J. I. Packer
6
THE PURITAN IDEA
OF COMMUNION WITH GOD
J. I. Packer
The thought of communion with God takes us to the very heart of Puritan theology and religion. This becomes clear as soon as we see how this subject stands related to other themes which stood in the forefront of Puritan interest. We all know, for instance, that the Puritans were deeply concerned with the many-sided problem of man—man’s nature and place in the world, man’s powers and possibilities for good and evil, man in the “fourfold state” of innocence, of sin, of grace, and of glory. And to their minds the whole end and purpose of man’s existence was that he should have communion with God. “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.”1 Again: we all know that the Puritans were deeply and constantly concerned with the doctrine of the covenant of grace—its nature, its terms, its blessings, the modes of its dispensation, its seals and ordinances. The covenant of grace has been called the characteristic Puritan doctrine, as justification by faith was the characteristic doctrine of Luther. And to the minds of the Puritans the end and purpose of the covenant of grace was to bring men into union and communion with God. Or again: the Puritans never tired of dwelling on the mediation of Christ in the covenant of grace—His humiliation and exaltation, His satisfaction and intercession, and all His gracious relations—as Shepherd, Husband, Friend, and the rest—to His own covenant people. And the Puritan view of the end and purpose of the mediation of Christ is made plain to us by John Owen when he speaks of Christ’s “great undertaking, in his life, death, resurrection, ascension, being a mediator between God and us . . . to bring us to an enjoyment of God.”2 Thus, to the Puritans, communion between God and man is the end to which both creation and redemption are the means; it is the goal to which both theology and preaching must ever point; it is the essence of true religion; it is, indeed, the definition of Christianity. The present paper is an attempt to plumb the Puritan understanding of this communion, and to gain some idea of the kind of religion to which this understanding gave rise.
The present-day value of such a study needs no stressing. For all who know anything of Puritan Christianity know that at its best it had a vigor, a manliness, and a depth, which modern evangelical piety largely lacks. This is because Puritanism was essentially an experimental faith, a religion of “heart-work,” a sustained practice of seeking the face of God, in a way that our own Christianity too often is not. The Puritans were manlier Christians just because they were godlier Christians. It is worth noting two particular points of contrast between them and ourselves.
First, we cannot but conclude that whereas to the Puritans communion with God was a great thing, to evangelicals today it is a comparatively small thing. The Puritans were concerned about communion with God in a way that we are not. The measure of our unconcern is the little that we say about it. When Christians meet, they talk to each other about their Christian work and Christian interests, their Christian acquaintances, the state of the churches, and the problems of theology—but rarely about their daily experience of God. Modern Christian books and magazines contain much about Christian doctrine, Christian standards, problems of Christian conduct, techniques of Christian service—but little about the inner realities of fellowship with God. Our sermons contain much sound doctrine—but little relating to the converse between the soul and God. We do not spend much time, alone or together, in dwelling on the wonder of the fact that God and sinners have communion at all; no, we just take that for granted, and give our minds to other matters. Thus we make it plain that communion with God is a small thing to us. But how different were the Puritans! The whole aim of their “practical and experimental” preaching and writing was to explore the reaches of the doctrine and practice of man’s communion with God. In private they talked freely of their experiences of God, for they had deep experiences to talk about, like the “three or four poor women sitting at a door in the sun” whom Bunyan met at Bedford:
their talk was about a new birth, the work of God on their hearts, also how they were convinced of their miserable state by nature; they talked how God had visited their souls with his love in the Lord Jesus, and with what words and promises they had been refreshed, comforted, and supported against the temptations of the devil. Moreover, they reasoned of the suggestions and temptations of Satan in particular; and told to each other by which they had been afflicted, and how they were borne up under his assaults. . . . And methought they spake as if joy did make them speak. . . . 3
And the Puritans never ceased to feel a sense of awe and wonder that access to God in peace and friendship was possible for them at all. “Truly for sinners to have fellowship with God, the infinitely holy God, is an astonishing dispensation,” wrote Owen;4 and Puritan hearts thrilled again and again at the wonder of God’s “astonishing” grace. To them it was the most wonderful thing in the world. Yet we in our day take it for granted! Surely something is wrong here.
