🚀 go-pugleaf

' experiences,
might from these things be justified; yet I often signify to my people
how unable man is to know another's heart, and how unsafe it is to
depend merely on the judgment of others. I have abundantly insisted,
that a manifestation of sincerity in fruits brought forth, is better
than any manifestation they can make of it in words alone: and that
without this, all pretences to spiritual experiences are vain. This all
my congregation can witness. And the people in general have manifested
an extraordinary dread of being deceived; being exceeding fearful lest
they should build wrong. Some of them have been backward to receive
hope, even to a great extreme, which has occasioned me to dwell longer
on this part of the narrative.

Conversion is a great and glorious work of God's power, at once changing
the heart, and infusing life into the dead soul; though the grace then
implanted more gradually displays itself in some than in others. But as
to fixing on the precise time when they put forth the very first act of
grace, there is a great deal of difference in different persons; in some
it seems to be very discernible when the very time was; but others are
more at a loss. In this respect, there are very many who do not know,
even when they have it, that it is the grace of conversion, and
sometimes do not think it to be so till a long time after. Many, even
when they come to entertain great hopes that they are converted, if they
remember what they experienced in the first exercises of grace, they are
at a loss whether it was any more than a common illumination; or whether
some other mo