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Lemuel Haynes on the impossibility of faith preceding regeneration:
 It is necessary that we consider those things that are the attendants or consequences regeneration or the new birth, for there are no gracious or holy exercises that are prior thereto, to be sure, in the order of nature. Some seem to suppose faith to be before regeneration, but a little reflection upon the matter will show this to be wrong. By faith we are to understand a believing of those truths that God has exhibited in His Word with a friendly heart. Now, to suppose that a man believes this friendly heart antecedent to regeneration, is to suppose that a man is a friend to God while in a state of unregeneracy, which is contradictory to Scripture. Now, if to believe with a friendly and rightly disposed heart is absolutely necessary in order to constitute a true faith , and such a heart is peculiar to the regenerate only, then we must be possessed with this heart (which is given in regeneration) before there can flow from it any such exercises. So that the man must become a good man, or be regenerated, before he can exercise faith, or love, or any grace whatever. Hence we read of men’s receiving Christ, and becoming sons of God (John 1:12). —Lemuel Haynes, May We Meet in the Heavenly World: The Piety of Lemuel Haynes, ed. Thabiti Anyabwile (Reformation Heritage Books, 2007), 32–33.
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