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their youth, some in their middle age, some in their old age; yea, some have been called at their last hour, Luke xxiii. 42, 43. Now let it be granted, that you cannot, by searching into yourselves, find the signs of effectual calling, which yet may be in you, though your dim eyes cannot perceive them; nay, suppose that you are not yet effectually called, here is no cause for you utterly to despair, and say, you are reprobates. How know you that God will not call you before you die?

It were a far wiser and better course for you, who will be thus hasty in judging yourselves to be reprobates, to busy yourselves first with other things. Acquaint yourselves with God's revealed will in his word. Learn to know what God has commanded you to do, and do that; also what he has threatened, and fear that; and what he has promised, and believe and rest on that. After you have done this, you may look into yourselves, and there you shall read your election written in golden and great letters.

For God never intended that the first lesson which a Christian should learn, should be the hardest, and highest that can be learned, taken out of the book of his eternal counsel and decree; and so to descend to the A. B. C. of Christianity; which were a course most perplexed and preposterous. But his will is, that his scholars and children should learn out of his written word here on earth, first, that God made all things. Gen. i. 31, and that he made man good, and that men, hearkening to Satan, found out evil devices, Eccles. vii. 29, and so fell from grace, and from God, and so both they, and the whole world that came of their loins, became liable to eternal damnation. Next, God would have you to learn, that he, in his infinite wisdom, goodness, and mercy, thought of, and concluded a new covenant of grace, Gen. iii. 15, xvii. 1, 2, 11; Rom. iv. 11; Jer. xxxi. 31, 32; for the effecting whereof, he found out and appointed a way and means to pacify his wrath, by satisfying his justice, punishing sin in man's nature, by which he opened a way unto his mercy, to show it to whom he would; namely, He