PAGE 166:
CHAPTER V

and old nations convulsed and changed. A series of new and astonishing events, which will influence the church and the world, will happen in your life time, and prove the Providence of God. It was no enthusiasm. I had not anticipated any thing of that kind. I was cool and thoughtful. It produced, at the moment, great agitation of mind. Yet I left the suggestion, and whatever it might mean, as well as whatever might follow, with great reverence and humble adoration, to the Lord. But it removed the evil suggestion against Providence, and I became, during that walk and meditation, confirmed in the doctrine, with enlarged views, precision, and evidence, that have never since been assaulted or disturbed. I often afterwards recollected the suggestion, and expected the accomplishment."

That in every age of the Church, there have been children of God favoured with extraordinary revelations of things future, no one, who has been much conversant with the histories of Christian experience, will deny. They do not, indeed, essentially belong to such experience: every Christian does not receive them: they are not a necessary part of the operations of saving grace; but the fact, nevertheless, is certain, that they have been made; and, in some isolated cases, they have been of a very remarkable kind, well attested and fully

PAGE 167:
CHAPTER V

verified by subsequent occurrences in Providence. The purpose of God, in imparting a measure of prescience occasionally, or under some peculiar circumstances, to particular persons is, to communicate by this means an immediate spiritual benefit to their souls, as may be supposed; — not to constitute them prophets, in the sense in which the term is commonly used, or to authorize them to utter predictions, but merely to deliver them from some present or powerful temptation, to confirm their faith, to sustain their hope, to invigorate all their graces, and thus to advance and secure their eternal salvation: or, it may be, that some gracious purpose is to be accomplished by it in other persons. God has his own way of working, in calling and conducting his children to Heaven. They are his. He knows them; and the enemy shall not, by any stratagems he can devise, or by any power he can exert, be able to pluck them out of his hand. When they pass through the waters, he will be with them: and through the rivers, they shall not overflow them: when they walk through the fire, they shall not be burnt, neither shall the flame kindle upon them. [Isa. xliii. 2.] He will not suffer his faithfulness to fail; but will supply all their need, according to his riches in glory, by Christ Jesus. [Psl. Ixxxix. 33. and Phil. iv. 19.] He knows the best method of