ticular texts, but to the whole tenor of scripture. It is repugnant to the very nature of God: it is utterly beneath his majesty and wisdom, (as an eminent writer strongly expresses it) "to play at bo-peep with his creatures." It is inconsistent both with his justice and mercy, and with the sound experience of all his children.
8. One more cause of heaviness is mentioned by many of those who were termed mystic authors. And the notion has crept in, I know not how, even among plain people who have no acquaintance with them. I cannot better explain this, than in the words of a late writer, who relates this, as her own experience. "I continued so happy in my Beloved, that altho' I should have been forced to live a vagabond in a desert, I should have found no difficulty in it. This state had not lasted long, when in effect, I found myself led into a desert.—I found myself in a forlorn condition, altogether poor, wretched and miserable.—The proper source of this grief is, the knowledge of ourselves, by which we find, that there is an extreme unlikeness between God and us. We see ourselves most opposite to him, and that our inmost soul is entirely corrupted, depraved and full of all kind of evil and malignity, of the world and flesh and all sorts of abominations:" from hence it has been inferred, That the knowledge of ourselves, without which we should perish everlastingly, must even after we
