“A view of the blessed effect of honest endeavors to bring home divine truths to the conscience, and duly to affect the heart with them, has often reminded me of those words of our Lord, which I have thought might be a proper exhortation for ministers in respect to their treatment of others, as well as for persons in general with regard to themselves. ‘Cleanse first the inside of the cup and platter, that the outside may be clean also.’ Cleanse, says he, the inside that the outside may be clean. As if he had said, the only effectual way to have the outside clean, is to begin with what is within; and if the fountain be purified, the streams will naturally be pure. Most certain it is, if we can a weaken in sinners a lively sense of their inward pollution and depravity—their need of a change of heart—and so engage them to seek after inward cleansing, their external defilement will naturally be cleansed, their vicious ways of course be reformed and their conversation and behavior become regular. “Now, although I cannot pretend that the reformation among my people does, in every instance, spring from a saving change of heart; yet I may truly say, it flows from some _heart-affecting_ view and sense of divine truths which all have had in a greater or less degree. I do not intend, by what I have observed here, to represent the preaching of morality and pressing persons to the external performance of duty, to be altogether unnecessary and useless, especially at times when there is less of divine power attending the means of grace, when, for want of internal influences, there is need of external restraints. It is doubtless among the things that ought to be done, while others are not to be left undone. But what I principally designed by this remark, was to discover a plain matter of fact, viz. That the reformation, the sobriety, and the external compliance with the rules and duties of Christianity, appearing among my people, are not the effect of any mere doctrinal instruction, or merely rational view of the beauty of morality, but from the internal power and influence which the soul-humbling doctrines of grace have had upon their hearts.