mere man, and I doubt not were dictated by the Holy Ghost, to set forth the sufferings of him who

was so.

3dly, The excessive greatness of this trouble of mind appears from the uninterrupted, incessant continuance of it. It does not come and go by fits, or paroxysms: it has no pauses, or vicissitudes; for then the respite of one hour might lay in strength to endure the troubles of the next. From the very first minute of our Saviour's passion, from the first arrest and seizure of his righteous soul, the anguish of this sorrow never left it, till it had forced that to leave his body. Nothing could make the powers of darkness quit their hold of so great a prize. As David again has it, (and still, no doubt, prophetically of Christ, in this his last and great scene of misery,) in Psalm xxii. 2, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not, and in the night season, and am not silent. He seems here to describe this man of sorrow at his night-agonies and devotions in the garden, as well as groaning out the inward pangs of his soul on the day of his crucifixion. There was no distinction of night and day, during his sufferings; but, without any lucid intervals of comfort, he was under one continued darkness of desertion. Hence we have the like pathetical outcry again in Psalm xxxix. 13, O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength. He begged of God but to grant him so much as a little breathing-time, and for a while to intermit the strokes of his fury. For when there is no release to be had from wrath, the next mitigation is to have some respite under it: the nature of man being so very impotent and feeble, that it is not able to bear a continual pleasure, and

much less a continual sorrow. This it was that made Job's affliction hardly to be paralleled or expressed, that so many killing mischiefs and disasters came thronging (as it were) one in the neck of another. No sooner was one sad story ended, but another presently began. So that his heart was so employed and taken up in admitting and drinking in the sorrow that still came flowing into it, that it had no truce or relaxation to utter or discharge it : like a man receiving money faster than he can tell it; his incomes nonplus his accounts. In which and the like cases, God's hand does not only strike, but, as it is emphatically in Psalm xxxviii. 2, it also presseth the soul. And what is pressure, but the continuation of a blow? nay, what is hell itself, but sorrow without intermission?

4thly, The height and greatness of this spiritual trouble appears from its violent and more than ordinary manifestation of itself on outward signs and effects. A strange and supernatural instance of which we have in our Saviour, in the sad preliminaries of his passion. The inward chafings and agitations of his struggling soul forcing a way through his body, by a sweat even of blood, and opening all his veins, by an inward sense of something sharper than the impression of any lance or spear from without. And generally, in the very course of nature, when a thing, lodged or enclosed any where, breaks forth, it is because it finds no room for an abode within. Outward eruptions are the undoubted arguments of an inward fulness. Nor does this at all contradict what I had said before of such a vehement sorrow's manifesting itself in silence and astonishment; for that is only at some times, and at

some certain degrees, from which it often varies: as even our Saviour himself, while upon the cross, was not yet always crying out. But, besides, even in the midst of this silence, there are other ways by which such a trouble will sufficiently declare itself to the discernment of an ordinary eye. For while the tongue is silent, the countenance and conversation may speak aloud; and when we cannot hear sorrow speak, yet we may hear it groan; and when it is not to be known by its voice, it may be traced by its tears. Shame and sorrow, those twin children of sin, are seldom deep in the heart, but they are apparent in the face. It is hard to stifle or suppress any natural affection. But this trouble of conscience, as it is above a man's strength to conquer, so it is beyond his art to conceal it. It is scarce possible for a man to lie under the torments of the gout or the stone, without roaring out his sense of them; but the torments of conscience are as much sharper and more affecting than these, as the perceptions of the soul are quicker than those of the body. It is the load upon the heart that gives vociferation to its grief, like the weights of a clock, that cause it to be heard.

Add to this the drooping paleness and dejection of the looks, the mournful cloud upon the brow, the damp and melancholy covering the whole face; all of them the infallible signs of such a grief as will be sure to discover its abode by its effects; and such as made Christ himself so doleful a spectacle of misery, as to draw that compassionate exclamation, even from Pilate, John xix. 5, Behold the man! My moisture, says David, who (as we have observed already) spoke most of these things typically of our

Saviour, is turned into the drought of summer, Psalm xxxii. 4. His grief had sucked up all his radical juices, and reduced him even to a skeleton. So that he might well say, in Psalm xxii. 17, I may tell all my bones; while one might not only stand staring and looking upon him, but through him also. Such impressions will trouble of conscience make sometimes even upon the body; all which outward symptoms will be found undeniable arguments of the surpassing greatness of it, even upon this account, that they are sure indications of the excess of any worldly trouble. For how easily may the loss of a friend or an estate be read in the countenance ! When we are bereaved of our earthly contents, prorumpunt lacrymæ; and it is not in our power to stop those floodgates of sorrow.

Now, though I must confess that the spiritual sorrow that we have been discoursing of does not always work over in such sensible, passionate signs as worldly grief uses to do, and consequently is not certainly and universally to be measured by them; yet sometimes it has them all, and, if genuine and true, can never be wholly without some of them. And that man who has tears to spend at the memorial of a lost friend, but none to shed at the thoughts of a lost innocence, a wasted conscience, and a provoked God, has but too much cause to suspect the truth of his sorrow and the goodness of his heart.

5thly and lastly, The transcendent greatness of this spiritual trouble may be gathered from those horrid effects it has had upon persons not upheld under it by divine grace. This indeed could not be the case of our Saviour; no, not in the greatest height of his passion; God (as I may so speak) sup

porting him with one arm, while he was smiting him with the other. But the force and activity of every cause is to be discerned and measured only by its utmost effect. And this trouble of mind actually does its utmost only upon such persons as are abandoned of the forementioned supports of grace. For in others, whom Heaven deals with upon different terms, as soon as it has worked itself almost up to its fatal crisis, mercy steps in, stanches the bleeding wound, and will not suffer it to destroy, where God intends it only to prove.

Now both history and experience testify what tragical ends men deserted by God, under the troubles of a wounded spirit, have been brought into. One man, after he has been grappling with these terrors for some time, has at length drowned himself. Another has been so pursued and wearied with the tormenting thoughts of his sin, that he has sought for an antidote in poison, and even chose to end his grief with his days. Which, surely, are proofs clear enough to evince the insufferable torments of a guilty, inflamed conscience in persons finally forsook by God. Nor are those troubles at all less in persons truly pious, during a state of desertion: as may appear from those near approaches that even such persons, in such a condition, have made to these dismal outrages upon themselves. For some have been so far left to themselves, as even to intend and resolve upon self-murder; and nothing has been wanting but the last execution. Though they have not actually drowned themselves, yet they have stood pausing upon the brink of destruction; and though they have not used the fatal knife, yet they have prepared it. From whence it is evident, that, for the