On which Job

were in the wrong. At length God himself interfered, and said, 'If thou art so wise as to be able to fathom everything, gird up now thy loins like a man, for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.' however reversed the matter, and said, I have uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not. Hear, I beseech thee, and I will speak; I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me.' It was then said, ' My servant Job hath spoken right concerning me.'

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If Abraham had been desirous of ascertaining first of all the object and intention of offering up his son Isaac, he would have frustrated them; but he believed that God could do nothing but what was in accordance with his word, and thus he ascended Mount Moriah, and obtained the high commendation expressed in the words, 'Now I know that thou fearest God.'

6

When Christ began to wash the feet of his disciples, Peter wished first of all to know the intention of this act, before he would consent to give up his feet for that purpose; but he was told, What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter;' and when this proved unavailing, the Lord said, 'If I wash thee not, thou hast no part in me.'

'My sheep follow me,' says Christ; but he not unfrequently leads them in such a manner, as if he were not a shepherd, but was only conducting them to the butchery. Are these the people of God, it might be asked, who appear only to exist in order to be persecuted, slain, torn by dogs and wild beasts, and covered with pitch to illuminate the streets of Rome with the

slow flame? But they counted not their lives too dear to them, and are destined to shine in heaven as the stars for ever and ever. The Lord of his people wears, instead of a golden coronet, a crown of thorns; instead of a sceptre, a weak reed; and hangs on a cross, instead of sitting upon a throne. What a Lord! what a people!

True it is, that the preaching of such things seems foolishness, and that the natural man becomes quite foolish in consequence of it. But do thou only believe; wait for the Lord in the way of his judgments; the end of it all will be glorious-a glory which no eye hath seen, no ear heard, and which has never entered into the heart of man. His name is Wonderful;' and he is so in his works and guidance. Even if we were unable to discover any wisdom in his conduct towards Jacob, yet we ought still to believe, that he acted thus towards him for very wise and salutary reasons, although it may not have pleased him to reveal any thing to us respecting them.

It is, however, not difficult to discover some of the salutary intentions of such a procedure. The chief of them is this: that when God suffers us to become conscious, by inward experience, that we have no righteousness of our own, and that we are unable to acquire any that by our own wisdom we cannot accomplish any thing: and that when he thus humbles us, it is a a path by which he conducts all his children, although the means are various by which he attains this end. These paths are painful to the old man, even as the

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dislocation of his hip was to Jacob; but the pain is richly compensated by the fruits which follow.

At first we form to ourselves strange and unfounded ideas of religion. We imagine such a growth in it as we perceive in children, who have graduaily less need of their mother's care and attention, until they can at length entirely do without it. But Christ prefers comparing his people to the branches of the vine, which never bring forth fruit of themselves, but solely by their abiding in the vine. In like manner, says he, 'Ye cannot bring forth fruit of yourselves, except ye abide in me; for without me ye can do nothing.' The ideas we form of religion at the commencement, correspond little with this figure. We think of aged Christians, that they are far advanced; and they may have really advanced as far as Jacob, who could no longer stand nor go of himself, much less wrestle, and who had no alternative but to cling to the Son of God, that he might be sustained by him, or according to the expression of the Apostle, To live in the faith of the Son of God, who loved us, and gave himself for us. When they are weak he is their strength: they have nothing, and yet possess all things; are unable of themselves, even to think any thing good, and yet are able to do all things; and many more such singular descriptions of the inward life, which may justly be called a continual riddle, which cannot be solved without personal experience.

Real growth, which must certainly take place in every real Christian, does not consist in an increasing facility in the performance of religious duties in and by ourselves; but it is rather an increase in grace and in

the knowledge of Jesus Christ; an increasing facility in making use of Christ in the manner in which he is made and given unto us of God, and this can naturally be learnt in no other manner than by the destruction of our own wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption, by which we decrease, but Christ increases.

The hip, if I may so speak, on which the whole body of a natural godliness rests, the foundation that supports it, is nothing else than confidence in ourselves. Hence the upright are proud of their uprightness, and have reason to be so, because it is a consequence of their diligence; they are indebted for it to their discernment, their own reflection, or to the understanding which they possess, and their commendable conduct is the result of the good resolutions they formed, and which they were strong enough to carry into effect. The noise which is made about human inability, they regard as idle talk, by which nothing else is demonstrated than the individual's own slothfulness; or else they look upon it as an artifice, designed to cover his worthlessness, and to enable him to reject, in a hypocritical manner, a strictly moral deportment; and the appealing to grace is, in their eyes, little more than blaming God because we are not better than we are. Both, in their opinion, are equally abominable; and they thank God that they are not enthusiasts and nominal Christians, like these people. These are the strong who need not a Physician.

Natural men, who lead an ungodly life, and therefore cannot appeal to their virtues, always excuse themselves, because they have not committed this or that

particular sin, or else deceive themselves with the idea that when once they find it necessary to amend, they shall soon be able to accomplish it; but that there is still time enough for such a purpose. With that real religion, to which they will not concede the appellation, both of these classes refuse to have any thing to do, but are opposed to it, since the greatest part of it appears to them extremely irrational and absurd, so that a sensible man has reason to be ashamed of it. They rely upon their own understanding and their own strength, and do not comprehend upon what a person can otherwise depend. But let them go; for they are blind!

When the Lord, however, begins to wrestle with a soul-by which we mean, when he begins his work of grace in a man—he struggles with him in such a manner, that to a certainty, either earlier or later, the hip will be dislocated, and so put out of joint, that no other choice will be left him than that which was left Jacob --that of embracing with the arms of faith the Son of God; there will be no alternative but to let himself be borne and carried by him. By degrees he is entirely brought off from from his previous method of existing and acting, and conducted into a path, of which he must himself confess that flesh and blood have not revealed it to him; that he has not learned it from books, from sermons, from other men, or from his own wisdom; but that wondrous grace first reduced him to the state of a little child, and then began to reveal to him the mystery of the kingdom of God. He now learns to believe from the heart those passages of Scripture, where it is said, 'Not of him that willeth, nor of him