hear only with your bodily ears, and what you hear will be received only by the body; whilst, in the mean time, your mental ears will be closed, so that not a particle of the SPIRIT and the LIFE which enter into the composition of the RECORD, will gain admission into your mind. Or perhaps it may be, that one part of your mental ear may be opened, viz. the intellectual, so that your understanding may admit one part of the Divine contents of the RECORD, viz. its bright and blessed truths, whilst yet the other part of your mental ear, viz. the voluntary, may be shut, so that although you receive the light, you are not made sensible of a single beam of the warmth of that heavenly love and life which those truths contain, and to which they were intended to direct you.
Well, then, might the SAVIOUR of the world say, on this occasion, to His disciples, “Take heed how ye hear,” [Luke viii. 18.], for what can be conceived more tremendous than, when the ALMIGHTY speaks, to stop the ears against hearing Him? Yet such is the awful state of those who, in hearing the WORD OF GOD, open only the bodily ear to the sound of the letter, or perhaps their intellectual ear to some intellectual and speculative sentiment contained in the letter; whilst, at the same time, they shut the voluntary ear against all calls on their love, their obedience, and that entire
