duing
all things to the obedience of the Father's will--that I feel she
may object more to my being accepted than I could to her. Yet,
notwithstanding all this, I am conscious there is a difference--though
I am only on the lowest step of Jacob's ladder, yet I do desire to
ascend higher into the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to descend
lower in my own esteem, so to be able to say without the pollution of
affected humility, I feel myself less than the least of all saints.
The divine life appears to me daily more and more a deep internal
personal work, without which all external exertions and exercises will
come to nothing; however fair, it will be at best but a fruitless
blossom, that withers as soon as blown. Oh! how difficult it is not to
deceive oneself with the appearance of Christian graces instead of the
substance; how difficult not to substitute the _act_ for the _spirit_;
that monster pride, how hard it is to kill, how chameleon like it
changes its colour and seems to live on air, yea, on very vanity.

_July 18._ _Lord's Day._--The warlike sounds of the cannon and mortars
have abated within these three days. Oh that the Lord would quickly
terminate this hateful civil strife. Yet at present there seems no
prospect.

How hard I feel it to-day to rise above the loss of my dear, dear
Mary--it seems like a new wound just opened. It is so hard to feel the
great honour and great proof of love the Lord has manifested towards
me, in removing her I loved from the trials and sorrows of this earth
to the ease and joy of his own Paradise, to join our dear little Mary,
and sing there together his praise who washed them in his own blood,
prepared them as vessels of honour, and then took them to himself.
Sometimes I think I ought not to have gone out of our house during the
plague, about Major T.'s affairs, but that I should have left them to
their own fate; yet, at other times, I think, after all the kindness I
had received from him, I ought not to have declined the dangerous
service. Then again, I think that when I did go, I should have taken
more precautions, and not have joined my dear family immediately,
but remained apart; yet at last my heart comes round to the full
assurance, that my dear and loving Lord would not have visited
undesigned neglect, which sprang mainly from confidence in his loving
care, with such a privation, had he not designed by it her speedy
glory and my final good: now I shall go to her, but she