yet from that same hand would I expect
salvation.

Bless God, O my soul, for this sweet and strong comforter! It is the
honey in the lion.

Ib. p. 75.

This natural men may discourse of, and that very knowingly, and give a
kind of natural credit to it as to a history that may be true; but
firmly to believe that there is divine truth in all these things, and
to have a persuasion of it stronger than of the very things we see
with our eyes; such an assent as this is the peculiar work of the
Spirit of God, and is certainly saving faith.

'Lord I believe: help thou my unbelief!' My reason acquiesces, and I
believe enough to fear. O, grant me the belief that brings sweet hope!

Ib. p. 76.

Faith * * causes the soul to find all that is spoken of him in the
word, and his beauty there represented, to be abundantly true, makes
it really taste of his sweetness, and by that possesses the heart more
strongly with his love, persuading it of the truth of those things,
not by reasons and arguments, but by an inexpressible kind of
evidence, that they only know that have it.

Either this is true, or religion is not religion; that is, it adds
nothing to our human reason; 'non religat'. Grant it, grant it me, O
Lord!

Ib. pp. 104-5.

This sweet stream of their doctrine did, as the rivers, make its own
banks fertile and pleasant as it ran by, and flowed still forward to
after ages, and by the confluence of more such prophecies grew greater
as it went, till it fell in with the main current of the Gospel in the
New Testament, both acted and preached by the great Prophet himself,
whom they foretold to come, and recorded by his Apostles and
Evangelists, and thus united into one river, clear as crystal. This
doctrine of salvation in the Scriptures hath still refreshed the city
of God, his Church under the Gospel, and still shall do so, till it
empty itself into the ocean of eternity.

In the whole course of my studies I do not remember to have read so
beautiful an allegory as this; so various and detailed, and yet so just
and natural.

Ib. p. 121.

There is a truth in it, that all sin arises from some kind of
ignorance * * *. For were the true visage of sin seen at a full light,
undressed and unpainted, it were impossible, while it so appeared,
that any one soul could be in love with it, but would rather flee from
it as hideous and abominable.

This is the only (