Alas! I thought I had faith in Christ, because I was born in a christian country, and said in my creed, that “I believed on Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord.” I thought I was certainly regenerate and born again, and was a real christian, because I was baptized when I was young, and received the holy sacrament in my adult age. But alas! little did I consider that faith is something more than the world generally thinks of; a work of the heart, and not merely of the head, and that I must know and feel that there is no other name given under heaven whereby I can be saved, but that of Jesus Christ.
It is true indeed, you have frequently seen me at church and the sacrament; but alas, you little think what remorse of conscience I now feel for so frequently saying, “the remembrance of our sins is grievous unto us, and the burden of them is intolerable,” when I never experienced the meaning of them in all my life. You have also seen me join with the minister when he said, “we do not approach thy table trusting on our own righteousness;” but all this while I was utterly ignorant of God’s righteousness, which is by faith in Christ Jesus, and was going about to establish a righteousness of my own. It is true indeed, I have kept the fasts and feasts of the church, and have called Christ, Lord, Lord; but little did I think, that no one could call Christ truly Lord, but by the Holy Ghost. I have attended upon ordinations, and heard the Bishop ask the candidates, “whether they were called by the Holy Ghost;” I have seriously attended to the minister, when he exhorted us to pray for true repentance and God’s holy Spirit; but alas, I never enquired whether I myself had received the Holy Ghost to sanctify and purify my heart, and worked a true evangelical repentance in my soul. I have prayed in the litany that I might bring forth the fruits of the Spirit, but alas, my whole life has been nothing but a dead life, a round of duties, and model of performances, without any living faith for their foundation. I have professed myself a member of the church of England; I have cried out, “The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord,” and in my zeal have exclaimed against Dissenters; but little did I think, that I was ignorant all this while of most of her essential articles, and that my practice, as well as the want of a real experience of a work of regeneration and true conversion, when I was using her offices, and reading her homilies, gave my conscience the lie.
O my friends! a form of godliness without the power, and dead morality not founded on a living faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, is such a dreadful delusion, so contrary to the lively oracles of God, that did not I know (though alas how late!) that the righteousness of Jesus Christ was revealed in them, and that there was mercy to be found with God, if we venture by a real faith on that righteousness, though at the eleventh hour, I must now sink into total despair.
Penitens was here going on, but had his mouth stopped by a convulsion, which never suffered him to speak any more. He lay convulsed about twelve hours, and then gave up the ghost.
Now if every reader would imagine this Penitens to have been some particular acquaintance or relation of his, and fancy that he saw and heard all which is here described; that he stood by his bed-side when his poor friend lay in such distress and agony, lamenting the want of a living faith in Jesus Christ, as the cause of a dead, lifeless, indevout life: if besides this, he should consider, how often he himself might have been surprized in the same formal dead state, and made an example to the rest of the world; this double reflection, both upon the distress of his friend, and the goodness of that God, which ought to have led him to repentance, would in all likelihood set him upon seeking and earnestly praying for such a faith, of which Penitens felt himself void, and constrain him to let the Lord have no rest, till he should be pleased to apply the righteousness of his dear Son to his sin-sick soul, and enable him henceforward to study, out of love, to glorify him in all the actions of his future life, as the best and happiest thing in the world.
This therefore being so useful a meditation, I shall here leave the reader, I hope, seriously engaged in it.
CHAPTER IV.
Shewing, how the fear of being singular, and making the world their rule of action, is a second great cause, why so few devote themselves to God.
ANOTHER cause why so few devote themselves to God, is a fear of contempt from the world, and their making its modes and customs the general rule of all their actions.