up the rear, is the converting power of the word, not set last, because the least among tliem, but rather because it is tlie greatest wonder of them all, and com- prehends in it all the other. When souls are converted, the blind receive their sight ; 'you were darkness, but now light in the Lord.' The lame Avalk, in that the affections (the soul's feet) are set at liberty, and receive strength to run the ways of God with delight. Lepers are cleansed, in that filthy lusts are cured, and fovil soids are sanctified; and so of the rest. Now, though the former miracles cease, yet this, which is the greatest, still accompanying the word, affords such a demonstration for its divinity, as reason itself cannot oppose. Is it beyond the skill and strength of the mightiest angel to make the least pile of grass in the field ? Much more the new creature in the heart, the noblest of God's works. 'I'hat, therefore, which new moulds the heart, and makes the creature as unlike to his former self as the lamb is to the wolf; the one meek and harmless, the other fierce and ravenous ; must needs be from God ; and such changes are the daily product of the word. How many, once under the power of their lusts, throwing, like madmen, their fire-brands about, possessed with as many devils as sins, and hurried hither and thither by these furies, yet at the hearing of one gospel sermon, have you not seen them quite metamor- phosed, and, with him in the gospel, out of whom the devil was cast, sitting at Jesus' feet in their right mind, bitterly bewailing their former coiu-se, and liating their once-beloved lusts, more than ever they were fond of them ? I hope someof j^ou can say, concerning yourselves, as the apostle doth of himself, and others of his brethren. Tit. iii. 3, 5, ' We ourselves also were sometimes foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving divers lusts and pleasures,' &c. ' But after that the kindness and love of God our Saviour appeared, — he saved us by the washing of regeneration,' &c. And can you, who are the very epistle of Christ, written, not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God, in the fleshly tables of your hearts, stand yet in doubt whether that word came from God, which is thus able to bring you home to God ? How long might a man sit at the foot of a philosopher, before he could find such a commanding power go forth with his lectures of morality, to take away his old heart full of lusts, and put a new and holy one in the room of it? Some, indeed, in their school, have been a little refined from the dregs of sensuality, as Polemo, who went a drunkard to hear Plato, and returned a temperate man from his lecture ; and no wonder, if we consider what violence such beastly sins offer to the very light of a natural conscience, that lesser light appointed by God to rule the night of the heathen world. But take the best philosopher of them all, and you shall find sins that are of a little finer spinning (such as spiritual wickedness and heart-sins are) that are acted behind the curtain, in the retiring room of the inner man ; these were so far from being the spoils of their victorious arms, that they could never come to the sight of them. But the word treads on these high places of spiritual wickednesses, and leaves not any stronghold of them untaken. It pursues sin and Satan to their bogs and fastnesses, it digs the sinner's lusts like vermin out of their holes and burrows. The heart itself is no safe sanctuary for sin to sit in, the word will take it thence (as Joab from the horns of the altar) to slay it ; those corruptions that escaped the sword of the moralist, and honest heathen, fall by the edge of the word. I cannot give a better instance of this converting power of the word, than by presenting you with the mira- culous victories obtained by it over the hearts of men, when the apostles were sent out first to preach the grace of Christ. Wherever they came they found the world up in arms against them, and the devil at the head of their troops, to make their utmost resistance ; yet what unheard-of victories were got by them ! Was it not strange, that, without drawing any other sword than the everlasting gospel, they should turn the world upside down, as their enemies themselves confessed ? Slighting the devil's works, casting down his holds wherever they came, and overcoming those barbarous heathens, whom the devil had held in his peaceable possession so many thousand years, to renounce their idolatries in which they had been bred, and trained up all their days, to receive a new Lord, and him a crucified Jesus, and this at the report of a few silly men loaded with the vilest reproaches that the wit of man could invent, or malice rake together, to besmear their persons, and render the doctrine they preach odious to the world ; — this, I say, is such an unheard-of conquest, as could not
AND THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT. 57,5