To Mr. _J. T._
_My dear worthy Friend_,
YOUR letter, though full of complaints about the state of your heart, was very much according to my mind, and gives me great hopes that God will carry on the good work he has begun in you, and lead you by his Holy Spirit through all those difficulties, under which you at present labour.
The desire that you have to be better than you find yourself at present, is God’s call, and will make itself to be more heard within you, if you give but way to it, and reverence it as such, humbly believing that he that calls, will, and only can help you to pay right and full obedience to it.
You seem to yourself to be all _infatuation and stupidity_, because your head and your heart are so contrary, the one delighting in heavenly notions, the other governed by earthly passions and pursuits. It is happy for you, that you know and acknowledge this: for only through this truth, through the full and deep perception of it, can you have any entrance, or so much as the beginning of an entrance into the liberty of the children of God. God is in this respect dealing with you, as he does with those, whose darkness is to be changed into light. Which can never be done, till you fully know 1. the real badness of your own heart, and 2. your utter inability to deliver yourself from it, by any sense or power of your own.
And was you in a better state, as to your own thinking, the matter would be worse with you. For the badness in your heart, though you had no sensibility of it, would still be there, and would only be concealed to your much greater hurt. For there it certainly is, whether it be seen and found, or not, and sooner or later, must shew itself in its full deformity, or the old man will never die the death which must be undergone, before the new man can be formed in us.
All that you complain of in your heart is common to man, as man. There is no heart that is without it. And this is the one ground, why every man, as such, however different in temper, complexion, or natural endowments from others, has one and the same reason, and absolute necessity of being born again.
Flesh and blood, and the spirit of this world, govern every spring in the heart of the natural man. And therefore you can never enough adore the ray of divine light, which breaking in upon your darkness, has discovered this to be the state of your heart, and raised even those faint wishes you feel to be delivered from it.
For faint as they are, they as certainly proceed from the goodness of God working in your soul, as the first dawning of the morning is wrought by the same sun, which helps us to the noon-day light. Firmly, therefore believe this, as a certain truth, that the present sensibility of your incapacity for goodness, is to be cherished as a heavenly seed, as the blessed work of God in your soul.
Could you like any thing in your own heart, or fancy any good to be in it, or believe that you had any power of your own to embrace the following truth, this comfortable opinion, would be your turning away from God and all goodness, and building iron walls of separation betwixt God and your soul.
For conversion to God, only then begins to be in _truth_, when we see nothing that can give us the least degree of hope, of trust, or comfort in any thing, that we are of ourselves.
To see vanity of vanities in all outward things, to loath and abhor certain sins, is indeed something, but yet as nothing in comparison of seeing and believing the vanity of vanities within us, and ourselves as unable to take one single step in true goodness, as to add one cubit to our stature.
Under this conviction, the gate of life is opened to us. And therefore it is, that all the preparatory parts of religion, all the various proceedings of God either over our _inward_, or _outward_ state, setting up and pulling down, giving, and taking away, light and darkness, comfort and distress, are for this only end, to bring us to this conviction, that all that can be called _life_, _good_, and _happiness_, is to come solely from God, and not the smallest spark of it from ourselves. When man was first created, all the good that he had in him was from God alone. This must be the state of man for ever.――From the beginning of time through all eternity, the creature can have no goodness, but that which God creates in it.
Our first goodness is lost, because our first father departed from a full, absolute dependance upon God. For a full, continual, unwavering dependance upon God, is that alone which keeps God in the creature, and the creature in God.
Our lost goodness can never come again, till by a power from Christ, we are brought out of ourselves, into that full and blessed dependance upon God, in which our first father should have lived.