Grounded encouragement from Horatius Bonar

I am nine pages from finishing God’s Way of Peace: A Book for the Anxious, by Horatius Bonar (1808-1889), and found this passage particularly compelling. I believe the book’s title is absolutely appropriate and the book itself encouraging and important for all Christians.

“You have been expecting faith to descend, like an angel from heaven, into your soul, and hope to be lighted up like a new star in your firmament. It is not so. Whilst the Spirit’s work is beyond nature, it is not against nature. He displaces no faculty; he disturbs no mental process; he does violence to no part of our moral framework; he creates no new organ of thought or feeling. His office is to set all to rights within you; so that you never feel so calm, so true, so real, so perfectly natural, so much yourself, – as when he has taken possession of you in every part; and filled your whole man with his heavenly joy. Never do you feel so perfectly free, – less constrained and less mechanical, – in every faculty, as when he has ‘brought every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.’ The heavenly life imparted is liberty, and truth, and peace; it is the removal of bondage, and pain.” Horatius Bonar: God’s Way of Peace: A Book for the Anxious