first intended;
for the doubt so often expressed, of the possibility of one who is
lost finding _immediate_ peace when he finds his God--and so has
found himself--betrays great unbelief or great ignorance of God. Pride
is at its root;--a desire to find something wherewith to commend
ourselves to God--some evidence of a good character first--some work
done as a hired servant, in order to entitle us with any hope to call
God father and be at peace with Him; instead of our _beginning_ all
work by _first_ being at peace--by our being reconciled at once to God
through faith in His love to us, revealed in the atonement of Jesus
Christ. We may just add, what every true man knows, and rejoices to
know, that the hour which begins his peace with God necessarily begins
also war with all sin in his own heart. His friendship with God
implies enmity to all in himself which is opposed to God.

2. "But the whole tendency of revivals, and of this theory of sudden
conversions by means of any man's preaching, is to disparage God's
appointments of the Church and the family for accomplishing genuine
conversion."

If by this is meant that God ordinarily blesses for the saving of
souls what are termed "the means of grace," or "_the truth_ as it
is in Jesus," whether inculcated by the parent, the teacher, or the
minister, and presented to the mind, and impressed upon it patiently
and laboriously during a course of years,--then we also believe this,
and cordially admit it. Nay, we would have all "friends of revivals"
keenly alive to the danger of so expressing themselves as to seem even
to disparage such earnest painstaking, and we would have them to
avoid seeking to attain by a summary process what thousands strive to
attain, and actually do attain, only by a prayerful diligence, which
begins with sowing the seed in childhood, and never ceases until there
is the blade and the full ear ending in the golden harvest. We feel
assured that the faithful minister who has seen many souls born to God
under his teaching, will acknowledge that these results were connected
not so much, or probably not at all, with any sudden change, from some
striking sermon he had preached, but from a series of impressions
made by pious parents in their home-training, or by himself in his
congregational class, or by the whole tone and tenor of his public
ministrations, &c. How often has it thus happened that others have
laboured, and that he has but entered into their