Re: Help, my cat is a serial killer!

to mind; things appear very dim to what they did
before. And though there still remains an habitual strong persuasion;
yet not so as to exclude temptations to unbelief, and all possibility of
doubting. But then, at particular times, by God's help, the same sense
of things revives again, like fire that lay hid in ashes. I suppose the
grounds of such a conviction of the truth of divine things to be just
and rational; but yet, in some, God makes use of their own reason much
more sensibly than in others. Oftentimes persons have (so far as could
be judged) received the first saving conviction from reasoning which
they have heard from the pulpit; and often in the course of reasoning
they are led into in their own meditations.

The arguments are the same that they have heard hundreds of times; but
the force of the arguments, and their conviction by them, is altogether
new; they come with a new and before unexperienced power. Before, they
heard it was so, and they allowed it to be so; but now they see it to be
so indeed. Things now look exceeding plain to them, and they wonder they
did not see them before.

They are so greatly taken with their new discovery, and things appear so
plain and so rational to them, that they are often at first ready to
think they can convince others; and are apt to engage in talk with every
one they meet with, almost to this end; and when they are disappointed,
are ready to wonder that their reasonings seem to make no more
impression. Many fall under such a mistake as to be ready to doubt of
their good estate, because there was so much use made of their own
reason in the convictions they have received; they are afraid that they
have no illumination above the natural force of their own faculties: and
many make that an objection against the spirituality of their
convictions, that it is so easy to see things as they now see them. They
have often heard, that conversion is a work of mighty power, manifesting
to the soul what