n, ye backsliding children, and I will heal your backslidings.
Behold, we come unto Thee; for Thou art the Lord our God."-JER. iii.
22.

"Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed."-JER. xii. 14.

"O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of
this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. The law of
the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin
and death."-ROM. vii. 24, viii. 2.

During one of our conventions a gentleman called upon me to ask advice
and help. He was evidently an earnest and well-instructed Christian man.
He had for some years been in most difficult surroundings, trying to
witness for Christ. The result was a sense of failure and unhappiness.
His complaint was that he had no relish for the Word, and that though he
prayed, it was as if his heart was not in it. If he spoke to others, or
gave a tract, it was under a sense of duty: the love and the joy were
not present. He longed to be filled with God's Spirit, but the more he
sought it, the farther off it appeared to be. What was he to think of
his state, and was there any way out of it?

My answer was, that the whole matter appeared to me very simple; he was
living under the law and not under grace. As long as he did so, there
could be no change. He listened attentively, but could not exactly see
what I meant.

I reminded him of the difference, the utter contrariety, between law and
grace. Law demands; grace bestows. Law commands, but gives no strength
to obey; grace promises, and performs, does all we need to do. Law
burdens, and casts down and condemns; grace comforts, and makes strong
and glad. Law appeals to self, to do its utmost; grace points to Christ
to do all. Law calls to effort and strain, and urges us towards a goal
we never can reach; grace works in us all God's blessed will. I pointed
out to him how his first step should be, instead of striving against
all this failure, fully to accept of it, and the lesson of his own
impotence, as God had been seeking to teach it him, and, with this
confession, to sink down before God in utter helplessness. There would
be the place where he would learn that, unless grace gave him
deliverance and strength, he never could do better than he had done, and
that grace would indeed work all for him. He must come out from under
law and self and effort, and take his place under grace, allowing God to
do all.

In later conversations h