OF SPIRITTTÁL MINDEDNESS. 303 the only proper ways and means of their relief, which let the world say what it will, is Christ and his right- eousness alone, with the grace of God in him, and they quickly discover that they are strange things to them, such as they do not understand, nor indeed ap- prove. 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 tor- ment of thisconviction, they come to one or other of these issues with them. For either they utterly decay, and the mind loséth 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 at- tain to be spiritually minded. This is the best end that our affections towards spiritual things, not guided by the light of faith, come to. Secondly. Faith batha clear prospect into, and appre- hension of, spiritual things, as they are in themselves, and in their own nature. It is true, the light of it can- not fully comprehend the nature of all those things which are the objects of its affections : for they are infinite and incomprehensible, such as are the nature of God, and the person of Christ; and some of them, as future glory, are not yet clearly revealed : but it discerns them all in a due manner, so as that they may in themselves, and not in any corrupt representation, or imagination of them, be the object of our affections. They are, as the apostle speaks, spiritually discerned, 1 Cron ii. 14, which is the reason why the natural man
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