"While men are talking, and writing, and studying about religion, and hearing preaching, it may be with great delight (as those in Ezek. 33:32), [but their] conscience, unless thoroughly awake and circumspect and furnished with spiritual wisdom and care, will be very well pacified, and enter no rebukes or pleas against the way that the soul is in. But yet all this may be nothing but the acting of that natural vanity which lies in the mind, and is a principal part of the sin we treat of. And generally this is so when men content themselves, as was said, with the notions of truth, without laboring after an experience of the power of them in their hearts, and the bringing forth the fruit of them in their lives, on which a decay must needs ensue."
John Owen, Indwelling Sin, chapter 14
