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How long might a man sit at the foot of a philosopher, before he should find such a commanding power go forth with his lectures of morality, [as] to take away his old heart, full of lusts as the sea is of creeping things innumerable, and put a new and holy one in the room of it?  Some indeed in their school have been a little refined from the dregs of sensuality, as Polemo, who went a drunkard to hear Plato, and returned a temperate man from his lecture; and no wonder, if we consider what violence such broad and beastly sins offer to the very light of a natural conscience—that lesser light appointed by God to rule the night of the heathen world.  But take the best philosopher of them all, and you shall find sins that are of a little finer spinning—such as spiritual wickednesses and heart sins are—that are acted behind the curtain in the retiring room of the inner man.  These were so far from being the spoils of their victorious arms, that they could never come to the sight of them.  But ‘the word’ treads on these ‘high places’ of spiritual wickednesses, and leaves not any stronghold of them untaken.  It pursues sin and Satan to their bogs and fastnesses; it digs the sinner’s lusts like vermin out of their holes and burrows, where they earth themselves.  The heart itself is no safe sanctuary for sin to sit in. The word will take it thence—as Joab from the horns of the altar—to slay it.  Those corruptions that escaped the sword of the moralist and honest heathen, even these fall by the edge of the word.

           I cannot give a better instance of the converting power of the word, than by presenting you with the miraculous victories obtained by it over the hearts of men, when the apostles were sent out first to preach, the grace of Christ, and, as it were, to begin the com¬bination of the gospel ministry.  Wherever they came, they found the world up in arms against them, and the black prince of it, the devil, at the head of their troops, to make their utmost resistance against them; yet what unheard of victories were got by them?  Was it not strange that without drawing any other sword than ‘the everlasting gospel,’ they should turn the world upside down, as their enemies themselves con¬fessed?—slighting the devil’s works, casting down his holds wherever they came, and overcoming those bar¬barous heathens whom the devil had held in his peaceable possession so many thousand years!  To [make them] renounce their idolatries in which they had been bred and trained up all their days; receive a new Lord, and him a crucified Jesus; and this at the report of a few silly men, loaden with the vilest re-proaches that the wit of man could invent, or malice rake together, to besmear their persons, and render their doctrine they preached odious to the world, this, I say, is such an unheard of conquest, as could not be obtained by any less than the arm of the Almighty —especially if we cast in two or three circumstances to give a further accent to the heightening of this consideration.  As,

           First Circumstance.  The meanness of the per¬sons employed to preach this doctrine.  They were mean in their condition and rank, being of the floor and lowest of the people, and many of them as mean in their intellectual accomplishments as external port and garb in the world, having no help from human learning to raise their parts, and set a varnish upon their discourses.  Men very unfit for such an enter¬prise, God knows, had the stress and success of their works depend on their own furniture.  This put their very enemies to a stand, whence they had their wisdom, knowing well how low their parentage and unsuitable their breeding were to give them any advantage toward such a high undertaking, Acts 4:13. Surely these poor men could contribute no more, by anything that was their own, to that wonderful success which followed their labours, than the blowing of the rams' horns could to the laying of Jericho’s walls flat with the ground, or the sounding of Jehoshaphat’s musical instruments to the routing of so formidable an army of his enemies; so that we must attribute it to the breath of God, by which they sounded the trum¬pet of the gospel, and his sweet Spirit charming the hearts of his hearers, that such mighty works were done by them.

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 Second Circumstance.  If we consider the nature of the doctrine they held forth and commended to the world, which was not only strange and new—enough to make the hearers shy of it—but so contrary to the humour of man’s corrupt nature, that it hath not one thought in the sinner’s heart to befriend it.  No wonder indeed, that Mahomet’s spiced cup went down so glib, it being so luscious and pleasing to man’s carnal palate.  We are soon wooed to espouse that for truth which gratifies the flesh, and easily persuaded to deliver up ourselves into the hands of such opinions as offer fair quarter to our lusts, yea, promise them sat-isfaction.  Indeed, we cannot much wonder to see Christianity itself generally and readily embraced, when it is presented in Rome’s whorish dress, with its purity adulterated, and its power emasculated.  But, take the doctrine of the gospel in its own native excellency, before its falls into these hucksters’ hands, and it is such as a carnal heart cannot like, because it lays the axe to the root of every sin, and bids defiance to all that take part with it.  It will suffer no religion to set her threshold by its.  This may make us step aside—as Moses once to behold the bush—to see this great wonder—a doctrine believed and embraced that is pure nonsense to carnal reason, teaching us to be saved by another's righteousness, wise with another’s wisdom, to trust in him as a God that was himself a child, to rely on him to deliver us from the power of sin and Satan that fell himself under the wrath of men.  O how great a gulf of objections which reason brings against this doctrine, must be shot before a man come to close with it!  And yet this doctrine to find such welcome, that never any prince at the beat of his drum had his subjects flock more in throngs to list themselves in his muster roll, than the apostles had multitudes of believers offering themselves to come under baptism—the military oath given by them to their converts.  Add but one more.

