The Grace and Duty of Being Spiritually Minded

We may consider one especial Instance of this nature. Persons every day fall under great and effectual Convictions of Sin, and of their danger or certain Misery thereby. This stirs up and acts all their Affections, especially their Fears, Hopes, Desires, Sorrow, Self-Revenge, according as their Condition calls for them. Hence sometimes they grow restless in their Complaints, and turn themselves every way for relief, like men that are out of the way, and bewildered in the night. But in this State and Condition tell them of the only proper way and means of their Relief, which, let the World say what it will, is Christ and his Righteousness alone, with the Grace of God in him, and they quickly discover that they are strange things unto them, such as they do not understand, nor indeed approve. They cannot see them, they cannot discern them, nor any Beauty in them for which they should be desired.

We may consider one especial Instance of this nature. Persons every day fall under great and effectual Convictions of Sin, and of their danger or certain Misery thereby. This stirs up and acts all their Affections, especially their Fears, Hopes, Desires, Sorrow, Self-Revenge, according as their Condition calls for them. Hence sometimes they grow restless in their Complaints, and turn themselves every way for relief, like men that are out of the way, and bewildred in the night. But in this State and Condition tell them of the only proper way and means of their Relief, which, let the World say what it will, is Christ and his Righteousness alone, with the Grace of God in him, and they quickly discover that they are strange things unto them, such as they do not understand, nor indeed approve. They cannot see them, they cannot discern them, nor any Beauty in them for which they should be desired.

Wherefore after their Affections have been tossed up and down for a season, under the Power and Torment of this Conviction, they come unto one or other of these Issues with them. For either they utterly decay, and the Mind looseth all sense of any Impressions from them, so as that they wonder in themselves, whence they were so foolish as to be tossed and troubled with such melancholy Fancies, and so commonly prove as bad a sort of Men as live upon the Earth; or they take up in a formal legal Profession wherein they never attain to be Spiritually-Minded. This