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Essays designed to afford Christian encouragement and consolation
Essays designed to afford Christian encouragement and consolation Author:John Sheppard Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: HI. ON SUSPICIONS THAT FAITH MAY NOT BE GENUINE, INDUCED BY THE FREQUENT OBSERVA- TION AND PARTIAL EXPERIENCE OF SELF-DELUSIONS. You sometimes institute th... more »is anxious inquiry;—if I do indeed appear to be favoured with a " little faith," with a ray of that light " shining in the heart," which should be powerful to cheer, and guide, and purify, still where is my sure ground of persuasion, amidst those self-delusions, which, even within the pale of Christian fellowship, are too often observed,—and with some correspondent symptoms in myself,—that I possess in reality the " true light," the healing, renovating light, from heaven? Its occasional intermissions or continued feebleness would not so much impair my hope of this, did I not meet with examples, and these of painful frequency, where claims to the possession of it are evidently fal- lacious. Have I not noticed some, and heard of more, professing to have " the eyes of their understanding enlightened," and actually seeming to fix them with a most joyful intentness on those very truths and hopes to which the gospel invites, who yet in time of temptation have betrayed the nullity of its moral power, and are habitually betraying the extreme defectiveness of this, by not being so upright and true, not so pure and humble, not so charitable, patient, and self-denying, as their creed should in all reason make them ? Knowing that such fallacies exist, having ground to suspect that they are numerous, feeling also in myself a proneness to the same disjunction or disproportion between my professed faith and its due effects, and experiencing often such spiritual relapses, such falls from excitement into coldness and unwatehfulness, as seem to mark and brand the instability of the principle, how shall I know that the hoped-for influence...« less