ilgrim's Progress_ and the _Grace Abounding_.
'It made me greatly ashamed,' says Hopeful, 'of the vileness of my former
life, and confounded me with the sense of mine own ignorance, for there
never came into mine heart before now that showed me so by contrast the
beauty of the Lord Jesus. My own vileness and nakedness made me love a
holy life. Yea, I thought that had I now a thousand gallons of blood in
my body, I could spill it all for the sake of the Lord Jesus.' And if
you, my brother, far on in the way of Salvation, still think sometimes
that, after all, you must be a reprobate because of your filthy rags,
read what David Brainerd wrote with his half-dead hand on the last page
of his seraphic journal: 'How sweet it is to love God and to have a heart
all for God! Yes; but a voice answered me, You are not all for God, you
are not an angel. To which my whole soul replied, I as sincerely desire
to love and glorify God as any angel in heaven. But you are filthy, and
not fit for heaven. When hereupon there instantly appeared above me and
spread over me the blessed robes of Christ's righteousness which I could
not but exult and triumph in. And then I knew that I should be as active
as an angel in heaven, and should then be for ever stripped of my filthy
garments and clothed with spotless raiment.' Let me die the death of
David Brainerd, and let my latter end be like his!

The third Shining One then came forward and set a mark on the forehead of
this happy man. And it was a most ancient and a most honourable mark.
For it was the same redeeming mark that was set by Moses upon the
foreheads of the children of Israel when the Lord took them into covenant
with Himself at the Passover in the wilderness. It was the same
distinguishing mark also that the man with the slaughter-weapon in his
hand first set upon the foreheads of the men who sighed and cried for the
abominations that were done in the midst of Jerusalem. And it was the
same glorious mark that John saw in the foreheads of the hundred and
forty and four thousand who stood upon Mount Zion and sang a song that no
man knew but those men who had been redeemed from the earth by the blood
of the Lamb. The mark was set for propriety and for ornament and for
beauty. It was set upon his forehead so that all who looked on him ever
after might thus know to what company and what country he belonged, and
that this was not his rest, but that he had been called and chosen