|Am I Regenerated?| “Oh! I am happy to hear you say so,” replied Emma, “for I was beginning to fear that I had never felt the Holy Spirit changing my heart, and that I must surely be yet unregenerated and unsaved. Such a thought would be very awful to me.”
“I trust, my dear child,” said her grandmother, “I have good reason to believe that God, by His grace and Spirit, has ‘turned you from darkness to light,’ and given you a heart to love Him and serve Him. I wish that many little children would have such a |Awful Importance of Regeneration.| fear as you speak of. I wish many, too, would remember that one little word MUST, and who says it, ‘Ye MUST be born again!’”
“Dear grandmamma,” said Emma, “I must pray more than I ever have done for a clean heart. I fear, till you have been explaining this to me, I have thought too much about my sins being washed in Jesus’ blood, and too little about my heart being changed and made holy by Jesus’ Spirit. I see that I need both, and will try and pray for both.”
“It is a good resolution, my dearest,” said the other; “and the Great God, for your encouragement in asking for a change of heart, gives you in His own blessed Bible both a prayer |A Prayer for it, and its Answer.| and an answer. Give me your Bible,” continued she, “and, as I feel unable to speak more to‐night, I will mark the two places to which I refer, and you can take them with you to your own room, and read them to yourself.”
The good old lady kissed her little grandchild, putting two pieces of paper at what she had so marked. Emma, saying “Good‐night,” ran up‐stairs with her Bible in her hand, and, having shut her door, read to herself, before she knelt down to her evening prayer, these two verses:—
The Prayer.—“Create in me a clean heart, O God; renew a right spirit within me” (Ps. li. 10).
The Answer.—“A new heart also will I give you, and a right spirit will I put within you; and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh” (Ezek. xxxvi. 26).
FIFTH NIGHT.
“I am now ready for you,” said old Mrs Allan, as little Emma was waiting anxiously for the time when she might again seat herself by her grandmother’s chair. “What am I to tell you about to‐night?”
“I have been thinking,” replied Emma, “if you have no more to explain about the great work in the soul of the believer, that I should like to hear more of that glorious Being to whom the sinner owes all the precious blessings you have been telling me of.”