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| Chapter V. How our efforts and exertions are of no use without God's help.
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Chapter V.
How our efforts and exertions are of no use without
God’s help.
And by this it is clearly
shown that God’s grace and mercy always work in us what is good,
and that when it forsakes us, the efforts of the worker are useless,
and that however earnestly a man may strive, he cannot regain his
former condition without His help, and that this saying is constantly
fulfilled in our case: that it is “not of him that willeth or
runneth but of God which hath mercy.”1287
And this grace on the other hand
sometimes does not refuse to visit with that holy inspiration of which
you spoke, and with an abundance of spiritual thoughts, even the
careless and indifferent; but inspires the unworthy, arouses the
slumberers, and enlightens those who are blinded by ignorance, and
mercifully reproves us and chastens us, shedding itself abroad in our
hearts, that thus we may be stirred by the compunction which He
excites, and impelled
to
rise from the sleep of sloth. Lastly we are often filled by His sudden
visitation with sweet odours, beyond the power of human
composition—so that the soul is ravished with these delights, and
caught up, as it were, into an ecstasy of spirit, and becomes oblivious
of the fact that it is still in the flesh.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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