willing hearts, that love the truth, and feign would know it that they may obey it; and not with false and biassed hearts, which secretly hinder the understanding from entertaining the truth, because they love it not, as being contrary to their carnal inclinations and interest.'-The word that was received into "honest hearts" was it that was as the seed that brought forth plentifully". When the heart saith unfeignedly, Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth; teach me to know and do thy will;' God will not leave such a learner in the dark. Most of the damnable ignorance and error in the world is from a wicked heart, that perceiveth that the truth of God is against their fleshly interest and lusts, and therefore is unwilling to obey it, and unwilling to believe it, lest it torment them because they disobey it. A will that is secretly poisoned with the love of the world, or of any sinful lusts and pleasures, is the most potent impediment to the believing of the truth. Direct. XI. Learn with quietness and peace in the school of Christ, and make not divisions, and meddle not with others' lessons and matters, but with your own.'-Silence, and quietness, and minding your own business, is the way to profit. The turbulent wranglers that are quarrelling with others, and are religious contentiously, in envy and strife, are more likely to be corrected or ejected than to be edified. Read James iii. Direct. XII. 'Remember that the school of Christ hath a rod; and therefore learn with fear and reverence".'-Christ will sharply rebuke his own, if they grow negligent and offend: and if he should cast thee out and forsake thee, thou art undone for ever. "See," therefore, that "ye refuse not him that speaketh: for if they escaped not, who refused him that spake on earth, much more shall not we escape, if we refuse him that speaketh from heaven"." "For how shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation, which at first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed to us by them that heard him: God also bearing them witness both with signs and wonders, and divers miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost, according to his own will." "Serve the Lord therefore with fear, and rejoice with trembling: * Matt. xiii. 23. a Heb. xii. 28, 29. Phil. ii. 12. c Heb. ii. 3, 4. kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish, in the kindling of his wrathd." Grand Direct. VIII. Remember that you are related to Christ, as the Physician of your souls, and to the Holy Ghost, as your Sanctifier: make it therefore your serious study, to be cured by Christ, and cleansed by his Spirit, of all the sinful diseases and defilements of your hearts and lives.' Though I did before speak of our believing in the Holy Ghost, and using his help for our access unto God, and converse with him; yet I deferred to speak fully of the cleansing and mortifying part of his work of sanctification till now; and shall treat of it here, as it is the same with the curing work of Christ, related to us as the physician of our souls: it being part of our subjection and obedience to him, to be ruled by him, in order to our cure. And what I shall here write against sin, in general will be of a twofold use. The one is, to help us against the inward corruptions of our hearts, and for the outward obedience of our lives, and so to further the work of sanctification, and prevent our sinning. The other is, to help us to repentance and humiliation, habitual and actual, for the sins which are in us, and which we have already at any time committed. The general Directions for this curing and cleansing of the soul from sin, are contained, for the most part, in what is said already and many of the particular Directions also may be brought from the sixth Direction before going. I shall now add but two general Directions, and many more particular ones. Direct. 1. I. The two General Directions are these: 1. Know what corruptions the soul of man is naturally defiled with and this containeth the knowledge of those faculties, that are the seat of these corruptions, and the knowledge of the corruptions that have tainted and perverted the several faculties.' Direct. 11. 2. Know what sin is, in its nature or intrinsic evil, as well as in the effects.' 1. The parts or faculties to be cleansed and cured, are both the superior and inferior. 1. The Understanding, d Psal. ii. 11, 12. though not the first in the sin, must be first in the cure for all that is done upon the lower faculties, must be by the governing power of the will: and all that is done upon the will, according to the order of human nature, must be done by the understanding. But the understanding hath its own diseases, which must be known and cured. Its malady in general is ignorance; which is not only a privation of actual knowledge, but an undisposedness also of the understanding to know the truth. A man may be deprived of some actual knowledge, that hath no disease in his mind that causeth it: as in a case that either the object be absent, and out of reach, or that there may be no sufficient revelation of it, or that the mind be taken up wholly upon some other thing, or in case a man shut out the thoughts of such an object, or refuse the evidence, which is the act of the will, even as a man that is not blind, may yet not see a particular object, 1. In case it be out of his natural reach : 2. Or if it be night, and he want extrinsic light: 3. Or in case he be wholly taken up with the observation of other things: 4. Or in case he wilfully, either shut or turn away his eyes. It is a very hard question to resolve, how far and wherein the diseases of the understanding may be called sin. Because the understanding is not a free, but a necessitated faculty and there can be no sin, where there is no liberty. But to clear this, it must be considered, 1. That it is not this or that faculty that is the full and proper subject of sin, but the man: the fulness of sin being made up of the vice of both faculties, understanding and will, conjunct. It is more proper to say, The man sinned, than, The intellect or will sinned, speaking exclusively as to the other. 