Would you divinely know the mysteries of grace and salvation? Let divine love work within you. Without this, be as learned and polite as you will, your heart is but the dark heart of fallen _Adam_, and your knowledge of the kingdom of God, will be only like that which murdering _Cain_ had.――If love is not the spirit that forms and governs every thing that proceeds from you, every thing that has your labour, your allowance and consent; you are broken off from the works of God, you are without God, and your name and nature and works, can have no other name, or nature, but pride, wrath, envy, hypocrisy, hatred, revenge and self-exaltation.――Nothing can possibly save you from being the certain prey of all these evil spirits, but that love, which is God himself, his light, and spirit within you.
But now, since divine love can have no beginning, but from the divine nature in us, therefore saith St. _John_, we love him, because he FIRST loved us: the same as saying, we desire God, because he first desired us; for we could not desire God, but because he first desired us, we could not turn to God, but because he first turned to us.
*Believe me then, thou great scholar, that all thou hast got of wisdom or learning, day after day, in any other school but this, will stand thee in as much stead, fill thee with as high comfort at the hour of death, as all the dreams which night after night, thou hast ever had in thy sleep.――And till a man knows this, with as much fullness of conviction, as he knows the vanity of a dream, he is not yet in the light of truth, not yet _taught of God_.
Behold your state ye ministers, that wait at Christian altars, who have neither faith, nor hope, nor desire of _heavenly fire_ kindled in your souls; ye have a priesthood, and an altar not fit to be named with that, which in Jewish days, had an holy fire from God, descending upon it, which made priest and sacrifice acceptable to God, though only a type of that inward celestial fire, which Christ would kindle into a never-ceasing burning, in the living temples of his new-born children.
Complain then no more of atheists, infidels, and open enemies to the gospel kingdom of God; for whilst you call heavenly fire and spirit, downright phrensy, and mystic madness, you do all that infidel work within the church, which they do on the outside of it.――And if through a learned fear of having that done to your earthly reason, which was done to _Enoch_ when God _took him_, ye will own no higher a regeneration, than a few cold drops of water sprinkled on the face, any of the Heathen gods of wood and stone, are good enough for such an _elementary_ priesthood.――For let this be told you, as a truth from God, that till _heavenly fire and spirit_ are within you, you can rise no higher by your highest learning, than to be elegant orators about scripture words. What wonder then, if sacraments, church-prayers, and preachings, leave high and low, learned and unlearned, priests and people, as unaltered in all their aged vices, as they leave children unchanged in their childish follies? For where the _only_ fountain of life and goodness is forsaken, all the difference between man and man, is as nothing with respect to the kingdom of God.――It matters not what name is given to the old man, whether he be called a zealous _churchman_, a stiff-necked _Jew_, a polite _Heathen_, or a grave _infidel_: under all these names, he has but one and the same nature, without any other difference but that, which _time_ and _place_, _education_, _complexion_, and _worldly wisdom_, happen to make. By such a one, whether he be Papist or Protestant, the gospel is only _kept_, as a book, and all that is within it, is only so much condemnation to the keeper, just as the old man, a _Jew_, hath kept the book of the law and prophets, only to be more fully condemned by them.
That the Jewish and Christian church, stand at this day in the _same kind_ of ♦apostasy, or fallen state, must be manifest to every one that will not shut his eyes. Why are the Jews in a fallen state? It is because they have refused him, who in his whole process, was the truth, the substance, the life, and fulfilling of all that, which was outwardly taught, in their law and prophets.
♦ “apostacy” replaced with “apostasy”