if yet ye will not fee its finfulness, I will take you where you may see some more of it. Go take a view of it,

3. In the threatenings of the law, and fee there what estimate God puts on it, and what a thing it is. All the power of heaven, the anger, the fury, the vengeance of God, all are levelled at the head of fin. Take but one instance for all, in that vii of Joshua; there a people accustomed to victory, turn their back before the enemy, fall a prey to a people devoted to deftruction; nay, moreover, God in the 12 ver. calls all the people accurfed, and tells, they cannot ftand before the enemy, neither will I be with you any more, fays he. Why, what is the matter? wherefore is the heat of all this anger? what meaneth this vengeance? The matter was, there was a fin committed, Achan had taken fome of the fpoil of the eneumy.

Thus you fee, one fin makes God breathe out threatenings against a whole nation. In fine, look through the book of God, and there you shall fee one threatening big with temporal, another with eternal plagues; one full of external, another of internal and spiritual woes; and all as it were levelled at the head of fin. And is that a small matter which never fails to fet all the vengeance of heaven against the person that is guilty of it? But yet this is not all, you may fee more, if ye look at it,

4. In the judgments of God that are abroad in the earth. Look we to one nation, there we shall fee thousands falling before the avenging enemy, the fword glutted as it were with blood; men who a little before were poffeffed of wifdom, courage, and all thefe endowments which ferve to enhance the worth of the fons of men, are here laid heaps

upon

upon heaps. Go we to another, there we fhall fee no fewer carried off by fickness and difeafes, and all wearing out by time. Go to church-yards, and fee what vaft havoc thefe do make; there you may fee the rubbish of many generations laid heaps upon heaps. Well, fee you nothing of fin in all this? What think you of all these lamentable evils, miferies and woes? Why, fee you nothing of fin in them all? Sure you are blind if you do not. I ask you as Jehu did, when he faw the dead fons of Achab, 2 Kings x. 9. Who flew all these? Who brought all these fons of pride, who not long ago were ftrangely ruffling it out in the light of warlike glory, down to the fides of the pit? who filled your church-yards with heaps upon heaps, fathers and fons, high and low, rich and poor, of all fexes, ranks, ages and degrees? Surely fin has done this; for as by one man fin entered into the world, and death by fin: and fo death paffed upon all men, for that all have finned, Rom. V. 12. But if ftill you will look upon fin as a small and light thing, we have yet another glass where in you may have a further fight of it.

5. Enter the house of a foul under trouble of * confcience; look at a Heman, and you shall hear him making an heavy mone in that lxxxviii. Pfalm: there you fee a man that has a foul full of trouble, oppreffed with all the waves and billows of the wrath of God, almost distracted with the terrors of God. Now, if you faw one in this cafe crying out in anguish of fpirit; nay, it may be, tearing himself, beating his breast; afk him the reafon of all this diftrefs, he will tell you, That it is fin that has done all this. He has no reft in his bones for ills that he has done, Pfal. xxxviii. 3. And if yet ye have not feen enough of the finful

nefs,

1

nefs and evil of fin, I fhall give you another prospect of it,

6. In the hateful, monftrous and enormous crimes that are commited in the world. Some fins there are which bring along with them infamy and difgrace, even before men. Human nature, as corrupt as it is,, fhrinks at fome fins, they carry in them fuch an evident contrariety to the faint remains of natural light. Sins there are, which, as the apostle says, 1. Cor. v. 1. are not fo much as named among the Gentiles. Now if a man be guilty of any of these crying abominations, these crimson fins, then he becomes odious in the world. Call a man a murderer, an incestuous perfon, an abufer of his parents, or the like, every fober perfon will flee from, and evite as a peft the company of fuch an one: but why? what is the matter? what is there fo odious in thefe crimes, that every one flees from the perfon guilty of them? there is fin in them; and hence it is, they are fo hateful: and the only thing that diftinguisheth thefe from others, is, That they have different circumstantial aggravations: for in the nature of fin they all do agree, the least,and the greatest; the least fin ftrikes at the holy law of God, contemns the authority of the great and fupreme lawgiver, as well as the greatest doth. And if fin be lo odious when you get a fuller view of it, as it were in thefe large, thefe great and crying provocations, it is no lefs fo, when it is lefs perceptible in thefe fins which quadrate better with our vitiated and corrupted natures; for indeed the difference among fins, as to greater and lefs, lies not fo much in the nature of the fins, as in their different refpect to our understanding, arifing from the objects about which they are converfant. But

if after all these views of fin, your eyes are fo blinded that you cannot fee it, then come take a view of it,

7. In the cafe of the damned. Here, here you may have a strange, an heart-affecting view of fin's ugly face. See the poor wretches lying in bundles, boiling eternally in that stream of brimstone, roring under the intolerable, and yet eternal anguish of their spirits. Take a furvey of them in this lamentable posture. If you should see some hundreds of men, women and children, all thrown alive into burning pitch or melted lead, would not this present you with a fad fcene of mifery and wo? would not this be a difmal fight? indeed it would be fo: but all this is nothing to the unspeakable mifery of the devils and damned, who have fallen into the hands of the living and finrevenging God, and are laid in chains of maffy and thick darkness, eternally depreffed and funk into the bottomlefs depth of the wrath of God, and choked with the fteam of that lake of fire and brimstone; and have every faculty of their foul, every joint of their body, brim-full of the fury of the eternal God: behold, and wonder at this terrible and aftonishing fight; and in this take a view of fin. Ware hell now opened, and faw you the damned in chains of darkness, and if you heard their dreadful yelling, and found the fteam of the bottomlefs pit, ye would then in every fenfe get fome discovery of fin. It is only fin that has kindled that dreadful and inextinguishable fire of wrath, and caft the damned into it; and it is fin that holds them there, and torments them there. If you had but a juft impreffion of these things, how hateful would fin be to you? And if after all that has been faid, you ftill imagine that fin is not fo bad as we would

D

would reprefent it, then come once more, and take a view of it,

So

8. In the fufferings of Chrift. Here is a glass, O criminals, wherein you may fee your own face. You think it a little thing that you have finned; nay, it may be, you roll fin as a fweet morfel under your tongues. But come here, and see what a thing it is which you thus dreadfully mistake! Come fee it holding the fword; O ftrange! Nay more, thrufting it into Chrift's fide! Here, finners, is a fight that made the earth to tremble, and the Sun to hide his face, as we fee, Matth. xxvii. 51. Luke xxiii. 45. In this glafs you may. fee, (1.) What God's thoughts of fin are. highly oppofite to his nature is it, that the bowels of affection he had to the fon of his love, whom he fo highly honoured, when the voice came from the excellent glory, faying, This is my beloved fon in whom I am well pleased, were not able to hold up the hand of inexorable juftice from striking at him, nay, ftriking him dead for the fin of the elect world. Would not that be a great proof, think ye, of the averfion of a parent to any thing, if he would rather choofe to flay his fon, nay, his only fon, his fon whom he loved most tenderly, than it should efcape a mark of his d'pleasure? (2.) Here you may fee more of the pollution of fin than any where elfe. Never was there any thing that gave fo juft apprelenfions of the stain of fin, as the death of Christ. An ingrain'd pollution it must indeed be, if no lefs will wash it out than the blood of God. (3.) Here is a dreadful evidence of the power of fin. Never did this more appear, than when it blinded the eyes of the degenerate fons of men fo far, that they could not discern the glory of the only begotten of the fa

ther,