           Third Circumstance.  Consider how little worldly encouragement this word they preached gave to its disciples; and you will say, ‘God was in it of a truth.’ Had it been the way to thrive in the world to turn Christian, or had it won the favour of kings and princes to have been their disciple, and taught them how to climb the hill of honour, we could not have wondered to have seen so many to worship the rising sun. But, alas! the gospel which they preached comes not with these bribes in its hand.  No golden apples thrown in the way to entice them on.  Christ bids his disciples stoop not to take up crowns for their heads, but a cross for their backs; ‘If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me,’ Luke 9:23.  They must not dream of getting the world’s treasure, which they have not, but prepare to part with what they have.  To be sure, when the apostles preached it, the way it led to was not to princes’ palaces with their preferments, but have aimed at their own honour, and pleased themselves with the renown that they should win by their sufferings, and that their names should be writ and read in the leaves of fame when they were dead and gone, some Roman spirit, haply, might have been found to have endured as much.  Or, if it had taught them that they should have ascended in their fiery chariot of martyrdom, to receive heaven’s glory as the purchase of their patience and prowess, this might have hardened some popish shaveling against the fear of those bloody deaths they met with.  But the doctrine they preached allows neither, but teaches them when they have done their best, and suffered the worst that their enemies’ wrath can inflict for the cause of God, then to renounce the honour of all, and write themselves unprofitable servants.  All these considerations twisted together, make a strong cord to draw any that have staggered in this particular to a firm belief of the divine parentage of the Scriptures.

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 FOURTH EFFECT.  The word of God hath the power of conversion, which none but God—who is the ‘God of all grace’—can produce.  When John’s disciples came to Christ to be resolved who he was, whether the Messiah or not, Christ neither tells them he was, or was not he; but sends them to take their answer from the marvellous works he did.  ‘Go,’ saith he, ‘and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see; the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them,’—are gospellized, Matt. 11:4, 5—that is, they are transformed into the very nature of the gospel, and acted by the spirit which breathes in the gospel.  By all these instances Christ’s drift was to give an ocular demonstration of their faith, that he, who did such miracles, could be no other than he whom they sought.  And that which brings up the rear, is the converting power of the word —not set last because the least among them, but rather because it is the greatest wonder of them all, and comprehends in it all the other.  When souls are converted, ‘the blind receive their sight.’  You were ‘darkness,’ but now ‘light in the Lord.’  ‘The lame walk,’ in that the affections—the soul’s feet—are set at liberty, and receive strength to run the ways of God with delight.  Lepers are cleansed, in that filthy lusts are cured, and foul souls are sanctified.  And so of the rest.  Now, though the former miracles cease, yet this, which is the greatest, still accompanying the word, affords such a demonstration of its divinity, as reason itself cannot oppose.  Is it not beyond he skill and strength of the mightiest angel to make the least pile of grass in the field?  Much more the new creature in the heart, the noblest of God’s works.

           That therefore which doth thus new mould the heart, and make the creature as unlike to his former self as the lamb is to the wolf, and the ox to the lion —the one meek and harmless, the other fierce and ravenous—that must needs be from God.  And such changes are the daily product of ‘the word.’  How many have you known—once under the power of their lusts, throwing like madmen their firebrands about, possessed with so many devils as sins, and hurried hither and thither by these furies—yet at the hearing of one gospel sermon, have you not seen them quite metamorphosed, and, with him in the gospel, out of whom the devil was cast, sitting at Jesus’ feet in their right mind, bitterly bewailing their former course, and hating their once beloved lusts, more than ever they were fond of them?  I hope some of you that read these lines can say thus much concerning yourselves, as the apostle doth of himself and others of his brethren: ‘We ourselves were also sometimes foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving divers lusts and pleasures,’ &c.  ‘But after that the kindness and love of God our Saviour toward man appeared, he saved us, by the washing of regeneration,’ &c., Titus 3:3, 4.  And can you, who are the very epistle of Christ, writ not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God, in the fleshly tables of your hearts, stand yet in doubt whether that word came from God, which is thus able to bring you home to God?