of this important concern, take with you, even now, words, and turn unto the Lord; and before you quit the place where you now are, fall upon your knees in his sacred presence, and pour out your heart in such language, or at least to some such purpose, as this: A Prayer for one, who is tempted to delay applying to Religion, though under some Convictions of its Importance. "OH thou righteous and holy sovereign of heaven and earth! Thou God, in whose hand my breath is, and whose are all my ways! I confess, I have been far from glorifying thee, or conducting myself according to the intimations or the declarations of thy will. I have therefore reason to adore thy forbearance and goodness, that thou hast not long since stopped my breath, and cut me off from the land of the living. I adore thy patience, that I have not months and years ago, been an inhabitant of hell, where ten thousand delaying sinners are now lamenting their folly, and will be lamenting it for ever. oh God, how possible is it, that this trifling heart of mine may, at length, betray me into the same ruin! and then, alas, into a ruin aggravated by all this patience and forbearance of thine! I am convinced, that sooner or later religion must be my serious care, or I am undone. And yet my foolish heart draws back from the yoke: yet I stretch myself upon the bed of sloth, and cry out for a little more sleep, a little more slumber, a little more folding of the hands to sleept. Thus does my corrupt heart plead for its own indulgence, against the convictions of my better judgment. What shall I say! O Lord, save me from myself! Save me from the artifices and deceitfulness of sin: save me from the treachery of this perverse and degenerate nature of mine, and fix upon my mind what I have now been reading. “O Lord, I am not now instructed in truths which were before quite unknown. Often have I been warned of the uncertainty of life, and of the greater uncertainty of the day of salvation; and I have formed some light purposes, and have begun to take a few irresolute steps in my way towards a return to thee. But alas, I have been only, as it were, fluttering about religion, and have never fixed upon it. All my resolutions have been scattered like smoke, or dispersed like a cloudy vapour before the wind. Oh that thou wouldst now bring these things home to my heart, with a more powerful conviction than it hath ever *Hos. xiv. 2. + Dan. v. 23. Prov. vi. 10. yet felt! Oh that thou wouldst pursue me with them, even when I flee from them! If I should ever grow mad enough to endeavour to escape them any more, may thy spirit address me in the language of effectual terror; and add all the most powerful methods, which thou knowest to be necessary, to awaken me from this lethargy, which must otherwise be mortal! May the sound of these things be in mine ears, when I go out, and when I come in, when I lie down, and when I rise up* And if the repose of the night, and the business of the day, be for a while interrupted by the impression, be it so, O God! if I may but thereby carry on my business with thee to better purpose, and at length secure a repose in thee, instead of all that terror which I now find, when I think upon God, and am troubled+. O Lord, my flesh trembleth for fear of thee, and I am affraid of thy judgments. I am affraid lest even now, that I have begun to think of religion, thou shouldst cut me off in this critical and important moment, before my thoughts grow to any ripeness; and blast in eternal death, the first buddings and openings of it in my mind. But oh spare me, I earnestly intreat thee; for thy mercies' sake, spare me a little longer! It may be through thy grace, I shall return. It may be, if thou continuest thy patience towards me a little longer, there may be some better fruit produced by this cumberer of the ground. And may the remembrance of that long forbearance, which thou hast already exercised towards me, prevent my continuing to trifle with thee, and with my own soul! From this day, O Lord, from this hour, from this moment, may I be able to date more lasting impressions of religion, than have ever yet been made upon my heart by all that I have ever read, or all that I have heard! Amen." * Deut. vi. 7. + Psal, Ixxvii. 3. Psal, cxix. 120. || Luke xiii. 7,9. VOL. I. Gg CHAP. IV. The Sinner arraigned and convicted. Conviction of Guilt necessary. §. 1. A Charge of Rebellion against God advanced. §. 2. Where it is shewn, (1.) That all men are born under God's Law. §. 3. (2.) That no man hath perfectly kept it. §. 4. An appeal to the Reader's Conscience on this Head, that he hath not. §. 5. (3.) That to have broken it, is an evil inexpressibly great. §. 6. Illustrated by a more particular View of the Aggravations of this Guilt, aris ing, (1.) From Knowledge. §. 7. (2.) From divine Favours received. §. 8. (3.) From Convictions of Conscience overborne. §. 9. (4.) From the Strivings of God's Spirit resisted. §. 10. (5.) From Vows and Resolutions broken. §. 11. The Charge summed up, and left upon the Sinner's Conscience. §. 12. The Sinner's Confession under a general Conviction of Guilt. §. 1. As I am attempting to lead you to true religion, and S not merely to some superficial form of it, I am sensible I can do it no otherwise, than in the way of deep humiliation. And therefore supposing you are persuaded through the divine blessing on what you have before read, to take it into consideration, I would now endeavour in the first place, with all the seriousness I can, to make you heartily sensible of your guilt before God. For I well know, that unless you are convinced of this, and affected with the conviction, all the provisions of gospel grace will be slighted, and your soul infallibly destroyed, in the midst of the noblest means appointed for its recovery. I am fully persuaded that thousands live and die in a course of sin, without feeling upon their hearts any sense that they are sinners; though they cannot for shame but own it in words. And therefore let me deal faithfully with you, though I may seem to deal roughly; for complaisance is not to give law to addresses in which the life of your soul is concerned. §. 