Communion with God
C
The pride and self-sufficiency of the natural heart of man in considering a passage such as this, are ever prone to wrest it to his own destruction, and to convert that which, when rightly understood, contains a most glorious truth, into a poisonous and deadly error. Men of legal and Arminian spirits contend that we are hereby taught that, in the great work of conversion, the first effective movement is and must be on the part of man—that the sinner first, of his own free will, returns unto God, and that then, but not till then, does the grace of God take effect upon his soul.