_A._ All these persons, as well as I, can testify also, that this is no evidence at all of the co-operation of the Holy Spirit. For some years I attended these public offices, _because I would not be punished_ for non-attendance. And many of these attended them, _because their parents did before them_, or _because they would not lose their character_. Many more, because they confounded the means with the end, and fancied this _opus operatum_ would bring them to heaven. How many thousands are now under this strong delusion? Beware, you bring not their blood on your own head? _Q._ 3. However, does not this attendance better answer those ends, than those roarings, screamings, &c.? I suppose you mean, “Better than an attendance on that preaching, which has often been accompanied with these.” I answer. 1. There is no manner of need to set the one in opposition to the other: Seeing we continually exhort all who attend on our preaching, to attend the offices of the church. And they do pay a more regular attendance there, than ever they did before. 2. Their attending the church did not, in fact answer those ends at all, ’till they attended this preaching also. 3. It is the preaching of remission of sins through Jesus Christ, which alone answers the true ends of devotion. And this will always be accompanied with the co-operation of the Holy Spirit; tho’ not always with sudden agonies, roarings, screamings, tremblings, or droppings down. Indeed if God is pleased at any time to permit any of these, I cannot hinder it. Neither can this hinder the work of his Spirit in the soul: which may be carried on either with or without them. But 4. I cannot apprehend it to be any reasonable proof, That “this is not the work of God,” that a convinced sinner should _fall into an extreme agony, both of body and soul_, (Journal 3. page 26.) That another should _roar for the disquietness of her heart_, (page 40.) that others should scream or _cry with a loud and bitter cry, “What must we do to be saved?”_ (page 50.) that others should _exceedingly tremble and quake_, (page 58.) And others, in a deep sense of the majesty of God, _should fall prostrate upon the ground_. (page 59.) Indeed by picking out one single word from a sentence, and then putting together what you had gleaned in sixty or seventy pages, you have drawn a terrible groupe, for them who look no farther than those two lines in _the observations_. But the bare addition of half a line to each word, just as it stands in the place from which you quoted it, reconciles all both to scripture and reason, and the spectre-form vanishes away.