Page:A Compendium of the Chief Doctrines of the True Christian Religion.djvu/81

Rh any person by the following signs. If he be a professor of religion, he worships God not for the sake of God, and serves his neighbour not for the sake of his neighbour; thus he does good, and speaks truth, not for their own sake, but from some selfish and worldly motive. In all his actions he wishes to aggrandize his own merits: he perceives no disgust or dissatisfaction, but on the contrary a pleasure and delight, in enmity, hatred, revenge, cruelty, adultery, fraud, &c.; and, under the pernicious influence of such evils, he indulges his imagination in all the licentiousness of thought about them. The change from this state of evil to that of heavenly good, is the process so often alluded to in the Sacred Scriptures, under the name of the new birth and the remission of sins.

THE removal of evils, together with the pleasures and delights attending them, in consequence of their being deeply implanted in the human mind, cannot be effected without interior pain, distress, and anxiety. Such interior pain is called temptation; and if the objects which occasion it be spiritual, the temptation is then spiritual; but if the objects which occasion it be worldly, the temptation is then merely natural, and is more properly called anxiety. In spiritual temptation there is a conflict or combat between the heavenly kingdom and the infernal kingdom in man, that is, between good and evil, with an endeavour on the part of each to gain the dominion over the other. This conflict is carried on by evil spirits on the one hand, who excite and cherish in man his evil affections, and by good spirits on the other hand, who