Resolved, that I will live so, as I shall wish I had done when I come to die. - Jonathan Edwards

When God is here spoken of as hardening some of the children of men, it is not to be understood that God by any positive efficiency hardens any man's heart. There is no positive act in God, as though he put forth any power to harden the heart. To suppose any such thing would be to make God the immediate author of sin. God is said to harden men in two ways: by withholding the powerful influences of his Spirit, without which their hearts will remain hardened, and grow harder and harder; in this sense he hardens them, as he leaves them to hardness. And again, by ordering those things in his providence which, through the abuse of their corruption, become the occasion of their hardening. Thus God sends his word and ordinances to men which, by their abuse, prove an occasion of their hardening.

In the work of conversion, the Holy Spirit renews the heart by giving it a divine temper, and it is one and the same divine temper thus wrought in the heart, that flows out in love both to God and man.

If we take reason strictly, the perceiving of spiritual beauty and excellence no more belongs to reason than it belongs to the sense of feeling to perceive colors or to the power of seeing to perceive the sweetness of food.