There are many persons whose conversion is a long and severe struggle, during which they alternate week after week, and month after month between hope and fear, who, were it not for perplexing their minds with a wrong notion of what they are to do and be done with, might go up the mountain almost without going through the valley.
It is known that John Wesley went well nigh three years before he found what he sought. John Bunyan went through awful terrors, as a consequence of a long continued exercise of mind, before he found religious peace. His experiences are embalmed in some of the best writing in the English language.
It is my impression that the conversion of Bunyan might as well have been a work of days as of months. The difficulty in many cases results from an erroneous apprehension of what is to be taken as evidence of conversion, Now, to be a Christian is to obey Christ, no matter how you feel.
If a person trying to come into the discipleship of Christ, expects to do so by sitting down and waiting for a certain preconceived state of mind to come to him, as he might wait for a pair of wings to sprout out of his shoulders, he must not be surprised if he is disappointed.—BEECHER.