2. Liberum arbitrium,' free choice is belonging to the man, and not to his will only, though principally to the will. 3. Though the will only be free in itself, originally, yet the intellect is free by participation, so far as it is commanded by the will, or dependeth on it for the exercise of its acts. 4. Accordingly, though the understanding primitively and of itself, be not the subject of morality, of moral virtues, or of moral vices, which are immediately and primarily in the will, yet participatively its virtues and vices are moralized, and become graces or sins, laudable and rewardable, or vituperable and punishable, as they are imperate by the will, or depend upon it. Consider then, the acts, and habits, and disposition of the understanding: and you will find, 1. That some acts, and the privation of them, are necessary, naturally, originally, and unalterably: and these are not virtues or sinful at all, as having no morality. As, to know unwillingly as the devils do, and to believe, when it cannot be resisted, though they would; this is no moral virtue at all, but a natural perfection only. So 1. To be ignorant of that which is no object of knowledge, or which is naturally beyond our knowledge, as of the essence of God, is no sin at all. 2. Nor, to be ignorant of that which was never revealed, when no fault of ours hindered the revelation, is no sin. 3. Nor, to be without the present, actual knowledge or consideration of one point, at that moment, when our thoughts are lawfully diverted, as in greater business, or suspended, as in sleep. 4. But to be ignorant, wilfully, is a sin, participatively in the intellect, and originally in the will. 5. And to be ignorant for want of revelation, when ourselves are the hinderers of that revelation, or the merito-rious cause that we want it, is our sin because, though that ignorance be immediately necessary, and hypothetically, yet, originally and remotely it is free and voluntary. So, as to the habits and disposition of the intellect: it is no sin to want those, which man's understanding in its entire and primitive nature was without. As, not to be able to know without an object, or to know an unrevealed or too distant object, or actually to know all things knowable, at once. But there are defects or ill dispositions, that are sinfully contracted; and though these are now immediately natural and necessary, yet being originally and remotely voluntary or free, they are participatively sinful. Such is the natural man's disability or undisposedness to know the things of the Spirit, when the Word revealeth them. This lieth not in the want of a natural faculty to know them, but, 1. Radically in the will. 2. And thence in contrary, false apprehensions which the intellect is posessed with, which resisting the truth, may be called, its pre • Maxima pars hominum morbo jactatur eodem. Hor. lib. ii. Sat. 3. v. 121. blindness or impotency to know them. And 3. In a strangeness of the mind to those spiritual things which it is utterly unacquainted with. Note here, 1. That the will may be guilty of the understanding's ignorance, two ways: either, by positive averseness prohibiting or diverting it from beholding the evidence of truth: or, by a privation and forbearance of that command or excitation which is necessary to the exercise of the acts of the understanding. This last is the commonest way of the sin in the understanding; and that may be truly called voluntary which is from the will's neglect of its office, or suspension of its act, though there be no actual violation or nolition. 2. That the will may do more in causing a disease in the understanding, than it can do in curing it. I can put out a man's eyes, but I cannot restore them. 3. That yet for all that, God hath so ordered it in his gracious dispensation of the grace of the Redeemer, that certain means are appointed by him, for man to use, in order to the obtaining of his grace, for his own recovery and so, though grace cure not the understanding of its primitive, natural weakness, yet it cureth it of its contracted weakness, which was voluntary in its original, but necessary, being contracted. And, as the will had a hand in the causing of it, so must it have, in the voluntary use of the aforesaid means, in the cure of it. So much to shew you how the understanding is guilty of sin. Though no actual knowledge be so immediate as to be without the mediation of the sense and fancy, yet supposing these, knowledge is distinguished into immediate and mediate. The immediate is when the being, quality, &c. of a thing, or the truth of a proposition is known, immediately, in itself, by its proper evidence. Mediate knowledge is, when the being of a thing, or the truth of a proposition is known by the means of some other intervenient thing or proposition, whose evidence affordeth us a light to discern it. The understanding is much more satisfied when it can see things and truths immediately, in their proper evidence. But when it cannot, it is glad of any means to help it. The further we go in the series of means (knowing one thing by another, and that by another, and so on) the more |