communion with God. Unbelief does not try to get hold of the promises, nor pray for their fulfilment. Unbelief does not weep at the foot of the cross, nor rejoice to go to the mercy-seat.

This is UNBELIEF. But this is not the state of your mind towards the salvation or the service of God and the Lamb. Almost the very reverse of this is the real state of your feelings and desires. Thank God, therefore, and take courage!

No. IV.

PRAYER, PROOF OF THE WORK AND WITNESS OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.

WHOEVER has a praying spirit has both the work and the witness of the Holy Spirit begun within him. All real suppliants are really partakers of the Spirit of grace and supplication. Were this well understood and habitually remembered, by the prayerful, it would both confirm their love to prayer, and settle that absorbing question-Am I born again of the Spirit? This solemn question has often made you solemn. It has occasionally agitated your whole soul. No wonder for "if any man," however moral or amiable, "have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his :” “ Except a man be born of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom

of God." Ever since you read those solemn oracles, so as to mark and inwardly digest. them, you have felt that saving piety is more than a mere good character, and that personal religion is more than the discharge of religious duties. These "true sayings of God," have turned your attention in upon the state of your heart, as well as out upon the state of your morals. You feel now that you must "be born again," if you would enter the kingdom of God. Your convictions on this point are gone so far beyond those of Nicodemus, that it is needless to say unto you, "Marvel not that ye must be born again." You have ceased to "marvel" at the necessity of a change of heart, ever since you discovered the plagues of your own heart. Any marvelling you ever felt has given place to praying for a new heart, and a right spirit. To be the subject of the work and witness of the Holy Spirit is now your chief concern, and your daily prayer. And your chief fear is, lest that Spirit, whom you have grieved so often, and neglected so long, should refuse to take away the heart of stone, or to give

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you a heart of flesh. You even feel, at times, as if he had refused to work upon your soul, and ceased to strive with you. And even when these strivings are renewed, you are afraid that they do not amount to saving operations of the Holy Spirit, because they do not produce such a change of heart as you desire to experience. And even when you are almost convinced that what you have experienced is the beginning of His work on your heart, how often are all your fond hopes overthrown again by the questions-" But where is the witness of the Spirit with my spirit? If I were, indeed, born of the Spirit, would he not witness within me, that I am a child of God?"

Such are some of your ponderings and perplexities upon this solemn subject. Sometimes you think that the Holy Spirit has given you up entirely; at other times, that what you feel is only his common, not his special, influence; and, even when it is best with you, you are, as you imagine, such a stranger to the witness of the Spirit, that you can take but little comfort from what you feel of his

work. Much of this fear is, however, really unnecessary; for it chiefly arises from misapprehending the work and witness of the Holy Spirit. A spirit of prayer is proof of the possession of something of both, in the case of all who are looking to Christ, and trying to be holy. Prayer, even if secret, proves nothing of the work or witness of the Spirit, in the case of those who are going on in open or secret sin. The sensual have not the Spirit. But where prayer is loved, and not belied by sensuality or dishonesty, it is itself the first fruit of the Spirit, and positive evidence of his saving operations being begun in the heart.

Did this never occur to your mind in the course of all your ponderings on the subject? Who inclined your heart to pray? Who overcame the aversion and reluctance you once felt to pouring out your heart unto God in secret? "Who opened thine eyes" to see your need of an interest in Christ so clearly, that you can no longer refrain from praying to "be found in him?" Who brought you to feel that there is nothing between you and hell,