Why should we think it impossible, that true goodness and universal love should ever come to sway and prevail in our souls? Is not this their primitive state and condition, their native and genuine constitution, as they came first from the hands of their Maker? Sin and corruption are but usurpers, and though they have long kept possession, yet from the beginning it was not so. That inordinate self-love, which one would think were rooted in our very being, and interwoven with the constitution of our nature, is nevertheless of a foreign extraction, and had no place at all in the state of integrity. We have still so much reason left as to condemn it; our understandings are easily convinced, that we ought to be wholly devoted to him from whom we have our being, and to love him infinitely more than ourselves, who is infinitely better than we; and our wills would readily comply with this, if they were not disordered and put out of tune: and is not he who made our souls, able to rectify and mend them again? Shall we not be able, by his assistance, to vanquish and expel those violent intruders, and turn unto flight the armies of the aliens?
No sooner shall we take up arms in this holy war, but we shall have all the saints on earth, and all the angels in heaven, engaged on our party. The holy church throughout the world is daily interceding with God for the success of all such endeavours; and, doubtless, those heavenly hosts above are nearly concerned in the interests of religion, and infinitely desirous to see the divine life thriving and prevailing in this inferior world; and that the will of God may be done by us on earth, as it is done by themselves in heaven. And may we not then encourage ourselves, as the prophet did His servant, when he showed him the horses and chariots of fire, Fear not, for they that be with us, are more than they that be against us.
Henry Scougal. The Life of God in the Soul of Man.
