to work in concert with His spirit on our hearts?  Or is the calming and soothing power a thing confined to sense and sensibility?  I suppose the latter, but that religion appropriates these as well as all other faculties and parts of man’s nature, and, where he would have praised nature, bids him praise God, his own God in Christ.

6th Mo. 18th.  I have thought this summer a time of critical importance for my soul, for eternity.  I have felt, and sometimes spoken, strongly, but always, I believe, honestly, unless I have imposed upon myself.  Thought I had accepted Christ.  I thought He was my salvation and my all.  “Yet once more” will the Lord shake not my earthly heart, but also my heaven, my hopes, my expectations, in Him.  Will He convict me still of holding the truth in unrighteousness?  How else can I explain to myself the pride which revolts from censure, the touchy disposition, the self-justifying spirit, the jealousy of my reputation, the anxiety to keep up my character?  How else can I explain the inaptitude for the divine, the unwillingness to have the veil quite lifted from my heart, to display it even to my own eyes?  Ah! is it not that there is still a double mind and instability in all my ways, still a want of that simplicity of faith, that humility, and poverty, and meekness of spirit, that can accept the gospel, still the self-righteousness (worse than “I am of Paul”) which assumes to itself “I of Christ”?  Ah! if I may yet lift my eyes through Him who hath borne even the iniquity of our holy things, keep me, O Lord, from a wider wandering, till Thou bring me fully into the fold, the “little flock,” to whom it is Thy good pleasure to give thy kingdom.

7th Mo. 5th. * * * It is useless to conceal from myself that I have felt grieved at some, whom we might suppose grounded in the faith long since, appearing to keep the expression of sole reliance on the mercy of God in Jesus Christ, as a sort of death-bed confession.  I know full well that religion must be an actual transformation of soul; but then the ground of our hope that this will be perfectly effected ere we depart, is the mercy of God in Christ, quite as much as our hope of forgiveness of actual sin, and final salvation.  Oh, some do separate things too much, as if it were possible to err by too full a reliance on Christ; as if there was a danger that He or we should, by that means, forget the work of grace.  Grace is grace throughout, not of works, but of Him that calleth.  Still, I believe there must and will be variations in our modes of viewing the great gospel, the “exceeding broad” commandment.  May we, as S. Tuke so beautifully said, “know one another in the one bond of brotherhood, ’One Lord, one faith, one baptism;’” without entering into nice distinctions and metaphysical subtleties.  And may I, to whom temptations of this kind are naturally so accessible, be preserved in my own spirit from the snares of death, cleansed