From all this I would have you learn this lesson: That you ought not to trouble your self with fears and doubts lest you are not truly Regenerate, because you know not the Sermon or the very time and manner of your Conversion: but find that you have grace, and then, though you know not just the time or manner of your receiving of it, yet you may nevertheless be Assured of Salvation by it. Search therefore what you are, and how your will is disposed ⟨p. 141⟩and resolved, and how your Life is ordered, rather then to know how you became such. I know the workings of the Spirit on the soul may be discerned, because they stir up discernible Actings in our own spirits. The souls Convictions, Consideration, Resolutions and Affections are no insensible things: But yet the work of Grace usually begins in common Grace, and so proceeds by degrees till it come to special saving Grace, even as the work of nature doth, first producing the matter and then introducing the form; first producing the embryo, before it introduce a Rational soul. And as no child knows the time or manner of his own Formation, Vivification or Reception of that soul, so I think, few true Believers can say, Just such a day, or at such a Sermon I became a true Justified, sanctified man. That was the hour of your true Conversion and Justification, When you first preferred God and Christ and Grace before all things in this world, and deliberately and seriously Resolved to take Christ for your Saviour and Governor, and give up your self to him to be saved, taught and governed, and to obey him faithfully to the death against all Temptations, whatsoever you should lose or suffer by it. Now I would but ask those very Christians that think they do know the very Sermon that converted them, Did that ⟨p. 142⟩Sermon bring you to this Resolution? Or was it not only some troubling, rousing preparation hereto? I think some desperate sickness or the like Affliction is a very usual means to bring Resolutions to be downright and fixed, with many souls that long delayed and fluctuated in unresolvedness, and lay under mere uneffectual Convictions.
From all this I would have you learn this lesson: That you ought not to trouble your self with fears and doubts lest you are not truly Regenerate, because you know not the Sermon or the very time and manner of your Conversion: but finde that you have grace, and then, though you know not just the time or manner of your receiving of it, yet you may nevertheless be Assured of Salvation by it. Search therefore what you are, and how your will is disposed ⟨p. 141⟩and resolved, and how your Life is ordered, rather then to know how you became such. I know the workings of the Spirit on the soul may be discerned, because they stir up discernable Actings in our own spirits. The souls Convictions, Consideration, Resolutions and Affections are no insensible things: But yet the work of Grace usually begins in common Grace, and so proceeds by degrees till it come to special saving Grace, even as the work of nature doth, first producing the matter and then introducing the form; first producing the embryo, before it introduce a Rational soul. And as no child knows the time or manner of his own Formation, Vivification or Reception of that soul, so I think, few true Believers can say, Just such a day, or at such a Sermon I became a true Justified, sanctified man. That was the hour of your true Conversion and Justification, When you first preferred God and Christ and Grace before all things in this world, and deliberately and seriously Resolved to take Christ for your Saviour and Governour, and give up your self to him to be saved, taught and governed, and to obey him faithfully to the death against all Temptations, whatsoever you should lose or suffer by it. Now I would but ask those very Christians that think they do know the very Sermon that converted them, Did that ⟨p. 142⟩Sermon bring you to this Resolution? Or was it not only some troubling, rowsing preparation hereto? I think some desperate sickness or the like Affliction is a very usual means to bring Resolutions to be downright and fixed, with many souls that long delayed and fluctuated in unresolvedness, and lay under meer uneffectual Convictions.
