an renewed
day by day. Thus they are in God's promise, and you would learn thus to
look upon it, not according to their present inequality in strength, but
that future inequality and difference which is wrapt up in the promise of
God and the seed whereof is in you.

As there is a woful penury and scantiness of examination in the most part
of men who are wholly spent without, and take no leisure to recognise
their own souls, so there is a miserable excess, and hurtful superfluity
of examination and disputation among many of God's children, who are
always in reflection, and almost never in action, so much on knowing what
is, that they take not much leisure to do or pursue what is not. Truly, I
think when the apostle commands us to examine whether we be in the faith,
and prove ourselves, he did not mean to make it our perpetual exercise, or
so to press it as we should not endeavor to be in the faith, till we know
whether we be in it; that were no advancing way, to refuse to go on in our
journey till we know what progress we have made, as the custom is. But
simply and plainly, I think, he intended to have Christianity begin in
examination, as the first returning of a soul must needs be upon some
inquiry and search of the way, and knowledge upon search, that our former
way was wrong, and this is only right. But if this be the porch to enter
at, will you sit down and dwell in it, and not go on into the palace
itself? Because you must begin to search what you have learned wrong, that
now you may unlearn it, will you be ever about the learning to know your
condition, and by this means never attain to the knowledge of the truth?
But when you have upon any inquiry found yourselves out of the way, you
should not entertain that dispute long, but hearken to the plain voice of
the gospel, that sounds unto you, "This is the way, walk in it." "I am the
way," saith Christ, "enter at me, by believing in me." Now, once having
found that you are unbelievers by nature, to suspend believing till you
prove whether you be in the faith, is unreasonable and impossible, for
certainly having once found yourselves void of it, you must first have it,
before you know that you have it, you must first apply to action, and
afterward your examination shall be more easy.

But I would tell of more profitable improvement of such representations of
the sinful and miserable estate of the ungodly world, than you use to make
of it, and I think it is that the ap