2. Permit me, therefore, O sinner, to consider myself at this time, as an advocate for God; as one employed in his name, to plead against thee, and to charge thee with nothing less, than being a rebel, and a traitor, against the Sovereign Majesty of heaven and earth. However thou mayest be dignified or distinguished among men; if the noblest blood run in thy veins; if thy seat were among princes, and thine arm were the terror of the mighty in the land of the living*; it would be necessary thou shouldst be told, and told plainly, thou hast * Ezek. xxxii. 27. broken the law of the King of kings, and by the breach of it art become obnoxious to his righteous condemnation. §. 3. Your conscience tells you, that you were born the natural subject of God; born under the indispensible obligation of his law. For it is most apparent, that the constitution of your rational nature, which makes you capable of receiving law from God, binds you to obey it. And it is equally evident and certain, that you have not exactly obeyed this law; nay, that you have violated it in many aggravated instances. §. 4. Will you dare deny this? Will you dare to assert your innocence: Remember it must be a complete innocence? Yes, and a perfect righteousness too; or it can stand you in no stead, farther than to prove, that, though a condemned sinner, you are not quite so criminal as some others, and will not have quite so hot a place in hell as they. And when this is considered, will you plead not guilty to the charge? Search the records of your own conscience; for God searcheth them: ask it seriously; 'Have you never in your life sinned against God?' Solomon declared, that in his day there was not a just man upon earth, who did good, and sinned not* : and the apostle Paul, that all had sinned and come short of the glory of God that both jews and gentiles, (which you know comprehended the whole human race,) were all under sint. And can you pretend any imaginable reason to believe the world is grown so much better since their days, that any should now plead their own case as an exception? Or will you, however, presume to arise, in the face of the omniscient Majesty of heaven, and say, I am the man? §. 5. Supposing, as before, you have been free from those gross acts of immorality, which are so pernicious to society, that they have generally been punishable by human laws; can you pretend, that you have not, in smaller instances, violated the rules of piety, of temperance, and of charity? Is there any one person, who has intimately known you, that would not be able to testify you had said, or done something amiss? Or if others could not convict you, would not your own heart do it? Does it not prove you guilty of pride, of passion, of sensuality; of an excessive fondness for the world, and its enjoyments? of murmuring, or at least of secretly repining, against God, under the strokes of his afflictive providence; of mispending a great deal of your time; of abusing the gifts of God's bounty, Eccles. vii. 20. + Rom. iii. 23. Rom. iii. 9. to vain, if not (in some instances) to pernicious purposes; of mocking him, when you have pretended to engage in his worship, drawing near to him with your mouth and your lips, while your heart has been far from him? Does not conscience condemn you of some one breach of the law at least? And by one breach of it you are in a sense, a scriptural sense, become guilty of allt; and are as incapable of being justified before God by any obedience of your own, as if you had committed ten thousand offences. But, in reality, there are ten thousand, and more, chargeable to your account. When you come to reflect on all your sins of negligence, as well as on those of commission; on all the instances in which you have failed to do good when it was in the power of your hand to do it; on all the instances, in which acts of devotion have been omitted, especially in secret; and on all those cases in which you have shewn a stupid disregard to the honour of God, and to the temporal and eternal happiness of your fellow-creatures: when all these I say, are reviewed, the number will swell beyond all possibility of account, and force you to cry out mine iniquities are more than the hairs of my head. They will appear in such a light before you, that your own heart will charge you with countless multitudes; and how much more then that God who is greater than your heart, and knoweth all things. §. 6. And say, sinner is it a little thing, that you have presumed to set light by the authority of the God of heaven, and to violate his law, if it had been by mere carelessness and inattention? How much more heinous, therefore, is the guilt when in so many instances you have done it knowingly and wilfully? Give me leave seriously to ask you, and let me intreat you to ask your own soul, against whom hast thou magnified thyself? against whom hast thou exalted thy voice**, or lifted up thy rebellious hand? On whose law, oh sinner, hast thou presumed to trample? and whose friendship, and whose enmity hast thou thereby dared to affront? Is it a man like thyself, that thou hast insulted? Is it only a temporal monarch? Only one, who can kill thy body, and then hath no more that he can dott? Nay, sinner, thou wouldst not have dared to treat a temporal prince, as thou hast treated the King eternal, immortal, and invisible. No price could have hired thee to deal by the majesty of an earthly sovereign, as thou hast dealt by that God, before whom the cherubim and seraphim are continually bowing. Not |