Another effect of this “reasoning together” with God, respecting our character and conduct, is to render our views discriminating.  The action of the mind is not only intense, it is also intelligent.  Strange as it may sound, it is yet a fact, that a review of our past lives conducted under the eye of God, and with a recognition of His presence and oversight, serves to deliver the mind from confusion and panic, and to fill it with a calm and rational fear.  This is of great value.  For, when a man begins to be excited upon the subject of religion,—­it may be for the first time, in his unreflecting and heedless life,—­he is oftentimes terribly excited.  He is now brought suddenly into the midst of the most solemn things.  That sin of his, the enormity of which he had never seen before, now reveals itself in a most frightful form, and he feels as the murderer does who wakes in the morning and begins to realize that he has killed a man.  That holy Being, of whose holiness he had no proper conception, now rises dim and awful before his half-opened inward eye, and he trembles like the pagan before the unknown God whom he ignorantly worships.  That eternity, which he had heard spoken of with total indifference, now flashes penal flames in his face.  Taken and held in this state of mind, the transgressor is confusedly as well as terribly awakened, and he needs first of all to have this experience clarified, and know precisely for what he is trembling, and why.  This panic and consternation must depart, and a calm intelligent anxiety must take its place.  But this cannot be, unless the mind turns towards God, and invites His searching scrutiny, and His aid in the search after sin.  So long as we shrink away from our Judge, and in upon ourselves, in these hours of conviction,—­so long as we deal only with the workings of our own minds, and do not look up and “reason together” with God,—­we take the most direct method of producing a blind, an obscure, and a selfish agony.  We work ourselves, more and more, into a mere phrenzy of excitement.  Some of the most wretched and fanatical experience in the history of the Church is traceable to a solitary self-brooding, in which, after the sense of sin had been awakened, the soul did not discuss the matter with God.

For the character and attributes of God, when clearly seen, repress all fright, and produce that peculiar species of fear which is tranquil because it is deep.  Though the soul, in such an hour, is conscious that God is a fearful object of sight for a transgressor, yet it continues to gaze at Him with an eager straining eye.  And in so doing, the superficial tremor and panic of its first awakening to the subject of religion passes off, and gives place to an intenser moral feeling, the calmness of which is like the stillness of fascination.  Nothing has a finer effect upon a company of awakened minds, than to cause the being and attributes of God, in all their majesty and purity,