Reader, say, can you declare your pedigree? Is this a thoroughly settled point with you? Are you clear as to this in the very depths of your soul? When you are all alone with God, is it a perfectly settled question between you and Him? Search and see. Make sure work of it. Do not slur the matter over. Build not upon mere profession. Say not, I am a member of such a church; I receive the Lord’s supper; I hold such and such doctrines; I have been religiously brought up; I live a moral life; I have done nobody any harm; I read the Bible and say my prayers; I have family worship in my house; I give largely in the cause of philanthropy and religion. All this may be perfectly true of you, and yet you may not have a single pulse of divine life, a single ray of divine light. Not one of these things, not all of them put together, could be accepted as a declaration of spiritual pedigree. There must be the witness of the Spirit that you are a child of God, and this witness always accompanies simple faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. “He that believeth in the Son of God hath the witness in himself.” (1 John v. 10.) It is not by any means a question of looking into your own heart for evidences; it is not a building upon frames, feelings, and experiences—nothing of the sort. It is a childlike faith in Christ; it is having eternal life in the Son of God; it is the imperishable record of the Holy Ghost; it is taking God at His word. “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth My word, and believeth on Him that sent Me, _hath_ everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment [κρίσιν], but _is passed_ from death unto life.” (John v. 24.)