Excerpt from The Grace and Duty of Being Spiritually Minded: Declared and Practically Improved Now, after this, there is what we would call the second stage in the work of self-examination. Our reason for advising a Christian to begin first with a survey of the handy-work, ere he proceeds to a search and scrutiny of the heart, is, that the one is greatly more manifest than the other. Now it is said in Scripture, that the works of the flesh are manifest and what we would have him to remark is, that, in the enumeration of these works, the Apostle takes account of wrong affections as well as of wrong actions. Wrath, for example, and hatred, and envy - these, in the estimation of the Apostles, are alike manifest with drunkenness, and open quar relling, and murder. It would appear that there are certain strong and urgent feelings of the inner man, which may be as distinctly taken cognizance of, as certain glaring and palpable misdeeds of the outward history. And therefore, while, for the first stage of self-examination, we proposed, as the topics of it, the doings of the visible conduct, we would suggest, for the second stage, the evil desires of the heart, which, whether they break forth or not into open effervescence, at least announce, and that most vi videdly, their existence and their power, to the eye, or rather to the sense of conscience, Simply by the felt emotion which they stir up within, by the fierce ness wherewith they rage and tumultuate among the secrecies of the bosom. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.