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

Parents are commanded to teach their children the Law of God, urgently, at home and as they walk abroad, lying down and rising up; and to bring them up in the admonition and nurture of the Lord: and to train up a child in the way he should go, and then when they are old they will not depart from it, Prov. 22.6. And children are commanded to Remember their Creator in the days of their youth, Eccles. 12.1. And if this be Gods first great means, then doubtless he will ordinarily bless his own means here, as well as in the Preaching of the Word.

Parents are commanded to teach their children the Law of God, urgently, at home and as they walk abroad, lying down and rising up; and to bring them up in the admonition and nurture of the Lord: and to train up a child in the way he should go, and then when they are old they will not depart from it, Prov. 22.6. And children are commanded to Remember their Creator in the dayes of their youth, Eccles. 12.1. And if this be Gods first great means, then doubtless he will ordinarily bless his own means here, as well as in the Preaching of the Word.

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