Jonathan Edwards Selected Shor
forgiveness, etc. is a release from the bond of iniquity. If the heart be purified by faith, it does not remain in the gall of bitterness.
35. Saving grace differs from common grace, in nature and kind. To suppose only a gradual difference, would not only be to suppose that some in a state of damnation are, within an infinitely little, as good as some in a state of salvation (which greatly disagrees with the Arminian notion of men's being saved by their own virtue and goodness), but this, taken with the Arminian notion of men's falling from grace, will naturally lead us to determine that many that are once in a state of salvation, may be in such a state, and out of it, scores of time in a very short space. For though a person is in a state of salvation, he may be but just in it, and may be infinitely near the limits between a state of salvation and damnation. And as the habits of grace are, according to that scheme, only contracted and raised by consideration and exercise and the exertion of the strength of the mind, and are lost when a man falls from grace by the intermission or cessation of these and by contrary acts and exercises, and as the habits and principles of virtue are raised and sunk, brought into being and abolished by those things, and both the degree of them and the being of them wholly depend on them: — the consequence will naturally be that when a man is first raised to that degree of a virtuous disposition, as to be in a state of salvation, and the degree of virtue is almost infinitely near the dividing line, it will naturally be liable to be a little raised or sunk every hour, according as the thoughts and exercises of the mind are: as the mercury in the thermometer or barometer is never perfectly at rest, but is always rising or subsiding, according to the weight of the atmosphere, or the degree of heat.