Here is the blossoming of trees and flowers, therefore it is spring, and the sun is turning again in his course. Here is perfect day light, therefore the sun is risen. Here is good fruit growing; therefore here is a good tree. ’Tis a consequence no less sure and infallible, here is unfeigned love to the brethren, therefore here is regeneration. Here are spiritual motions, affections, desires, acts, and operations, therefore here is spiritual life.”(58) These were plainly the sentiments of Binning. He distinguished, with logical precision, between faith in Christ and its consequences. In regard to the doctrine of the Antinomians, he says, “That every man is bound to persuade himself at the first, that God hath loved him, and Christ redeemed him, is the hope of the hypocrite,—like a spider’s web, which, when leaned to, shall not stand. That man’s expectation shall perish, he hath kindled sparks of his own,—a wild fire, and walketh not in the true light of the word, and so must lie down in sorrow.”(59) Employing language very similar to that of Gillespie, which it would almost seem he had before him at the moment, he also says, “If the question be, as it is indeed, about the grounds of our assurance, and knowledge of our own faith, certainly it is clear as the noonday, that as the good tree is known by the fruits thereof, and the fire by the heat thereof, so the indwelling of faith in the heart is known by its purifying of the heart and working by love. It makes a man a new creature, so that he and others may see the difference. Neither is this any derogation to the free grace of Christ, or any establishing of our own righteousness, except men be so afraid to establish their own righteousness, that they will have no holiness at all, but abandon it quite, for fear of trusting in it, which is a remedy worse than the disease, because I make it not a ground of my acceptation before God, but only a naked evidence of my believing in Christ, and being accepted of God, it being known that these have a necessary connexion together in the scriptures, and it being also known that the one is more obvious and easy to be discerned than the other.”(60)