How often have I found reason to regret, that Leighton had not clearly made out to himself the diversity of reason and the understanding!

Ib.  Serm.  XV. p. 196.

A narrow enthralled heart, fettered with the love of lower things, and cleaving to some particular sins, or but some one, and that secret, may keep foot a while in the way of God’s commandments, in some steps of them; but it must give up quickly, is not able to run on to the end of the goal.

One of the blessed privileges of the spiritual man (and such Leighton was,) is a piercing insight into the diseases of which he himself is clear. [Greek:  Eleaeson Kyrie!]

Ib.  Serm.  XVI. p. 204.

Know you not that the redeemed of Christ and He are one?  They live one life, Christ lives in them, and if ’any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his’, as the Apostle declares in this chapter.  So then this we are plainly to tell you, and consider it; you that will not let go your sins to lay hold on Christ, have as yet no share in him.

But on the other side:  the truth is, that when souls are once set upon this search, they commonly wind the notion too high, and subtilize too much in the dispute, and so entangle and perplex themselves, and drive themselves further off from that comfort that they are seeking after; such measures and marks they set to themselves for their rule and standard; and unless they find those without all controversy in themselves, they will not believe that they have an interest in Christ, and this blessed and safe estate in him.

  To such I would only say, Are you in a willing league with any known
  sin? &c.

An admirable antidote for such as, too sober and sincere to pass off feverous sensations for spiritualities, have been perplexed by Wesley’s assertions—­that a certainty of having been elected is an indispensable mark of election.  Whitfield’s ultra-Calvinism is Gospel gentleness and Pauline sobriety compared with Wesley’s Arminianism in the outset of his career.  But the main and most noticeable difference between Leighton and the modern Methodists is to be found in the uniform selfishness of the latter.  Not “Do you wish to love God?” “Do you love your neighbour?” “Do you think, ‘O how dear and lovely must Christ be!’”—­but—­“Are you certain that Christ has saved ‘you’; that he died for ’you—­you—­you —­yourself’?” on to the end of the chapter.  This is Wesley’s doctrine.

Lecture IX. vol.  IV. p. 96.

For that this was his fixed purpose, Lucretius not only vows, but also boasts of it, and loads him (Epicurus) with ill-advised praises, for endeavouring through the whole course of his philosophy to free the minds of men from all the bonds and ties of religion.

But surely in this passage ‘religio’ must be rendered superstition, the most effectual means for the removal of which Epicurus supposed himself to have found in the exclusion of the ‘gods many and lords many’, from their imagined agency in all the ‘phaenomena’ of nature and the events of history, substituting for these the belief in fixed laws, having in themselves their evidence and necessity.  On this account, in this passage at least, Lucretius praises his master.