11. There is indeed one aggravation more, which may not attend your guilt, I mean that of being committed against solemn covenant engagements: A circumstance which has lain heavy on the consciences of many, who perhaps in the mean series of their lives have served God with great integrity. But let me call you to think to what this is owing? Is it not that you have never personally made any solemn profession of devoting yourself to God at all! have never done any thing which has appeared to your own apprehension an action by which you made a covenant with him; though you have heard so much of his covenant, though you have been so solemnly and so tenderly invited to it? And in this view, how monstrous must this circumstance appear, which at first was mentioned as some alleviation of guilt! yet I must add, that you are not, perhaps, altogether so free from guilt on this head as you may at first imagine. I will not insist on the covenant which your parents made in your name when they devoted you to God in baptism; though it is really a weighty matter, and by calling yourself a christian you have professed to own and avow what they then did; but I would remind you of what may have been more personal and express. Has your heart been, even from your youth, hardened to so uncommon a degree that you have never cried to God in any season of danger and difficulty? and did you never mingle vows with those cries? did you never promise, that if God would hear and help you in that hour of extremity, you would forsake your sins, and serve him as long as you lived? He heard and helped you, or you had not been reading these lines; and, by such deliverance did, as it were, bind down your vows upon you: And therefore your guilt in the violation of them remains before him, though you are stupid enough to forget them. Nothing is forgotten, nothing is overlooked, by him; and the day will come when the record shall be laid before you too.

12. And now, O sinner, think seriously with thyself what defence thou wilt make to all this! Prepare thine apology, call thy witnesses; make thine appeal from

him whom thou hast thus offended to some superior judge, if such there be. Alas, those apologies are so weak and vain that one of thy fellow worms may easily detect and confound them, as I will endeavor presently to show thee. But thy foreboding conscience already knows the issue. Thou art convicted; convicted of the most aggravated offences. Thou hast not humbled thine heart, but lifted up thyself against the Lord of headen; and thy sentence shall come forth from his presence. Thon bast violated his known laws: Thou hast despised and abused his numberless mercies: Thou hast affronted conscience, bis vicegerent in thy soul; thou hast resisted and grieved his Spirit: Thou hast trifled with him in all thy pretended submissions; and in one word, and that his own, thou hast done evil things as thou couldest. Thousands are, no doubt, already in hell, whose guilt never equalled thine; and, it is astonishing, that God has spared thee to read this representation of the case, or to make any pause upon it. O waste not so precious a moment, but enter as attentively, and humbly as thou canst, into those reflections, which suit a case so lamentable, and so terrible as thine !

The CONFESSION of a sinner, convinced in general of his

guilt.

OH God! thou injured sovereign, thou all penetrating and almighty Judge! what shall I say to this charge? Shall I pretend I am wronged by it, and stand on the defence in thy presence? I dare not do it: for thou knowest my foolishness, and none of my sins are hid from thee. My conscience tells me, that a denial of my crimes would only increase them, and add new fuel to the fire of thy deserved wrath. If I justify myself, mine own mouth will condemn me; if I say I am perfect, it will also prove me perverse. For innumerable evils have compassed me about: Mine iniquities have taken hold upon me, so that I am not able to look up; they are as I have been told in thy name, more than the hairs of my head, and therefore my heart faileth me. I am more

E

guilty than it is possible for another to declare or represen My heart speaks more than any other accuser. And thou, O Lord, art much greater than my heart, and knowest all things.

My ac

What has my life been but a course of rebellion against thee? It is not this or that particular action alone I have to lament. Nothing has been right in its principal views and ends. My whole soul has been disordered; all my thoughts, my affections, my desires, my pursuits, have been wretchedly alienated from thee I have acted as if I had hated thee, who art infinitely the loveliest of all beings; as if I had been contriving how I might tempt thee to the uttermost, and weary out thy patience, marvellous as it is. tions have been evil; my words yet more evil than they; and, O blessed God, my heart how much more corrupt than either! What an inexhausted fountain of sin has there been in it? a fountain of original curruption, which mingled its bitter streams with the days of early childhood; and which, alas! flows on, even to this day beyond what actions or words could express. I see this to have been the case, with regard to what I can particularly survey; but, oh how many months and years have I forgotten! concerning which I only know this in the general, that they are much like those I can remember, except it be that I have been growing worse and worse, and provoking thy patience more and more, though every new exercise of it was more and more wonderful.

