"enmity towards God:" your life remain uninfluenced by his precepts. The waters of the sanctuary may flow over your soul, yet fail to fertilize and refresh; the manna which should serve for food, will become corrupt, and afford no nourishment; your spiritual knowledge, like the carved cherubim and palm trees of the temple, will breathe no life, and yield no fruit. So then, you must pray, and pray first for a praying spirit, or even the word of God will profit you nothing. But ask God to be his own interpreter, and he will make that word plain, and not only plain, but precious. Its treasures may at first be hidden, but none ever rightly sought without finding, as none ever found without being satisfied. These letters have grown far beyond their intended limits: I will now sum up my advice, and bid you farewell. Read with expectation. Read with reverence. Read for yourself. Read with prayer. Then will you seldom lay down that holy book without some apprehension of Simeon's joyful feeling, when he took his infant Saviour in his arms, LETTER V. MY DEAR RELIGION is not in reality a gloomy, unintelligible thing; a principle which, when admitted into the human mind, is destructive of intellect and happiness. It is the direction of natural energy into a worthy channel; the devotion of the mind to subjects immortal as itself. Religion is not a thing of Sundays and sermons, creeds and commentaries; of separate acts, and distinct observances; it is a life-giving, life-pervading spirit, intended to exercise over our motives just that guiding, quickening, controlling influence, which the mind exercises over the body. True religion is cheerful. Whilst its highest joy is derived from the contemplation of God, in his word, works, and ways, in his threefold character of Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier-whilst it feels that he, and he only, has a right, because he, and he only is worthy, to be loved supremely—it infringes upon no duty which we owe to our fellowcreatures; upon no pleasure which accords with right reason. If you should bring me a catalogue of tastes, habits, pursuits, and enjoyments, which religion really did require to be modified, or surrendered, I would undertake to prove that reason commanded the same. True piety is active. Man was made for occupation: a life wholly contemplative, is not a Christian life: it is necessary to follow a thousand pursuits, it is lawful to indulge in a thousand tastes, which in themselves have entire and simple reference to this world;but however unconnected with religion in the act, there is nothing which may not, which ought not, to be connected with it by the motive. Herein consists one chief comfort of this principle, it affords a new stimulus to exertion-it supplies a sufficient motive. Others may actuate us, but eventually they fail both to satisfy the judgment, and animate the heart. Self-aggrandizement, abstract ideas of duty, desire of self-complacency, and even desire to please, are not only wrong in their principle, but in their really induce sorrow. in every unrenewed mind; the sun, round which, at a greater or a lesser distance, every feeling revolves; self, in some shape or other, is the root from which every action grows. A person may, even after religion is received into the heart as a regenerating principle, do precisely similar things, in a manner precisely similar to what he would have done before; the difference will consist in his new motive; and that motive will be a hearty, honest, constant desire to glorify and serve God, and to benefit his fellow-creatures for the sake of God; a perpetual reference to the declared will of God, as a standard of duty; a constant eye to the approbation of God, in the place of his former desire of the approbation of his fellow-men. This may, and generally will have some influence even in the present case, but it is no longer the grand object of his regard; it is a secondary consideration: if it ensues, well and good; if not, as "thou God seest me," was his motive, so will it be his retrospect and reaction Self is the grand centre |