The Power of Love in Regulating Speech

[The person] who has faith in God, has confidence in the power of love, as well as in the power of the truth. And indeed they are closely related. True love is love without selfishness, which is always a love according to the truth. Such love will win its way against every sort of argument, which is not founded in the truth. Nothing has such efficacy in weakening prejudice, in soothing passion, and in bringing the mind of an opponent, in every respect, into a right position. If we had nothing but nature for a teacher, we could not fail to learn the lesson, that there is nothing so efficacious as the spirit of love in correcting the perversions of prejudice, and in prostrating the falsehoods of passion. But when we know from the Scriptures, that “God is love,” those who are like him can never distrust themselves in being what he is. And accordingly in a multitude of cases, holy love, having faith in God as its source, and having faith in itself as that which God will approve, will be silent, while the weakness and irritation of an unsanctified nature will fill the air with its clamors.

The Natural Dispensation

The Holy Spirit is to be regarded as the appointed and effective renovator, guide, comforter, and teacher of the children of men. In the moral and religious world all good is from Him; and beyond the reach of his influence, and irrespective of his presence and operations, there is not and cannot be any thing, which is valuable or desirable.

There are some reasons for saying, that the dispensation of the Holy Spirit is precisely opposite and antagonistical, in its principles and results, to what may be called the natural dispensation, viz. the law of the natural heart, or the reign of SELF in the soul. Man, before his fall, had a true life in God. He did not live by his own vitality, and flourish upon his own stock. The power of God possessed its habitation in the center of his soul; a living, animating, purifying principle. If he possessed, as undoubtedly he did, what might properly be denominated natural ability, it was, nevertheless, natural ability, made alive, inspired, animated by an ability out of and above nature. It was enough for him to know and rejoice in the fact that God was the continuance, as well as the beginning of his inward life; that every good thought and good feeling, that all purified activity and divine strength, all holy love and all angelic aspirations, were from God, and from God alone. And his apostasy, as it seems reasonable to suppose, consisted in the alienation and dethronement of this inward divine power, and in the substitution of SELF instead of God.

In the language of another, "man broke off from his true CENTER, his proper place in God, and therefore the life and operation of God was no more in him. He was fallen from a life in God into a life of SELF, into an animal life of self-love, self-esteem, and self-seeking in the poor perishing enjoyments of this world. This was the natural state of man by the Fall. He was an apostate from God, and his natural life was all idolatry, where SELF was the great idol, that was worshiped instead of God." [William Law's Spirit of Prayer, Part I, Chap. 2d.]

— edited from The Interior or Hidden Life (2nd edition, 1844) Part 3, Chapter 1.