And how am I astonished that thy forbearance is still continued? It is, because thou art God, and not man. Had I, a sinful worm, been thus injured, I could not have endured it. Had I been a prince, I had long since done justice on any rebel, whose crimes had borne but a distant resemblance to mine. Had I been a parent, I had long since cast off the ungrateful child, who had made such a return as I have all my life long been making to thee, O thou Father of my spirit! The flame of natural affection would have been extinguished, and his sight, and his very name, would have be, come hateful to me. Why then, O Lord, am I not cast out from thy presence? why am I not sealed up under an

irreversible sentence of destruction! That I live, I owe to thine indulgence. But, oh, if there be yet any way of deliverance, if there be yet any hope for so guilty a creature, may it be opened upon me by thy gospel and thy grace! And if any farther alarm, humiliation, or terror, be necessary to my security and salvation, may I meet them, and bear them all: Wound mine heart, O Lord, so that thou wilt but afterwards heal it; and break it in pieces, if thou wilt but at length condescend to bind it up!

CHAP. V.

THE SINNER STRIPPED OF HIS VAIN PLEAS.

The vanity of those pleas, which sinners may secretly confide in, so ap. parent, that they will be ashamed, at last. to mention them before God, 1, 2. Such as (1) That they descended from pious parents, 3. (2) That they had attended to the speculative part of religion, 4. (3) That they had entertained sound notions, 5 (4) That they had expressed a zealous regard to religion, and attended the outward forms of worship with those they apprehended the purest churches, 6, 7, (5) That they had been free from gross immoralities. 8. (6) That they did not think the consequence of neglecting religion would have been so fatal, 9. (7) That they could not do otherwise than they did, 10. Conclusion, 11. With the meditation of a convinced sin. ner, giving up his vain pleas before God.

1. MY last discourse left the sinner in a very alarming and a very pitiable circumstance; a criminal convicted at the bar of God, disarmed of all pretences to perfect innocence and sinful obedience, and consequently obnoxious to the sentence of the holy law, which can make no allowance for any transgression, no, not for the least; but pronounces death and a curse against every act of disobedience: How much more then against those numberless and aggravated acts of rebellion, of which, O sinner, thy conscience hath condemned thee before God! I would hope some of my readers will ingenuously fall under the conviction, and not think of making any apology; for, sure I am, that humbly to plead guilty at the divine bar, is the most decent, and, all things considered, the most prudent thing that can be done in such an unhappy circumstance.

Yet I know the treachery and the self flattery of a sinful and corrupted heart. I know what excuses it makes, and how, when it is driven from one refuge, it flies to another, to fortify itself against full conviction, and to persuade, not merely another, but itself, "That if it has been in some instances to blame, it is not quite so criminal as was represented, that there was at least considerations that plead in its favor, which, if they cannot justify, will, in some degree, excuse." A secret reserve of this kind, sometimes perhaps scarce formed into a distinct reflection, breaks the force of conviction, and often prevents that deep humiliation before God, which is the happiest token of an approaching deliverance. I will therefore examine into some of these particulars; and for that purpose would seriously ask thee, O sinner, what thou hast to offer in arrest to judgment? What plea thou canst urge for thyself why the sentence of God should not go forth against thee, and why thou shouldst not fall into the hands of his justice?

2. But this I must premise, that the question is not, how thou wouldst answer to me, a weak and sinful worm like thyself, who am shortly to stand with thee at the same bar: The Lord grant that I may find mercy of the Lord in that day! but what wilt thou reply to thy Judge? What couldst thou plead if thou wast now actually before his tribunal, where, to multiply vain words, and to frame idle apologies, would be but to increase thy guilt and provocation? Surely the very thought of his presence must supersede a thousand of those trifling excuses which now sometimes impose on a geners ation that are pure in their own eyes, though they are not washed from their filthiness; or, while they are conscious of their own impurities, trust in words that cannot profit, and lean upon broken reeds.

3. You will not, to be sure, in such a circumstance, plead, "That you are descended from pious parents." That was, indeed, your privilege, and wo be to you that you have abused it, and forsaken the God of your fathers. Ishmael was immediately descended from Abraham, the friend of God; and Esau was the son of Isaac, who was born according to the promise; yet you know,