ay to perpetuate our communion with him, and often to renew the sense of
his love and grace, that would grow slack in our hearts, if our needs did
not every day stir up fresh longing, and his returns by this means are so
much the more refreshing. There is a time of children's minority when they
stand in need of continual supplies from their parents, or tutors, because
they are not entered in possession of their inheritance; and while they
are in this state, there is nothing more beseeming them, than in all their
wants to address to their father, and represent them to him; and it is fit
they should be from hand to mouth, as you say, that they may know and
acknowledge their dependence on their father. Truly this is our minority,
our presence in the body, which because of sin that dwells in it, and its
own natural weakness and incapacity, keeps us at much distance with the
Lord, that we cannot be intimately present with him. Now, in this
condition, the most natural, the most comely and becoming exercise of
children, is, to cry to our Father, to present all our grievances; and
thus to entertain some holy correspondence with our absent Father, by the
messenger of prayer and supplication, which cannot return empty, if it be
not sent away too full of self-conceit. This is the most natural breathing
of a child of God in this world. It is the most proper acting of his new
life, and the most suitable expiration of that Spirit of adoption that is
inspired into him, since there is so much life as to know what we want,
and our wants are infinite. Therefore that life cannot but beat this way,
in holy desires after God, whose fulness can supply all wants. This is the
pulse of a Christian, that goeth continually, and there is much advantage
to the continuity and interruptedness of the motion, from the infiniteness
and inexhaustedness of our needs in this life, and the continual assaults
that are made by necessity and temptation on the heart, "But ye have
received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry," &c. He puts in his own
name in the latter part, though theirs was in the former part. When he
speaks of a donation or privilege, he supplies to the meanest, to show
that the lowest and most despised creature is not in any incapacity to
receive the greatest gifts of God; and then, when he mentions the working
of that Spirit in way of intercession, because it imports necessity and
want, he cares not to commit some incongruity in the language,