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Founder of their immortal hopes-the adorable Medium of access and reconciliation with the Divinity.

Now if such an account of the experience of real Christians in general were strictly true -that is, virtually or by implication, if a more or less considerable portion of their lives were wholly useless, as a season of preparation for a future state, and entirely lost to the great purposes of their "high calling of God in Christ Jesus"-such a conclusion would,' in no degree, invalidate the inference which has just been drawn from the actual efficacy of the Gospel at the period of its first promulgation. It would properly expose an absence of all congruity in the experience of Christians with the present circumstances, with their spiritual privileges and capabilities. We should have before us this egregious fact-that a religion which once wrought a rapid and a thorough change in the minds of multitudes, whose innate corruption had been strengthened by the power of habit, and a concurrence of most demoralizing influences, commonly, if not invariably, finds our youth untractable to its discipline-the youth of those who are eventually brought under its yoke, and become the willing captives of divine grace, the glad sub

jects of the Redeemer's empire-seldom or never, at that season, controlling the natural proneness to evil-the egregious fact that an apparatus which, in numerous instances, corrected a full-grown deformity of moral structure, is applied in vain to restrain the tendency to such a deformity; to prevent that distortion of the mind's rectitude which it even availed to cure; to support the weakness of its virtues, and to aid its growth to symmetry and its full proportions ;—that it is applied in vain at a period when the mental frame-to use the phraseology which was applied by Burke to a young and thriving people-"is still in the gristle, and not yet hardened to the bone of manhood."

But that account of the general experience of Christians which involves so anomalous a conclusion, is, we apprehend, as little sustained by facts as it is agreeable to antecedent presumption, or theoretical probability. There are many who, as far as they know the history of their own minds, have never undergone the change in question; who, however, appear to want none of the characteristics of the

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new creature," unless that circumstance itself be an evidence of their natural, unrenewed state. There are many who have no reminiscence of a portion of their lives when

they were wholly devoted to self-indulgence, and entirely strangers to a reverential love of God; when religious principles had no existence in their minds, or lay in dormancy and torpor. And the number is still greater, who cannot recall and specify a particular period when a revolution took place in the tendency of their minds-an occasion when they not only felt more powerfully than at any former period the excellence, the authority, and the value of the Gospel-not only received a more effective stimulus to activity in their Christian calling, but when they could with propriety be said to have realized, for the first time, a sense of religion at all-an occasion which separated their history into two parts, as distinct and opposite as light and darkness, life and death.

It is true, there are numbers, on the other hand, who affirm and sincerely believe their conversion to have been as sudden, and evident to the consciousness, as that of the original converts to Christianity; who, on hearing the Gospel preached, were immediately conscious of an influx of ideas of God, of their own nature, and of their future destiny, which were wholly new and unprecedented; and it may seem presumptuous to dispute the account which persons deliver of their own

experience. But, in truth, we often deal with the facts of our own experience, or the processes of our own minds, as we deal with the phenomena of external nature-that is, we unconsciously search out and dwell upon such facts, or expound and classify them in such a manner, as may suit and corroborate an accepted, favoured doctrine, or preconceived hypothesis. If a section of Christians be taught to believe that sudden and extensive changes in the mind, from a state of alienation from God to a habitude of piety, are proper to the Christian dispensation, and that, so far from showing exceptions to the ordinary mode in which the Holy Spirit operates on the human mind, they indicate the ordinary mode itself, we can scarcely wonder that a multitude of such changes should be collected and placed on record. If they were instructed otherwise, if they accorded to the view now insisted upon of the original design and primitive effects of Christianity, they would be prepared to observe a considerable diminution in the number of such changes. They might then be disposed to admit, that the Christian instruction which they received at an early age, was not entirely useless, as an instrument of their spiritual renovation; but that the effects

which it produced were virtually preparatory and incipient to the present habit of their minds; if not in prompting them to an actual obedience of the Gospel, yet in preventing à wider departure from the divine commandment, or in sowing the seeds of a future repentance. They might then allow that, however great and sudden the transformations of character which are occasionally effected by the Gospel, religion more commonly enters and possesses the mind in a manner which eludes immediate observation; pervading it as the sun's light steals across the landscape, and gains upon the face of nature till it glows and rejoices in his beams. They might perceive, that the growth of our religious principles exhibits no such abrupt and total departure from the analogy of human faculties in general, as their account of our " regeneration" would appear to establish; and that our experience with relation to this life-that experience which rarely acquaints us with a sudden exaltation of the mind of man, his elevation in an instant, and without effort, to heights of intelligence and power, but which presents him as attaining those. heights by repeated endeavours, and a succession of steps might teach us something might

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