How to Recover From a State of Backsliding

Pike and Hayward, Cases of Conscience, Case 2 - It is a peculiar mercy, when we find our souls in a declining condition, to be immediately alarmed at it, and sensible of it. When God is about to bestow the blessings of salvation, he first makes the sinner sensible of his need of them; so, when he is about to revive his work in the soul that has been running astray from him, he gives him first a sense of his decline, shows him from whence he has fallen, what a
stranger he is to the life of religion, what ingratitude he has been guilty of, how much he has lost of the pleasures of the divine life, and how much he has dishonoured that God who called him out of darkness into his marvellous light.