But, alas! methinks I can anticipate your lamentations. Are you not desirous of telling me, that through the deceitfulness of sin, you are often beguiled of your privileges, and robbed of those spiritual comforts for which your soul pants? It is your wish to love God from every consideration, but especially because he commended his love towards you, in that, while you were a sinner, Christ died for you. It is your wish to live in communion with your God, and to follow after that holiness without which no man shall see his face. But your imaginations are full of vanity, and your best endeavours after heavenly meditation are interrupted and marred by the frequent intrusion of evil thoughts. All this may be true enough in your case; for I firmly believe it accords with the experience even of the most advanced Christians. But allow me to say, that while you thus groan under the burden of remaining corruption, and are grieved on account of your natural aversion to what is good, you have reason to bless God for making you _feel_ your proneness to evil, and teaching you that your _entire_ dependence must be on his promised grace. At the same time that you confess and mourn over your imperfections, are you not powerfully affected with a sense of the Divine long-suffering, in bearing with them, and in even sympathizing with you under them; and in the readiness with which our gracious God condescends to help the infirmities, and supply all the wants of his people? In short, as you grow in grace, you will always find growing cause to humble yourself on account of your manifold short-comings, and to exalt the Saviour for the riches of his grace and love, so freely, so suitably, and so abundantly conferred. This is the tendency of the whole gospel dispensation. The sinner is nothing, and can do nothing. Christ Jesus is all in all. The blessings which he died to purchase, and now for ever lives to bestow, are inestimable in their nature, infinite in their extent, and eternal in their duration. O, amazing boon! And these blessings are offered without money and without price. They are a gift, a free gift; the gift of the great eternal God to the creatures of his own formation: the gift of the heavenly Father to children who are unconsciously upheld by his power, and fed by his bounty, and loaded with his benefits from day to day. What condescension! what love! And yet, strange to tell, both the Giver and the gift are alike despised by blinded, degraded, ungrateful man! This is a most affecting and humiliating view of human nature. But is it not a just one? We cannot look around us without perceiving innumerable proofs of its truth. Nor can even the renewed mind of a Christian free itself from the sad accusation of undervaluing that great salvation, which nothing could accomplish but the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Son of God. How then shall those escape who despise the proffered mercy? Solemn consideration!