“These smooth and ready emotions of virtue, which seem to give a man a more real and genuine possession of it than ever, do also encourage the mind to launch out in sublime theories; wherein it is much assisted by the repose and security it enjoys towards God, and by the delicate philosophic joy overflowing all the faculties, which raises the imagination to greater magnificence and sagacity. Here the grand system of Providence and all its various dispensations; the correspondencies of heaven and earth, of time and eternity; the gaiety and mournings of nature, and the greatness and abjectness of man; the saving mystery of human life, and the saving mystery of Christianity inserted into it;—all these are inquired into, not out of vain curiosity, but at the instigation of love, to salute the divine goodness in all its works. This is the meridian of the religious man. His notions and his virtues are at the height, in their full clearness and fervour. The love of holiness shines through him, and unites under it all the movements of nature. It commands and pierces all that converse with him. All, after this, is, to the eye of man, a decline and a fall; but a decline by a regular appointed path, and a fall into the arms of secret and infinite mercy. I need not explain to you what I mean; so I will shut up the description. “Now, where in all these stages shall we place our regeneration? And what shall we say it is? There is reason to think, that, we have no more real goodness (except experience) in one of these states than another,—in the last than the first; we only fill our minds with new sets of ideas, and, by a temporary force, drive our constitution into something that seems answerable to them. Let this force cease, and we are the same as before; when we are in the most plausible posture of virtue, let us but sleep upon it, or otherwise remit the contention of the mind, and ’tis no more; affectation gives place to nature.