II. 4. As soon as a person is born of God, there is a total change in all these particulars. The 'eyes of his understanding are opened' (such is the language of the great Apostle); and, God, who of old 'commanded light to shine out of darkness shining on his heart, he sees the light of the glory of God,' His glorious love, 'in the face of Jesus Christ.' The person's ears being opened, one is now capable of hearing the inward voice of God saying, 'Be of good cheer; your sins are forgiven you'; 'Go and sin no more.' This is the purport of what God speaks to the heart; although perhaps not in these very words. The person is now ready to hear whatever 'God that teaches humans knowledge' is pleased, from time to time, to reveal to him or her. This person 'feels in the heart,' to use the language of our Church, 'the mighty working of the Spirit of God'; not in a gross, carnal sense, as persons of the world stupidly and wilfully misunderstand the expression; though they have been told again and again, we mean thereby neither more nor less than this: a person feels, is inwardly sensible of, the graces which the Spirit of God works in the heart. A person feels, is conscious of, a 'peace which passes all understanding.' A person many time feels such joy in God as is 'unspeakable, and full of glory.' A person feels 'the love of God shed abroad in the heart by the Holy Ghost which is given unto him or her'; and all the spiritual senses are then exercised to discern spiritual good and evil. By the use of these, the person is daily increasing in the knowledge of God, of Jesus Christ whom the Father sent, and of all the things pertaining to God's inward kingdom. And now the person may be properly said to live: God has quickened him or her by God's Spirit, the person is alive to God through Christ. The person lives a life which the world knows not, a 'life which is hid with Christ in God.' God is continually breating, as it were, upon the soul; and the soul is breathing unto God. Grace is descending into the heart; and prayer and praise ascending to heaven; and by this intercourse of God and the human, this fellowship with the Father and the Son, as by a kind of spiritual respiration, the life of God in the soul is sustained; and the child of God grows up until the person comes to the 'full measure of the stature of Christ.'

5. From here it manifestly appears, what is the nature of the new birth. It is that great change which God works in the soul when God brings it into life; when God raises if from the death of sin to the life of righteousness. It is the change wrought in the whole soul by the almighty Spirit of God when it is 'created anew in Christ Jesus'; when it is 'renewed after the image of God in righteousness and true holiness'; when the love of the world is changed into the love of God; pride into humility, passion into meekness, hatred, envy, malice into a sincere, tender, distinterested love for all humanity. In a word, it is that change whereby the earthly, sensual, devilish mind is turned into the 'mind which was in Christ Jesus.' This is the nature of the new birth: 'so is every one that is born of the Spirit.'