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p454 Dear Miss W Winslow, - Conscience - besides the sense of responsibility, obligation to God, which was before the fall, and belongs necessarily to all morally intelligent creatures - is the knowledge of good and evil entered into at the fall, the sense of things being right and wrong; not a law imposed by authority, and the measure of the right and wrong, but the sense in ourselves that a thing is right, or a thing is wrong. "The man is become as one of us to know good and evil." Heart is a very general expression for all the inner man: "if our heart condemns us" - then it is conscience; my heart sheweth me, then it is spiritual perception; we are to love God with all our heart, then it is the ordinary modern sense; but in scripture, heart is all in which moral exercise is in us. "Once purged" is the conscience, as sin being imputed; (see Heb. 9) "perfect as pertaining to the conscience;" and being done on the cross once for all, when known by faith it cannot change, for it is that one work known which changes not. Our feelings may be dull, and we may look to them, but the blood of Christ has always its same value in the sight of God. He cannot, as undervaluing it, see iniquity in us. Hebrew 10 develops this fully. There can be no altering or repetition of the blood. Imputed guilt does not exist for the believer: but he may fail, and by this his communion with God is interrupted; the operation of the Spirit is to humble him, and lead him to confession - most profitable, but not communion. The word applied by the Spirit works in the soul to judge sin according to Christ's death, and then its putting away according to it, and so the enjoyment of the love which did it; and then communion is restored. Numbers 19 and John 13 and 1 John 2 develop this. Compare Ephesians 5:26 of the church. The feeling and joy of assurance may be dimmed, but faith rests assured of the acceptance by God of the blood of Christ.

As to temptation, I believe a person may so walk by the power of the Spirit, realising Christ, that no conscious evil thought may be there; but a state in which there is no temptation is a delusion. Nor is temptation all: there is the second class of flesh's working where there is no temptation, "now ye also put off all these." Then there is failure in that sense of Christ's presence which hinders idle words, impatience of spirit. What is called the higher christian life is only the getting out of Romans 7 into 6 and 8 - a very real thing; and that which the great body of teachers would have you content without, and this is all wrong, it is not the christian state.

Sincerely yours in Christ.

[53336E]

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