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CHAPTER II.

THE HONEST AND GOOD HEART.

"But that on the good ground are they, which in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, keep it."

"

Thy heart is not right in the sight of God."

"Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy; break up your fallow ground: for it is time to come and seek the Lord."

"Wherefore laying aside all malice, and all guile, and

hypocrisies, and envies, and evil speakings, as new born babes desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby."

To those who are wedded to human systems, the "honest and good heart" mentioned by the Saviour, would, perhaps, give rise to no small degree of speculation. By one class of interpreters it might perhaps be considered as bearing very decisive testimony to the idea of natural innocence and excellence, independently of Divine assistance; while theologians of an opposite school might find it hard to understand and explain, how "the heart" could be "honest and good," before the reception of the good seed of the word, and consequently not indebted to it for its goodness.

God

The triumph of the one, and the difficulty of the other, will vanish, when it is remembered, that, in this instructive parable, the good seed sown is the word of truth, the spoken or preached word, and not the ordinary grace of God. The parable itself contradicts the idea of intuitive religiousness. Righteousness was not the spontaneous growth of the heart, nay, even the very seeds of excellence were not there sown. sowed them; and if he had not, there would have been no spiritual harvest. The "honest and good heart" can be construed into nothing more than a state of willingness to receive and preparedness to cherish, the good seed of the word: and lest corrupt nature should hence take to itself undue credit, it would be easy to prove that even for this favourable state or disposition, it was indebted to the prior care and culture of the Great Spiritual Husbandman.

I shall not contend for a neutral ground in religion—a state or territory midway between belief and unbelief, in which we belong neither to God nor the world, neither to Christ nor Belial. This would be inconsistent with his own strong expression-" He that is not with me, is against me; and he that gathereth not with me, scattereth abroad." Still, in many cases, there is something which very closely approximates to this neutrality. The soul is disarmed of positive and active opposition, but has not as yet yielded cheerful, positive,

discoverable, the fact itself is questioned. The great difficulty apparently is this-that both knowledge and feeling usually come to us by association with the visible world, through the medium of our external senses; and that we consequently find it extremely difficult to conceive of an illumination of the mind, and an impulse given to the feelings, secretly, but directly from God, without the aid of the external senses, independently of "the sight of the eye, and the hearing of the ear." That the real difficulty lies here, will be admitted by all who have attended to the suggestions of their own minds, or to the objections usually urged by others. Without intending any laboured solution of this difficulty, or entering deeply into the philosophy of the matter, it is evident that our ignorance as to the mode, forms no valid reason for rejecting the fact of a secret Divine influence upon the heart. The ordinary mode of imparting knowledge and of exciting feeling, is not necessarily the only mode. The resources of Deity are infinite in number, and the power of Deity unlimited in extent. The possibility, and even probability, of a direct agency of his Spirit upon our spirits, without any interposing medium, might be inferred, moreover, from the attraction or affinity, as well as the repulsion, which is known to exist between the spirit of man and man here upon earth-from the powerful, rapid, and extensive influence of the sympathetic principle-from the

deep impressions made upon the soul, and the vigour of its energies, when the bodily senses are either injured or precluded from their wonted exercise-from their admitted existence and activity when separated from the body, and the consequent probability of their power to receive impression independently of the body, even during their union with it-and, lastly, from the necessary supposition that He who is a pure Spirit, and the Father of our spirits, cannot but have at all times access to the spirits which he has formed in his image.

They, therefore, who scoff at the very idea of Divine influence, as an absurdity, know little of the nature of their own spirits, and still less of the Immateriality, the Omnipresence, and the Omnipotence of God. But with such I enter into no protracted argument, I wage no war of words. There is little hope that this unpretending volume would fall into their hands, or that its contents would touch their hearts. Our best hope for them is from that same secret agency of God which their theory rejects.

There is another class, from whom a candid consideration of the subject is asked and hoped. They are those who, while receiving the general doctrine of spiritual influence, still give it but a nominal place in their creeds, and no place whatever in their hearts-and who, from the perversions and abuses of the doctrine by the ignorant

and fanatical, have been led to look with suspicion upon every attempt to illustrate its nature and extend its influence; and to consider even the terms Grace, Renovation, Sanctification, as of doubtful orthodoxy, as ominous of latent enthusi

asm.

The prejudices of such, it is to be feared, very seriously obstruct their own spiritual improvement. Endeavouring to discard for a little time these prejudices, it would be well for them to remember, that the abuse of terms does not justify their disuse-that the counterfeit presupposes somewhat that is genuine, and that doctrines may have been sadly distorted by man, which were originally revealed by God. The candid consideration by their minds, of the doctrine of grace in its scriptural simplicity and purity, may perhaps dispose their hearts to receive that "

God which bringeth salvation."

grace of

Difficult and delicate indeed is the task of describing, correctly, the heart when under the influence of grace. When an earthly object is acted upon by two or more conjoint forces, we have formulæ for calculating its direction, its momentum, and its ultimate position. But it is not so in regard to the soul of man. We have no means of resolving the combined force under which it acts of estimating the quantity of the separate forces and the momentum which each would impart. The divine and human agency are so strangely and inextricably intermingled, as