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the affections, which the Scripture calls a taste of the heavenly gift, and of the good word of God, and of the powers of the world to come, Heb. vi. 4, 5. By these gifts of the Spirit, the souls of these men are raised to an ability to do more than nature, and mere education can help them unto; carrying them further than nature or art can do, by working in them a kind of spiritual change in their affections, and a kind of reformation of their lives.

But yet all this while they are not ingrafted into Christ; neither are deeply rooted, as the corn in good ground, nor yet are thoroughly changed and renewed in the inward man, Matt. xiii. 21; they have at best only a form of godliness, but have not the power thereof, 2 Tim. iii. 5.

Now these men may, and often do fall away, not into some particular gross sins, of which they were sometime after a sort washed; but into a course of sinning; falling from the very form of godliness, and may so utterly lose those gifts received, that they may in the end become very apostates; yet this is not properly a falling from grace. It is only a falling away from the common graces or gifts of the Spirit, and from those graces which they did seem to have, and which the church out of her charity did judge them to have; but they fall not from true saving grace, for they never had any, Luke viii. 18. For if ever they had been indeed incorporated into Christ Jesus, and had been sound members of his body, and in this sense had ever been of us, as the apostle John speaks, then they would never have departed from us, but should no doubt have continued with us, 1 John ii. 19.

(2.) Of such Christians as shall persevere. The second sort of those that have given their names to Christ, are such as are endued with true justifying faith, and saving knowledge, and are renewed in the spirit of their mind; whereby, through the gracious and powerful working of the sanctifying Spirit, the word makes a deeper impression upon the will and the affections, causing them not only to taste,