_Worthy._ Depend upon it, God will never forgive your sins for the sake of your virtues. There is no commutation tax there. But he will forgive them on your sincere repentance for the sake of Jesus Christ. Goodness is not a single act to be done; so that a man can say, I have achieved it, and the thing is over; but it is a habit that is to be constantly maintained; it is a continual struggle with the opposite vice. No man must reckon himself good for any thing he has already done; though he may consider it as an evidence that he is in the right way, if he feels a constant disposition to resist every evil temper. But every Christian grace will always find work enough; and he must not fancy that because he has conquered once, his virtue may now sit down and take a holiday. _Bragwell._ But I thought we Christians need not be watchful against sin; because Christ, as you so often tell me, died for sinners. _Worthy._ Do not deceive yourself: the evangelical doctrines, while they so highly exalt a Saviour, do not diminish the heinousness of sin, they rather magnify it. Do not comfort yourself by extenuation or mitigation of sin; but by repentance toward God, and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. It is not by diminishing or denying your debt; but by confessing it, by owning that you have nothing to pay, that forgiveness is to be hoped. _Bragwell._ I don't understand you. You want to have me as good as a saint, and as penitent as a sinner at the same time. _Worthy._ I expect of every real Christian, that is, every real penitent, that he should labor to get his heart and life impressed with the stamp of the gospel. I expect to see him aiming at a conformity in spirit and in practice to the will of God in Jesus Christ. I expect to see him gradually attaining toward the entire change from his natural self. When I see a man at constant war with those several pursuits and tempers which are with peculiar propriety termed _worldly_, it is a plain proof to me that the change must have passed on him which the gospel emphatically terms becoming "a new man." _Bragwell._ I hope then I am altered enough to please you. I am sure affliction has made such a change in me, that my best friends hardly know me to be the same man.