Inquire what command you have gained over your passions, and
against which, if you beseech the Lord, as Paul did, with faith and fervency and constancy, you shall receive sufficient grace.
6. Be often examining your growth and proficiency in this grace. Inquire what command you have gained over your passions, and what improvements you have made in meekness. Provocations recur every day, such as have been used perhaps to throw you into a passion; these give you an opportunity to make the trial. Do you find that you are less subject to anger, and when angry, that you are less transported by it, than formerly; that your apprehension of injuries is less quick, and that your resentments are less keen than usual? Is the little kingdom of your mind more quiet than it has been, and the discontented party weakened and kept under? It is well if it is so, and a good sign that the soul prospers and is in health. We should examine every night whether we have been quiet all day. We shall sleep the better if we find we have. Let conscience keep up a grand inquest in the soul, under a charge from the Judge of heaven and earth to inquire and due presentment make of all riots, routs, and breaches of the peace within us; and let nothing be left unpresented for favor, affection, or self-love; nor let anything presented be left unprosecuted according to law. Those whose natural temper, or their age, or diseases lead them to be hasty, have an opportunity, by their meekness and gentleness, to discover both the truth and strength of grace in general; for it is the surest mark of uprightness to "keep ourselves from our own iniquity." And yet, if the children of God bring forth these fruits of the Spirit in old age, when commonly men are most froward and peevish, it shows not only that they are upright, but rather that "the Lord is upright," in whose strength they stand; that "He is their rock, and there is no unrighteousness in Him."