e nature, and
familiarized with the use of the Christian's privileges, habitually
solacing itself with the hopes held out by the Gospel, and animated by
the sense of its high relations, and its glorious reversion.

The doctrine of the sanctifying operations of the Holy Spirit, appears
to have met with still worse treatment. It would be to convey a very
inadequate idea of the scantiness of the conceptions on this head, of
the bulk of the Christian world, to affirm merely, that they are too
little conscious of the inefficacy of their own unassisted endeavours
after holiness of heart and life, and that they are not daily employed
in humbly and diligently using the appointed means for the reception and
cultivation of the divine assistance. It would hardly be to go beyond
the truth to assert, that for the most part their notions on this
subject are so confused and faint, that they can scarcely be said in any
fair sense to believe the doctrine at all.

The writer of these sheets is by no means unapprized of the objections
which he may expect from those, whose opinions he has been so freely
condemning. He is prepared to hear it urged, that often where there have
been the strongest pretences to the religious affections, of which the
want has now been censured, there has been little or nothing of the
reality of them; and that even omitting the instances (which however
have been but too frequent) of studied hypocrisy, what have assumed to
themselves the name of religious affections, have been merely the
flights of a lively imagination, or the working of a heated brain; in
particular, that this love of our Saviour, which has been so warmly
recommended, is no better than a vain fervor, which dwells only in the
disordered mind of the enthusiast. That Religion is of a more steady
nature; of a more sober and manly quality; and that she rejects with
scorn, the support of a mere feeling, so volatile and indeterminate, so
trivial and useless, as that with which we would associate her; a
feeling varying in different men, and even in the same man at different
times, according to the accidental flow of the animal spirits; a
feeling, lastly, of which it may perhaps be said, we are from our very
nature, hardly susceptible towards an invisible Being.

"As to the operations of the Holy Spirit," it may probably be further
urged, that "it is perhaps scarcely worth while to spend much time in
inquiring into the theory, when, in practice at least