s running
over with love to the name and to the people and to all the ways of Jesus
Christ.

And then, it is very encouraging and reassuring to us to see how
Hopeful's true conversion so deepened and sobered and strengthened his
whole character. He remained to the end in his mental constitution and
whole temperament, as we say, the same man he had always been; but, while
remaining the same man, at the same time a most wonderful change
gradually began to come over him, till, by slow but sure degrees, he
became the Hopeful we know and look to and lean upon. To use his own
autobiographic words about himself, it was "by hearing and considering of
things that are Divine" that his natural levity was so completely whipped
out of his soul till he was made at last an indispensable companion to
Christian, strong-minded and serious-minded man as he was. "Conversion
to God," says William Law, "is often very sudden and instantaneous,
unexpectedly raised from variety of occasions. Thus, one by seeing only
a withered tree, another by reading the lives and deaths of the
antediluvian fathers, one by hearing of heaven, another of hell, one by
reading of the love or wrath of God, another of the sufferings of Christ,
may find himself, as it were, melted into penitence all of a sudden. It
may be granted also that the greatest sinner may in a moment be converted
to God, and may feel himself wounded in such a degree as perhaps those
never were who have been turning to God all their lives. But, then, it
is to be observed that this suddenness of change or flash of conviction
is by no means of the essence of true conversion. This stroke of
conversion is not to be considered as signifying our high state of a new
birth in Christ, or a proof that we are on a sudden made new creatures,
but that we are thus suddenly called upon and stirred up to look after a
newness of nature. The renewal of our first birth and state is something
entirely distinct from our first sudden conversion and call to
repentance. That is not a thing done in an instant, but is a certain
process, a gradual release from our captivity and disorder, consisting of
several stages and degrees, both of life and death, which the soul must
go through before it can have thoroughly put off the old man. It is well
worth observing that our Saviour's greatest trials were near the end of
His life. This might sufficiently show us that our first awakenings have
carried us but a little