How is it, that the logical, critical, learned deist comes by his infidelity? Why by the same help of the same good powers of the _natural man_, as many a learned Christian comes to know, and contend for the gospel. For, drop divine inspiration, and all is dropt, that can give the believer any godly difference from the infidel. The Christian therefore that rejects and writes against the necessity of immediate divine inspiration, pleads the whole cause of infidelity: he confirms the ground on which it stands; and has nothing to prove the goodness of his own Christianity, but that which equally proves to the deist, the goodness of his infidelity. For without the new birth, or which is the same thing, without immediate, continual divine inspiration, the difference between the Christian, and the Infidel, is lost; and whether the uninspired, unregenerate son of Adam, be in the church, or out of the church, he is still that child of this world, _that_ mere natural man, to whom the _things of the Spirit of_ God, are and must be foolishness.――Nothing but the loss of the light and Spirit of God, turned an order of angels into devils.――Nothing but the loss of that same light and Spirit, took from Adam, his first crown of glory, stript him more naked than the beasts, and left him a prey to devils, and in the jaws of eternal death.――What therefore can have the least power towards man’s redemption, but the light and Spirit of God? Or what can begin, or bring forth the return of his first state, but this eternal light and Spirit.――Hence it is, that the gospel-state is by our Lord, affirmed to _be a kingdom of heaven_, because it has the nature of no worldly thing, is to serve no worldly ends, can be helped by no worldly power, receives nothing from man, but man’s full denial of himself, stands upon nothing that is finite or transitory, has no existence but in that power of God, that created and upholds heaven and earth; and is a kingdom of God become man, and a kingdom of men united to God, through a continual, immediate divine illumination. What scripture of the New Testament can you read, that does not prove this to be the gospel-state, a kingdom of God, into which none can enter, but by being born of the Spirit, none can continue, but by being led by the Spirit, and in which not a thought, or desire, or action, can be allowed to have any part, but as it is a fruit of the Spirit?