REFLECTION III.
The preceding history serves to confirm the doctrines of grace. For if it be allowed that there is truth, substance, or value in the main of Brainerd’s religion, it will undoubtedly follow, that those doctrines are divine; since it is evident that the whole of it, from beginning to end, accords with them. He was brought, by doctrines of this kind, to his awakening and deep concern about things of a spiritual and eternal nature; by these doctrines his convictions were maintained and carried on; and his conversion was evidently altogether agreeable to them. His conversion was no confirming and perfecting of moral principles and habits, by use, and practice, and industrious discipline, together with the concurring suggestions and conspiring aids of God’s Spirit; but entirely a supernatural work, at once turning him from darkness to marvellous light, and from the power of sin to the dominion of divine and holy principles. It was an effect, in no respect produced by his strength or labor, or obtained by his virtue; and not accomplished till he was first brought to a full conviction, that all his own virtue, strength, labors and endeavors, could never avail any thing toward producing or procuring this effect.
If ever Brainerd was truly turned from sin to God at all, or ever became truly religious, none can reasonably doubt but that his conversion was at the time when he supposed it to be. The change which he then met with, was evidently the greatest moral change that he ever experienced; and he was then apparently first brought to that kind of religion, that remarkable new habit and temper of mind, which he held all his life after. The narration shows it to be different, in nature and kind, from all of which he was ever the subject before. It was evidently wrought at once without fitting and preparing his mind, by gradually convincing it more and more of the same truths, and bringing it nearer and nearer to such a temper: it was soon after his mind had been remarkably full of blasphemy, and a vehement exercise of sensible enmity against God, and great opposition to those truths which he was now brought with his whole soul to embrace, and rest in as divine and glorious; truths, in the contemplation and improvement of which he placed his happiness. He himself, who was surely best able to judge, declares, that the dispositions and affections which were then given him, and thenceforward maintained in him, were, most sensibly and certainly, altogether different in their nature from all of which he was ever the subject before, or of which he ever had any conception.
Hence it is very evident that Brainerd’s religion was the effect of the doctrines of grace applied to his heart: and certainly it cannot be denied that the effect was good, unless we turn atheists or deists. I would ask whether there be any such thing, in reality, as Christian devotion? If there be, what is it? what is its nature? and what its just measure? Should it not be in a great degree? We read abundantly in Scripture of “loving God with all the heart, with all the soul, with all the mind, and with all the strength; of delighting in God, of rejoicing in the Lord, rejoicing with joy unspeakable and full of glory; the soul magnifying the Lord, thirsting for God, hungering and thirsting after righteousness; the soul breaking for the longing it hath to God’s judgments, praying to God with groanings that cannot be uttered, mourning for sin with a broken heart and contrite spirit,” &c. How full are the Psalms, and other parts of Scripture, of such things as these! Now wherein do these things, as expressed by and appearing in Brainerd, either the things themselves, or their effects and fruits, differ from the Scripture representations? To these things he was brought by that strange and wonderful transformation of the man, which he called his conversion. Does not this well agree with what is so often said in the Old Testament and the New, concerning “giving a new heart creating a right spirit, being renewed in the spirit of the mind, being sanctified throughout, becoming a new creature?”