OF SPIRITUAL MINDEDNESS. 381 grace. It were an easy task to demonstrate how the disorder of our affections and passions is destructive of spiritual life and peace. The contrariety that is in them, and the contradiction one of another, their vio- lence, impetuousness, and restlessness ; their readiness to receive and take in provocations on all occasions, and frequently on none at all butwhat imagination pre- sents to them, are sufficient evidences hereof. Can we think that life and peace inhabit that soul, wherein anger, wrath, envy, excess in love to earthly things, dwell, and on all occasions exert themselves 1 there, where there is a continual tumult, fighting, and rebell- ion, as there is where the passions of the mind are not under the conduct of reason nor of grace ? The nature and principal effect of this spiritual mind- edness, is to bring all the affections and passions of our minds into that holy order wherein they were cre- ated. This was that uprightness wherein God made us, namely, the whole blessed order of all the powers, faculties, and affections of our souls, in all their opera- tions, in order to our living to God : and this is restored to us by this grace, this duty of being spirit- ually minded. And wherein it falls short of that per- fection which we had originally, (for the remainders of that disorder which befel us by sin will still in part continue,) it is recompensed by the actings of that new principle of gospel grace which is exercised in it : for every act of our affections towards God, in the power of grace, exceeds, and is of another nature, above that we could do, or attain to, in the state of nature uncor- rupted. Hereby are life and peace brought into our souls, and preserved in them. (3.) It is that whereby our hearts and minds are taken off from the world, and all inordinate love
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