed hereby and inclined to God, that if God and Glory to be obtained through Christ by a holy self-denying life, were set before you on the one hand; and the Pleasure, Profits and Honours of the world, to be enjoyed in a way of sin, on the other hand; you would resolvedly take the former and refuse the later. Indeed they are thus set before you: and upon your choice dependeth your salvation or damnation (though that Choice must come from the Grace of God.)

3. Yet must you well remember, that this Willingness and Choice is still imperfect: and therefore when I mention a hearty willingness, I mean not a perfect willingness. There may be and is in the most gracious souls on earth, much undisposedness, backwardness and withdrawing of heart, which is too great a measure of unwillingness to duty. Especially to those duties which the flesh is most averse from, and which require most of God and his Spirit to the right performance of them.

Among all Duties, I think the soul is naturally most backward to these following: 1. To secret Prayer: because it is spiritual, and requires great reverence, and hath nothing of external pomp or form to take us up with, and consisteth not much in the exercise of common gifts, but in the exercise of special Grace, and the breathings of the Spirit, and searchings, pantings and strivings of a gracious soul towards God. (I do not speak of the heartless repeating of bare words, learned by rote, and either not understood, or not uttered from the feeling of the soul.) 2. To serious Meditation, also is the soul very backward: that is, either to meditate on God, and the promised Glory, or any spiritual subject, to this end, that the heart may be thereby quickened and raised, and graces exercised: (though to meditate on the same subject, only to know or dispute on it, the heart is nothing near so backward.) Or else to meditate on the state of our own hearts, by way of self-examination, or self-judging, or self-reprehension, or self-exciting. 3. Also to the Duty of faithful dealing with each others souls, in secret reproof and exhortation, plainly (though lovingly) to tell each other of our sins and danger, to this the heart is usually very backward; partly through a sinful bashfulness, partly for want of more believing