A man may be carried on in a constant course of mortification all his days; and yet perhaps never enjoy a good day of peace and consolation.

Hatred of sin as sin, not only as galling or disquieting, a sense of the love of Christ in the cross, lie at the bottom of all true spiritual mortification.

Without absolutes revealed from without by God Himself, we are left rudderless in a sea of conflicting ideas about manners, justice and right and wrong, issuing from a multitude of self-opinionated thinkers.

If our principal treasure be as we profess, in things spiritual and heavenly, and woe unto us if it be not so! on them will our affections, and consequently our desires and thoughts, be principally fixed.

Before the work of grace the heart is ‘stony.’ It can do no more than a stone can do to please God.

We admit no faith to be justifying, which is not itself and in its own nature a spiritually vital principle of obedience and good works.

Mortification from a self-strength, carried on by ways of self-invention, unto the end of a self-righteousness, is the soul and substance of all false religion in the world.