Then, second, we observe that whereas the experimental piety of the Puritans was natural and unselfconscious, because it was so utterly God-centered, our own (such as it is) is too often artificial and boastful, because it is so largely concerned with ourselves. We are interested in religious experience, as such, and in man’s quest for God, whereas the Puritans were concerned with the God of whom men have experience, and in the manner of his dealing with those whom He draws to Himself. The difference of interest comes out clearly when we compare Puritan spiritual autobiography—Grace Abounding, say, or Baxter’s autobiography, or the Memoirs of Fraser of Brea—with similar works of our own day. In modern spiritual autobiography, the hero and chief actor is usually the writer himself; he is the center of interest, and God comes in only as a part of his story. His theme is in effect “I—and God.” But in Puritan autobiography, God is at the center throughout. He, not the writer, is the focus of interest; the subject of the book is in effect “God—and me.” The pervasive God-centeredness of Puritan accounts of spiritual experience is a proof of their authenticity, and a source of their power to present God to the modern reader. But when experience of God is told in a dramatized and self-glorifying way, it is a sure sign that the experience itself, however poignant, lacked depth, if, indeed, it was genuine at all.
These two contrasts show clearly enough how urgently Christians today need to learn what the Puritans have to teach on the subject of communion with God.
A word, now, about source material. Our main source will be John Owen’s great work, Of Communion with God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, each person distinctly, in love, grace, and consolation; or, the Saints’ Fellowship with the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, unfolded. This treatise, first published in 1657, was reprinted in 1674 with a prefatory epistle by Daniel Burgess, who called it “the only (treatise) extant, upon its great and necessary subject.” This was true only from a formal standpoint, and with reference to Owen’s Trinitarian analysis of communion with God; the substance of what Owen says is found in less systematic form in very many Puritan expositions. One of the richest of these is Thomas Goodwin’s The Object and Acts of Justifying Faith. This study will draw mainly on these two representative volumes. Other relevant sources would be Puritan expositions of the Song of Solomon (Sibbes, Collinges, Durham, and others) and of the favorite Puritan theme of “walking with God” (Bolton, Baxter, Thomas Gouge, etc.), but we shall not need to tap any of these save Baxter’s treatment of “Walking with God” in The Divine Life.
A Relationship between God and Man
The Puritan analysis of communion with God can be set out in seven propositions.
1. Communion with God is a relationship of mutual interchange between God and man.
Such is the idea which the New Testament word koinonia (translated in the English Bible as “fellowship” and “communion”) expresses. In general, koinonia denotes a joint participation in something by two or more parties, an active sharing in which the parties give to and receive from each other. “Communion consists in giving and receiving.”5 Such a relationship naturally implies the existence of some prior bond between the parties concerned. Accordingly, Owen defines koinonia between God and men as follows: “our communion . . . with God consisteth in his communication of himself unto us, with our returnal unto him of that which he requireth and accepteth, flowing from that union which in Jesus Christ we have with him”—a “mutual communication in giving and receiving, after a most holy and spiritual manner, which is between God and the saints, while they walk together in a covenant of peace, ratified by the blood of Jesus.”6
2. Communion with God is a relationship in which the initiative and power is with God.
Note how Owen defines it as beginning with “his communication of himself to us,” with “our returnal unto him of that which he requireth” coming in only on the basis of this. Communion with God is a relationship which God Himself creates by giving Himself to us; only so can we know Him, and respond to Him. In the narrow sense of our communing with God, communion is a Christian duty; in the broader and more fundamental sense of God’s communicating Himself to us, whether to prompt our communing or to reward it, communion is a divine gift. Thus conceived, the idea of communion with God is broader than in our common present-day usage. We tend always to think of communion with God subjectively and anthropocentrically; we limit it to our conscious experience of God, our deliberate approach to Him and His felt dealings with us. But the Puritans thought of communion with God objectively and theocentrically, taking the idea to cover, first, God’s approach to us in grace, pardoning, regenerating, and making us alive to Himself; next, all His subsequent self-giving to us; and only then extending it to our own conscious seeking after, and tasting of, His gracious presence. They were not less concerned about experimental acquaintance with God than we are—rather, indeed, the reverse—but they did not isolate this concern in their minds from their broader theological concern about the doctrine of divine grace. Thus they were saved from the point of false mysticism, which has polluted much Christian devotion in recent times. The context and cause of our experienced communion with God, said the Puritans, is God’s effective, life-giving communion with us; the former is always to be thought of as a consequence and, indeed, an aspect of the latter. The idea of communion with God thus covers the whole of the grace-and-faith-
relationship with God in which we stand, a relationship which God Himself initiates and in which at each stage the initiative remains in His hands. The Barthians of our day proclaim that God is the active subject in all human relationships with Him as if this were a new discovery, but the Puritans knew this long ago.
