SPIRITUAL PEACE AN,n COMFORT. 303 ceiving it, yet you may nevertheless be assured of salvation by it. Search, therefore, what you are, and how your will is disposed and resolved, and how your life is ordered, rather than 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 ownspirits. The soul's convictions, considerations, 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 a 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 its own formation, vivifi- cation 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 re- solved to take Christ for your Savior and Governor, and give up yourself to him to be saved, taught and governed, and to obey him faithfullyto the death against all temptations, whatsoever you shall 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 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 resolu- tions to be downright and fixed, with . many souls that long delayed and fluctuated in unresolvedness, and lay under mere ineffectual convictions. Object. ' But this runs on your own grounds, that saving grace and common grace do but differ in degrees.' Anaw. I think most will confess that, as to the acts ofgrace, and that is it thatwe are now inquiring after; and that is all the means that we have of discerning the habits. Yet remember that. I still tell you, ' That there is a special moral difference, though grounded but in a gradual natural difference.' Yea, and that one grain of the Spirit's working, which turns 'the will in a prevalent measure for Christ, (together with the illuminationnecessary'there- to,) deserves all those eulogies and high titles that are given it in the word; so great a change doth it make in the soul! Well may it be called.' The new creature ;'.'Born of the Spirit;' 'The new life ;' yea, ' The image of God,' and ' The divine nature,' (if that text be not meant of the divine nature in Christ which we are relativelymade partakers of in our union with him.) When you are weighing things in the balance, you may add grain after grain, and it makes no turning or motion at all till you come to the
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