As meats do not nourish till they be chewed and digested, so spiritual things do not relish to a soul, nor can they truly feed the soul, till they be chewed and digested into the heart by serious and earnest consideration. This is that which makes these same truths to be some way not the same; these very principles of religion received and confessed by all, to be lively in one, and dead in another.
It is the living consideration of living truth, the application of truth to the heart, that makes it lively in one; whereas others keep it only beside them in a corner of their minds, or in a book, in the corner of the house. The same meat is laid to you all. The most part look on it. Others contemplate it, and exercise only their understandings about it, but there are some who taste it, and find sweetness in it, who digest it by meditation and solemn avocation of their hearts from the things of the world; and therefore some are fed, some are starved.
Hugh Binning, The Sinner’s Sanctuary: Being Sermons on the Eighth Chapter of the Epistle to the Romans (1670) in The Works of Hugh Binning, ed. James Cochrane (3 vols, Edinburgh: William Whyte, 1839), 2: 9.