3. Communion with God is a relationship in which Christians receive from, and respond to, all three Persons of the Trinity.
The Puritans constantly insisted that the doctrine of the Trinity was the foundation of Christian faith, and that if it falls, everything falls. The reason for this insistence was that they saw that the Christian salvation is a Trinitarian salvation, in which the economic relations of the three divine Persons as they work out salvation together mirror their essential and eternal relations in the glorious life of the Godhead. The first Person, the Father, is revealed as the One who initiates, who chooses a people to save and His Son to save them, and plans a way of salvation that is consistent with His holy character. The second Person is revealed as Son and Word in relation to the Father, imaging and embodying in Himself the Father’s nature and mind and coming forth from the Father to do His will by dying to redeem sinners. The third Person proceeds from the first two as their executive, conveying to God’s chosen the salvation which the Son secured for them. All three are active in fulfilling a common purpose of love to unlovely men; all three give distinct gifts of their bounty to the chosen people, and all three, therefore, should be distinctly acknowledged in faith, and in an appropriate response, by Christian believers. This is the theme which John Owen expounds in his treatise Of Communion.
Consider first the Father, says Owen. His special gift to us may be described as an attitude and exercise of fatherly love: “free, undeserved, and eternal. . . . This the Father peculiarly fixes upon the saints: this they are immediately to eye in him, to receive of him, and to make such returns thereof, as he is delighted withal.”7 Owen points out that in the New Testament love is singled out as the special characteristic of the Father in His relation to us (1 John 4:8; 2 Cor. 13:14; John 3:16; 14:27; Rom. 5:5; Titus 3:4).
The way to receive the Father’s love is by faith; that is, in this case, by believing and acknowledging that Christ comes to us, not of His own initiative, but as the gift to us of a loving Heavenly Father.
It is true, there is not an immediate acting of faith upon the Father, but by the Son. He is “the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by” him (John 14:6). . . . But this is that I say: When by and through Christ, we have an access unto the Father, we then . . . see his love that he peculiarly bears unto us, and act faith thereon. We are then, I say, to eye it, to believe it, to receive it, as in him; the issues and fruits thereof being made out unto us through Christ alone. Though there be no light for us but in the beams, yet we may by the beams see the sun, which is the fountain of it. Though all our refreshment actually lie in the streams, yet by them we are led up to the fountain. Jesus Christ, in respect of the love of the Father, is but the beam, the stream, wherein though actually all our light, our refreshment lies, yet by him we are led to the fountain, the sun of eternal love itself. Would believers exercise themselves herein, they would find it a matter of no small spiritual improvement in their walking with God. . . . The soul being thus by faith through Christ . . . brought unto the bosom of God, into a comfortable persuasion, and spiritual perception and sense of his love, there reposes and rests itself. . . .8
How should we respond to the Father’s love? By love in return: that is, says Owen, “by a peculiar delight and acquiescing in the Father revealed effectually as love unto the soul.”9 He goes on to analyze this love which we owe Him as consisting of four elements—rest, delight, reverence, and obedience, in combination together.
Next, Owen says, consider the Son. His special gift to us is grace—communicated free favor, and all the spiritual benefits which flow from it. All grace is found in Him, and is received by receiving Him.
There is no man whatever that hath any want in reference unto the things of God, but Christ will be unto him that which he wants. . . . Is he dead? Christ is life. Is he weak? Christ is the power of God, and the wisdom of God. Hath he the sense of guilt upon him? Christ is complete righteousness. . . . Many poor creatures are sensible of their wants, but know not where their remedy lies. Indeed, whether it be life or light, power or joy, all is wrapped up in him.10
All this, says Owen, is in the mind of Paul when he speaks of “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 13:14), and of John when he says, “of his fullness have we all received, and grace for grace” (John 1:16). In expounding the meaning of Christ’s grace, Owen makes much of the “conjugal relationship” between Christ and His people, and offers a detailed Christological exegesis of the Song of Songs 2:1–7 and chapter 5.
