20

20. All imaginations, inventions, and ways; all reading, studying, and teachings, is to no purpose [without this way of the new birth], no art or reason can attain it; we must enter only through the gate which God hath opened to us in Christ, and spring forth in God's kingdom and die unto the earthly will, so that it neither hindereth nor sticketh on us and cloggeth us; the seed of the woman must con- tinually bruise the serpent's head i?i us.