10th Mo. 1st.  I fear I have so long been childish and thoughtless, that I shall hardly ever be childlike and thoughtful.  Oh for a little more care without carefulness!

10th Mo. 2d.  Much struck with Krummacher’s doctrine of “Once in grace, always in grace.”  “After the covenant is made,” he says, “I can do nothing condemnable.  I may do what is sinful or weak, but my sins are all laid on my Surety.” True, if my will-spirit humbles itself to bear the reforming judgment of the Lord—­but I think his doctrine utterly dangerous; his error is this, that “the covenant cannot be broken.”  Now, suppose a Christian, therefore, in the covenant; he sins, then the Lord would put away his sin by cleansing him from its pollution and power, by the blood of Christ, who hath already borne the punishment thereof.  But he may refuse this cleansing, in other words, this judgment, revealed within; not against himself, as it must have been except for Christ’s intercession, but against the evil nature in him, and in love to his soul.  He may refuse this, because it cannot but be painful, it cannot but include repentance for his transgression, whereby he has admitted ground to the enemy.  And if he refuse it, persisting in withdrawing his heart from that surrender, which must have been made on his adoption into the covenant, who shall say that the covenant is not at an end?  Who shall say that the way of the Lord is not equal, in that, because he was once a righteous man, made righteous by the righteousness of Christ, “now, the righteousness that he hath had shall not be mentioned unto him, but in his trespass he shall die”?  Far be it from me to say how long the Lord shall bear with man; how long he may trespass ere he dies forever; but I think it most presumptuous to suppose that God cannot in honor (for it does come to this) disannul the covenant from which man has already retracted all his share; though this, truly, is but a passive one, a surrender of the will-spirit to the faith of Jesus.

What good it does me to clear up my ideas on prayer! but there is a limit beyond which intellect cannot go.  No one can fully explain the admission of evil into the heart.  We say “it is because I listen to temptation;” but why do I listen, to temptation?  Because I did not watch unto prayer.  The Calvinist would say, perhaps, “Because I am without the covenant;” but he allows that a person may sin who is in it.  Suppose I am one of these?  The origin of evil must ever be hidden, but not of evil only; the moral nature of man must ever be a mystery to his intellectual nature, for it is above it. There is a natural testimony to the supremacy of the moral in man above the intellectual.

  10th Mo. 8th.  The charm of book and pen has
  been beguiling me of my reward; but now my soul
  craves to be offered a living sacrifice.