The way in which men receive Christ’s love is by faith; that is, in this case,
free, willing consent to receive, embrace and submit unto the Lord Jesus, as their husband, Lord and Saviour, to abide with him, subject their souls unto him, and to be ruled by him for ever. . . . When the soul consents to take Christ on his own terms, to save him in his own way, and says, Lord . . . I am now willing to receive thee and to be saved in thy way, merely by grace; and though I would have walked according to my own mind, yet now I wholly give up myself to be ruled by thy Spirit, for in thee have I righteousness and strength, in thee am I justified and do glory; then doth it carry on communion with Christ. . . . Let believers exercise their hearts abundantly unto this thing. This is choice communion with the Son Jesus Christ. Let us receive him in all his excellencies as he bestows himself upon us. Be frequent in thoughts of faith, comparing him with other beloveds . . . preferring him before them, counting them all loss and dung in comparison of him . . . and let our hearts give up themselves unto him; let us tell him, that we will be for him and not for another; let him know it from us, He delights to hear it . . . and we shall not fail in the issue of sweet refreshment with him.11
How should we respond to the conjugal affection and loyalty of Christ toward us? By maintaining marital chastity toward Him, says Owen: that is, by refusing to trust or hanker after any but he for our acceptance with God; by cherishing His Spirit, sent to us for our eternal benefit; and by maintaining His worship undefiled, according to the Scripture pattern. This necessitates a daily deliberate submission to Him as our gracious Lord. Daily we should rejoice before Him in the knowledge of His perfection as a Savior from sin; daily we should take the sins and infirmities of that day to His cross to receive forgiveness (“this is every day’s work; I know not how any peace can be maintained with God without it”);12 daily we should look to Christ, and wait on Him, for the supply of His Spirit to purify our hearts and work holiness in us. Holiness, according to the Puritans, cannot be attained without the exercise of faith, any more than it can be perfected without the effort of fighting sin. The saints, say Owen,
look upon him (Christ) as . . . the only dispenser of the Spirit, and of all grace of sanctification and holiness. . . . He is to sprinkle that blood upon their souls, he is to create the holiness in them that they long after. . . . In this state they look to Jesus; here faith fixes itself, in expectation of his giving out the Spirit for all these ends and purposes; mixing the promises with faith, and so becoming actual partaker of all this grace. This is . . . their communion with Christ; this is the life of faith as to grace and holiness. Blessed is the soul that is exercised therein.13
Finally, says Owen, consider the Spirit. He is called the Comforter, and comfort—strength and encouragement of heart, and assurance and joy—is His special gift to us. This comfort is conveyed in and through the understanding which He gives us of the love of God in Christ, and of our share in God’s salvation (John 14:26–27; 16:14; Rom. 5:5; 8:16). The Spirit’s ministry as our Comforter consists in
his bringing the promises of Christ to remembrance, glorifying him in our hearts, shedding abroad the love of God in us, witnessing with us, as to our spiritual state and condition, sealing us to the day of redemption; being the earnest of our inheritance, anointing us with . . . consolation, confirming our adoption, and being present with us in our supplications. Here is the wisdom of faith; to find out, and meet with the Comforter in all these things; not to lose their sweetness, by lying in the dark as to their author, nor coming short of the returns which are required of us.14
How are we to respond to the comforting work of the Spirit? By taking care not to grieve Him by negligence or sin (Eph. 4:30), or to quench Him by opposing or hindering His work (1 Thess. 5:19), or to resist Him by refusing His word (Acts 7:51), but to give Him constant thanks, and to pray to Him for a continuance of His peace and goodness. (Owen finds in Rev. 1:4 a precedent for such prayer to the Spirit.)
This, then, according to Owen, should be the pattern of our regular communion with the three Persons of the Godhead, in meditation, prayer, and a duly ordered life. We should dwell on the special mercy and ministry of each Person toward us, and make our proper response of love and submission distinctly to each. Thus we are to maintain a full-orbed communion with God.
