*Such a man, though he may be of an humane, generous nature, of lively parts and much candour, is nevertheless entirely ignorant of the depth of the heart of man, and the necessities of human nature. As yet (though he knows it not) he is only at play, pleasing himself with supposed deep enquiries after truth, whilst he is only sporting himself with lively, wandring images of this, and that, just as they happen to start up in his mind. Could but he see himself in the state of the poor distressed prodigal son, and find that himself is the very person there recorded, he would then, see the fitness of that redemption, which is offered him by the mercy of God in Christ Jesus. But such an one, alas! is rich; he is sound; light is in his own power, goodness is in his own possession: he feels no distress or darkness; but has a crucible of reason and judgment, that on every occasion separates gold from dross; and, therefore, he must be left to himself, to his own elysium, till something more than argument awakens him out of these golden dreams. All preachers of the true spiritual gospel, of a birth, and life from above, by Jesus Christ, ever were, and will be, treated by the reigning fashionable orthodoxy, as enemies to the outward gospel, and its services, just as the prophets of God were by the then reigning orthodoxy, condemned and despised, for calling people to a spiritual meaning of the letter, to a holiness infinitely greater than that of their outward sacrifices, types, and ceremonies. The sect of the Pharisees did not cease with the _Jewish_ church: it only lost its old name; it is still in being, and springs now from the gospel, as it did then from the law: it has the same place, lives the same life, does the same work, minds the same things, has the same religious honour, and claim to piety, in the Christian, as it had in the _Jewish_ church, and as much mistakes the depths of the gospel, as that sect mistook the meaning of the law and the prophets.