Now hard as this may seem to unregenerate nature, and yet harder to nature highly exalted, and big with the glory of all that, which wits, poets, orators, critics, sophists, and historians have enriched it with, yet true it is, and a truth as certain as the fall of man, that this full denial of our own natural will, and our own natural reason, is the only possible way for divine knowledge, divine light, and divine goodness, to have any place or power of birth in us. All other religious knowledge, got any other way, let it be as great as it will, is only great in vanity, emptiness, and delusion. For nothing but that which comes immediately from God, can have anything godly in it, and all that which comes from self, and natural reason, however outwardly colored, can have no better a nature within, that self-seeking, self- esteem, and fleshly wisdom, which (N.B.) are those very works of the devil in us, which Christ came into the world to destroy. For the efforts of natural reason, and self-abilities, to be great in religious knowledge from our own particular talents, are as satanical things as any we carry about us, and most of all fix us in the highest contrariety to that state, which our Lord affirms to be absolutely necessary.