Goodwin propounds a similar conception, with less concern for verbal precision but greater exuberance and warmth than we find in what Moffat called “the dark grey pool of Owen’s ratiocination.” Owen has shown us intercourse with the Truine God as a part of Christian duty; in the following passage, Goodwin sets it before us as a part of God’s gift of assurance. Apropos of 1 John 1:3 and John 14:17–23, Goodwin writes:
There is communion and fellowship with all the persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and their love, severally and distinctly . . . Christ putteth you upon labouring after a distinct knowing of, and communion with all three persons . . . rest not until all three persons manifest their love to thee . . . in assurance, sometimes a man’s communion and converse is with the one, sometimes with the other; sometimes with the Father, then with the Son, and then with the Holy Ghost; sometimes his heart is drawn out to consider the Father’s love in choosing, and then the love of Christ in redeeming, and so the love of the Holy Ghost, that searcheth the deep things of God, and revealeth them to us, and taketh all the pains with us: and so a man goes from one witness to another distinctly, which I say, is the communion that John would have us to have. . . . And this assurance it is not a knowledge by way of argumentation or deduction, whereby we infer that if one loveth me then the other loveth me, but it is intuitively, as I may so express it, and we should never be satisfied till we have attained it, and till all three persons lie level in us, and all make their abode with us, and we sit as it were in the midst of them, while they all manifest their love to us . . . this is the highest that ever Christ promised in this life (in his last sermon, John 14).15
Friendship between God and Man
4. Communion with God is a relation of friendship between God and man.
This thought brings into perspective at once John Owen’s complex analysis. Communion with God means simply behaving as a friend of the God who has called you His friend. Thomas Goodwin dwells on the love of Christ, who, when we had fallen into sin and enmity against God, died to make us His friends again—though “he could have created new ones cheaper”16—and develops powerfully the thought that friendship is not a means to an end, but an end in itself, and that true friendship is expressed in the cultivation of our friend’s company for its own sake:
Mutual communion is the soul of all true friendship; and a familiar converse with a friend hath the greatest sweetness in it . . . (so) besides the common tribute of daily worship you owe to (God), take occasion to come into his presence on purpose to have communion with him. This is truly friendly, for friendship is most maintained and kept up by visits; and these, the more free and less occasioned by urgent business . . . they are, the more friendly they are. . . . We use to check our friends with this upbraiding. You still (always) come when you have some business, but when will you come to see me? . . . When thou comest into his presence, be telling him still how well thou lovest him; labour to abound in expressions of that kind, than which . . . there is nothing more taking with the heart of any friend. . . . ”17
This whole section of Goodwin’s exposition deserves study, but we cannot stay with it now.
5. Communion with God is the life of heaven begun on earth.
Frequently the Puritan writers make the point that though there are two ways of communing with God, by faith here and by sight hereafter (2 Cor. 5:7; 1 Cor. 13:12), the relationship itself remains the same in both. Communion with God by sight, in heaven, “is by a more high and elevated way, but it is of the same nature, and hath still the same object” as communion with God by faith, here below.18 Fellowship with God is a true foretaste of heaven, and to enjoy it is to enter into faith’s victory over death. So John Preston, when dying, answered the question, did he find himself afraid? with the whispered words: “no; I shall change my place, but I shall not change my company.” And Bunyan’s Mr. Stand-fast, as he stood in the river, was able to declare, “I am going now to see that Head that was Crowned with Thorns, and that Face that was spit upon, for me. I have formerly lived by Hear-say, and Faith, but now I go where I shall live by sight, and shall be with him, in whose Company I delight myself.” It is in this connection that we should note the Puritan insistence that communion with God, our present entry into the life of heaven, brings into our hearts the joy of heaven—the “glorified joy” of 1 Peter 1:8, the joy of the Lord which is joy in the Lord and is found in God’s presence alone.
6. Communion with God in Christ is enjoyed in a special way at the Lord’s Table.
Not that there is any special grace conveyed to the faithful communicant which he could not otherwise have; the Puritans all agreed with Robert Bruce that “we get no other thing in the Sacrament, than we get in the Word.”19 But there is a special exercise of faith proper to the Lord’s Table, where Christ’s supreme act of love is set before us with unique vividness in the sacramental sign; and from this should spring a specially close communion with God. Let Richard Baxter expound this.
