, or elsewhere, to have received from God any
immediate revelations which should raise him above the ordinary methods
of instruction, or discover any thing to him, whether of doctrines or
facts. No man was further from pretending to predict future events,
except from the moral prognostications of causes naturally tending to
produce them, in tracing of which he had indeed an admirable sagacity,
as I have seen in some very remarkable instances. Neither was he at all
inclinable to govern himself by secret impulses upon his mind, leading
him to things for which he could assign no reason but the impulse itself.
Had he ventured, in a presumption on such secret agitations of mind, to
teach or to do any thing not warranted by the dictates of sound sense and
the word of God, I should readily have acknowledged him an enthusiast,
unless he could have produced some other evidence than his own persuasion
to have supported the authority of them. But these ardent expressions,
which some may call enthusiasm, seem only to evince a heart deeply
affected with a sense of the divine presence and perfections, and of that
love which passeth knowledge, especially as manifested in our redemption
by the Son of God, which did indeed inflame his whole soul. And he
thought he might reasonably ascribe these strong impressions, to which
men are generally such strangers, and of which he had long been entirely
destitute, to the agency or influences of the Spirit of God upon his
heart; and that, in proportion to the degree in which he felt them, he
might properly say, God was present with him, and he conversed with
God.[*] Now, when we consider the scriptural phrases of "walking with
God," of "having communion with the Father and his Son Jesus Christ," of
"Christ's coming to them that open the door of their hearts to him, and
supping with them," of "God's shedding abroad his love in the heart of
the Spirit," of "his coming with Jesus Christ, and making his abode with
any man that loves him," of "his meeting him that worketh righteousness,"
of "his making us glad by the light of his countenance," and a variety
of other equivalent expressions,--I believe we shall see reason to judge
much more favourably of such expressions as those now in question, than
persons who, themselves strangers to elevated devotion, perhaps converse
but little with their Bible, are inclined to do; especially, if they
have, as many such persons have, a temper that inclines them to ca