all work by first being at peace—­by our being reconciled at once to God through faith in His love to us, revealed in the atonement of Jesus Christ.  We may just add, what every true man knows, and rejoices to know, that the hour which begins his peace with God necessarily begins also war with all sin in his own heart.  His friendship with God implies enmity to all in himself which is opposed to God.

2.  “But the whole tendency of revivals, and of this theory of sudden conversions by means of any man’s preaching, is to disparage God’s appointments of the Church and the family for accomplishing genuine conversion.”

If by this is meant that God ordinarily blesses for the saving of souls what are termed “the means of grace,” or “the truth as it is in Jesus,” whether inculcated by the parent, the teacher, or the minister, and presented to the mind, and impressed upon it patiently and laboriously during a course of years,—­then we also believe this, and cordially admit it.  Nay, we would have all “friends of revivals” keenly alive to the danger of so expressing themselves as to seem even to disparage such earnest painstaking, and we would have them to avoid seeking to attain by a summary process what thousands strive to attain, and actually do attain, only by a prayerful diligence, which begins with sowing the seed in childhood, and never ceases until there is the blade and the full ear ending in the golden harvest.  We feel assured that the faithful minister who has seen many souls born to God under his teaching, will acknowledge that these results were connected not so much, or probably not at all, with any sudden change, from some striking sermon he had preached, but from a series of impressions made by pious parents in their home-training, or by himself in his congregational class, or by the whole tone and tenor of his public ministrations, &c.  How often has it thus happened that others have laboured, and that he has but entered into their labours!  The conversion of his hearers has been the culminating point of a thousand appliances, and, in the vast majority of cases, it has been reached by degrees.  The glorious summit has been attained, not by a leap from the valley, but after many preparatory steps.  The light of life has not flashed out of darkness, but has dawned by imperceptible degrees, until the glory of God was seen in the face of Christ Jesus.  If the new life itself has been suddenly experienced, yet let us not overlook the preparatory work of the shaking of the dry bones, then of the bone coming to its bone, and, finally, the flesh and skin covering the skeleton, and so preparing a home in which the living spirit could dwell and act.  We cannot use language strong enough to express our conviction of the blessing which, as an ordinary rule, is sure to follow from the Lord on the faithful and prayerful labour of a pious parent, Sabbath-school teacher, or pastor.  Let nothing be said in favour of wide-spread