Also in the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ, we are called to a familiar converse with God. He there appeareth to us by a wonderful condescension in the representing, communicating signs of the flesh and blood of his Son, in which he hath most conspicuously revealed his love and goodness to believers: there Christ himself with his covenant gifts are all delivered to us by these investing signs of his own institution. . . . No where is God so near to man as in Jesus Christ; and no where is Christ so familiarly represented to us, as in this holy sacrament. Here we are called to sit with him at his table, as his invited, welcome guests; to commemorate his sacrifice, to feed upon his very flesh and blood; that is, with our mouths upon his representative flesh and blood, and with our applying faith upon his real flesh and blood, by such a feeding as belongs to faith. The marriage covenant betwixt God incarnate and his espoused ones, is there publicly sealed, celebrated and solemnized. There we are entertained by God as friends . . . and that at the most precious costly feast. If ever a believer may on earth expect his kindest entertainment, and near access, and a humble intimacy with his Lord, it is in the participation of this sacrifice feast, which is called The Communion, because it is appointed as well for our special communion with Christ as with one another. It is here that we have the fullest intimation, expression, and communication of the wondrous love of God; and therefore it is here that we have the loudest call, and best assistance, to make a large return of love; and where there is most of this love between God and man, there is most communion, and most of heaven, that can be had on earth.20
Public Worship and Private Meditation
7. Communion with God requires that we discipline ourselves to public worship and private meditation.
“Order and method” were not first heard of with Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot; both were Puritan watchwords, and they express one fundamental aspect of the Puritan approach to life. Both one’s outward conduct and one’s inward thoughts, said the Puritans, must be ordered; if you would know deeper communion with God, you must see to it that you worship Him regularly, and think of Him constantly. We quote Baxter again:
The assemblies of his saints that worship him in holy communion are places where he is likelier to be found than in an ale-house or a play-house. We must not be strange to him in our thoughts, but make him the object of our most serious meditations . . . we are far from him, when our thoughts are (ordinarily) far from him. I know that it is lawful and meet to think of the business of our callings, so far as is necessary to the prudent successful management of them; and that it is not requisite that our thoughts be always actually upon God: but he that doth manage his calling in holiness, doth all in obedience to God’s commands . . . and he intendeth all to the glory of God, or the pleasing of his blessed will; and he often reneweth these actual intentions; and oft interposeth thoughts of the presence, or power, or love, or interest of him whom he is serving; he often lifteth up his soul in some holy desire or ejaculatory request to God; he oft taketh occasion from what he seeth, or heareth, or is doing, for some spiritual meditation or discourse. . . . All the day long our thoughts should be working either on God, or for God. . . . Our hearts must be taken up in contemplating and admiring him, in magnifying his name, his word, and works; and in pleasant, contentful thoughts of his benignity, and of his glory, and the glory which he conferreth on his saints. He that is unskillful or unable to manage his own thoughts with some activity, seriousness, and order, will be a stranger to much of the holy converse that believers have with God. . . .21
The Christian must be diligent and tireless in doing God’s will in the world, but mere Christian activity is not enough. Through it all, the Christian’s heart and mind should ever be going out to God Himself, seeking communion with Him in it. To rest complacently in the thought that one is doing what God commanded, and not to be ever seeking to “keep up communion” with God Himself through all one’s work in His cause, is a Pharisaic snare. In the piercing words of Richard Alleine,
Count not that thou hast lived that day, in which thou hast not lived with God.
Keep close to God, by keeping close to duty. Keep close to duty, and keep close to God in duty. Call not that a duty, which thou canst not call communion with God. Make not duty to do the work of sin, to take God out of sight. Let not prayer, or hearing, or sacraments, be instead of a God to thee. Such praying and hearing there is amongst many but know not thou anything for religion, wherein thou meetest not with God.22
There was once a day when Jeremiah was sent of God to say to Israel, “Stand ye in the ways and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls” (Jer. 6:16). As we study the Puritan idea of communion with God, may it be that God is speaking in similar terms to us? These are “old paths,” paths, indeed, as old as the Bible, and paths which our Puritan forefathers found to be in truth “the good way.” We do well to ask ourselves whether we have yet learned to walk in them, and, if not, to humble ourselves and seek for grace to begin now. “And ye shall find rest for your souls.”