136 OF SPIRITUAL MINDEDNESS. we were by nature obnoxious to, as being children of wrath; what we have deserved byour personal sins, as the wages of sin is death; what we are delivered from through Jesus the deliverer, who saves us from the wrath to come ; what an expression it is of the indig- nation of God against sin, who hath prepared this Tophet of old ; that we may be delivered from sin, kept up to an abhorrency of it, walking in humility,. self-abasement, and the admiration of divine grace. This, therefore, is required of us, that in our thoughts and meditations, we compare the state of blessedness and eternal glory, as a free and absolute effect of the grace of God in and through Christ Jesus, with that state of eternal misery which we had deserved. And if there be any spark of grace or of holy thankfulness in our hearts, it will be stirred up to its due exercise. Some, it may be, will say, that they complained be- fore that they cannot get their minds fixed on these things. Weakness, weariness, darkness, diversions, occasions, do prevalently obstruct their abiding in such thoughts. I shall speak further to this afterwards; at present I shall only suggest two things. (1.) If you cannot attain, yet continue to follow after; get your minds in a perpetual endeavor after an abode in spiri- tual thoughts. Let your minds be rising towards them every hour, yea. an hundred times a day, on all occa- sions, in a continual sense of 'duty ; and sigh within yourselves for deliverance, when you find disappoint- ments, or not a continuance, in them. It is the sense of that place, Rom. viii. 23-27. (2.) Take care you go not backwards, and lose what you have wrought If you neglect these things for a season, you will quickly find yourselves neglected by them. So I ob- serve it every day in the hearing of the word. Whilst
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