Always Suffering, Yet Always Happy

Again, it may properly be said of the man who is truly regenerated, and is fashioned anew into the image of Christ, that he is always suffering, and yet always happy. The natural and necessary opposition between the state of his own soul and the condition of things around him causes affliction. The inhabitant of a dying body, and surrounded by a sinning world, pierced by the thorns of the flesh and by the arrows of Satan, the law of his outward position and the still lingering trials of his fallen nature necessarily constitute him, till his last footstep on this stricken and bleeding earth, "a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." But if, in some departments of his mental being, he is always suffering, in others he is always happy. And he is so, because, being born of God and made a partaker of the divine nature, he cannot be otherwise. In the inmost recesses of the soul, in that part which is central and controlling to all the rest, faith stands unshaken; faith which gives sight to the blind and strength to the weak; faith which proclaims sunshine after the storm, victory after the contest, a present God and everlasting rest.

— edited from A Treatise on Divine Union (1851) Part 8, Chapter 8.

The Mystery of the New Birth

"Marvel not, that I said unto thee, ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the  sound thereof, but canst not tell, whence it cometh and whither it goeth. So is every one, that is born of the Spirit."  John iii. 7, 8.

I hear the mountain wind, but see it not;
Its mournful sigh startles my mind's repose;
I listen; but it passes quick as thought;
I know not whence it comes, nor where it goes.
'Tis thus with those, who of the Spirit are born,
A change comes o'er them; how they cannot say.
They wake, as from the darkness wakes the morn,
And mental night is changed to mental day.
'Tis God's mysterious work. 'Tis He can find,
Deep searching, and 'tis He can touch
The deep and hidden spring that rules the mind,
And change its tendencies, and make it such,
Redeemed, restored, as it was not before.
We know that 'tis God's work; but we can know no more.

— American Cottage Life (1850) XXXVII.

Harmonizing With God in Prayer

The soul, which is fully in the experience of divine union, will harmonize perfectly with the emotions and desires of the divine mind. If, for instance, there are soon to be especial operations of tbs Holy Spirit, and if souls are to be enlightened and restored to God, the preparations for such events will always exist first in the mind of God himself. It is not possible that such things should exist accidentally They are the developments, coming in their appropriate order and under appropriate circumstances, of the divine thought, of the divine  feeling. But if it be true that the heavings of the billows, whether gently or more powerfully, will first show themselves in the great ocean of thought and feeling, it will also be true that they will excite a correspondent movement in all smaller steams and fountains which are in alliance with them. In other words, God, in all good works, moves first; and the minds of his people, (all those who come within the particular sphere of movement,) move in harmony with him.

If God desires a particular thing to take place within their particular sphere of feeling and action, the desire of the Infinite mind sympathetically takes shape and develops itself in the finite mind; and the unspoken desire of the Father shows itself in the uttered prayer of the children. As in nature a small moaning sound of the winds often precedes a wide and powerful movement, so the sighing in the bosoms of the finite denotes an approaching movement of far greater power in the Infinite.

In connection with these views we have one of the methods given us, by which we discover the particular thing or purpose which now exists in the mind of God. It is obviously the dictate of the common sense of mankind, that the fact of unity of spirit implies and involves the fact of unity of movement. All those who are "born of God," in the higher sense of the expressions, (for instance, in the sense in which the expressions are used in St. John's epistles,) are in unity with him, whose spiritual birth is within them. It is not more true that God is their Father, than it is that they are God's children. They are one; — as the planets are one with the sun, as the billow is one with the ocean, as the branch is one with the vine, as the son is one with the father. And, in the existence of such union, there cannot, as a general thing, be a feeling or purpose in one party, without the existence of a correspondent feeling and purpose in the other. There are some limitations and exceptions undoubtedly; but, as a general thing, when we know the thoughts of God's true people, we know God's thoughts; when we know what God's true people desire, we know what God desires; when we know what the people of God are determined to do, we know what God is deter­mined to do.

— edited from A Treatise on Divine Union (1851) Part 7, Chapter 11.