Let every creature have your love. Love with its fruits of meekness, patience, and humility, is all that we can wish for to ourselves, and our fellow-creatures; for this is to live in God, united to him, both for ♦time and eternity.
♦ “and time” replaced with “time and”
To desire to communicate good to every creature, in the degree we can, is a divine temper; for thus God stands unchangeably disposed towards the whole creation; but let me add my request, as you value the peace which God has wrought by his Holy Spirit in you, as you desire to be continually taught by an unction from above, that you would on no account enter into any dispute with any one, about the truths of salvation: give them every help, but that of debating with them; for no man has fitness for the light of the gospel, till he finds an hunger and thirst, and want of something better, than that which he has and is by nature. Yet we ought not to check our inclinations to help others in every way we can. Only do what you do, as a work of God; and then, whatever may be the event, you will have reason to be content with the success that God gives it.
The next thing that belongs to us, and which is also godlike, is a true patience and meekness, shewing every kind of good-will and tender affection towards those that turn a deaf ear to us; looking upon it to be full as contrary to God’s method, and the good state of our own heart, to dispute with any one in contentious words, as to fight with him for the truths of salvation.
We are apt to consider parts and abilities, as the proper qualifications for the reception of divine truths; and wonder that a man of a fine understanding should not immediately embrace just and solid doctrines: but the matter is quite otherwise. Had man kept possession of his first glorious state, there had been no foundation for the gospel redemption; and the doctrine of the cross, must have appeared quite unreasonable: and therefore says our Lord, _To the poor the gospel is preached_. It is to them, and none else: that is, to poor fallen man, that has lost all the riches of his first divine life. *But if a man knows and feels nothing of this poverty, he is not that person to whom the gospel belongs: it has no more suitableness to his state, than it had to man unfallen: and then the greater his parts, the better is he qualified to shew the folly of that salvation, whereof he has no want.
*Such a man, though he may be of an humane, generous nature, of lively parts and much candour, is nevertheless entirely ignorant of the depth of the heart of man, and the necessities of human nature. As yet (though he knows it not) he is only at play, pleasing himself with supposed deep enquiries after truth, whilst he is only sporting himself with lively, wandring images of this, and that, just as they happen to start up in his mind. Could but he see himself in the state of the poor distressed prodigal son, and find that himself is the very person there recorded, he would then, see the fitness of that redemption, which is offered him by the mercy of God in Christ Jesus. But such an one, alas! is rich; he is sound; light is in his own power, goodness is in his own possession: he feels no distress or darkness; but has a crucible of reason and judgment, that on every occasion separates gold from dross; and, therefore, he must be left to himself, to his own elysium, till something more than argument awakens him out of these golden dreams.
All preachers of the true spiritual gospel, of a birth, and life from above, by Jesus Christ, ever were, and will be, treated by the reigning fashionable orthodoxy, as enemies to the outward gospel, and its services, just as the prophets of God were by the then reigning orthodoxy, condemned and despised, for calling people to a spiritual meaning of the letter, to a holiness infinitely greater than that of their outward sacrifices, types, and ceremonies.
The sect of the Pharisees did not cease with the _Jewish_ church: it only lost its old name; it is still in being, and springs now from the gospel, as it did then from the law: it has the same place, lives the same life, does the same work, minds the same things, has the same religious honour, and claim to piety, in the Christian, as it had in the _Jewish_ church, and as much mistakes the depths of the gospel, as that sect mistook the meaning of the law and the prophets.