his victorious delusions, and whom almost amongst them all might we not hear charging his coming into that woful estate upon the overreaching arts of this great impostor? Some we should hear cursing those false and fallacious pleasures which had baited and beguiled, befooled and drawn them into those direful pains, from which there is neither respite nor redemption. Others we should hear raving and crying out of those guilty gains, those ill filled bags and deluding heaps, which served only to treasure up wrath to the owners of them, and at length sink them into a bottomless pit, deeper, and more insatiable, if possible, than their own covetousness. Others again we should hear, with the height of rage and bitterness, reflecting upon those treacherous, dear-bought honours, the unconscionable price of their wretched souls, by which the tempter hooked them into his clutches, blinding the judgment and blasting their innocence, till, by several steps of guilt and greatness, he "preferred them downwards," to the place prepared for such forlorn grandees, where they are like to lie for ever, cursing themselves as much as formerly they were cursed by others. This is the result and end of all the tempter's glossing arts and flattering addresses. Hell is the centre of all his temptations; for from thence they were first drawn, there they all meet, and in that they end. And therefore let not that man who would not be fooled in so vast an interest as his salvation, fix his eye either upon the outside or the beginning of a temptation. Even the beginning of a tragedy is pleasant, but the close of it is not so. Let him not judge of what the tempter intends by what he offers; for be it what it will, look it never so gay or great, can any one, not quite abandoned by common sense, imagine that his mortal, avowed enemy is at all concerned for his pleasure, profit, or preferment? Assuredly nothing less; in all this he is but setting his trap; and no man sets a trap, but he baits it too. He hates most implacably, while he offers most plausibly. His drift in every one of his temptations is to separate between the soul and its chief good for ever, and to plunge it into a state of misery both intolerable and unchangeable. Farther than this he cannot go, and short of this, if possible, he never stops. Every temptation not defeated, certainly destroys. For by once casting a man from his innocence, it carries him still downward; and he who falls so, falls farther and farther by a continual rolling motion, and never leaves falling (unless staid by a mighty intervening grace) till he comes to the bottom, or rather to the place that has none. This is the natural course, way, and method of a temptation from first to last. In the beginning it flatters, in the progress of it, it domineers, and in the issue it damns; always concluding (if not baffled and broken off in time) "in the worm that dies not, and the fire that is not quenched." But to proceed. There are other consequences of a successful, conquering temptation, short of damnation, and yet sufficiently dreadful in themselves. As, 2dly, In the second place, loss of a man's peace with God and his own conscience, and the weakening, if not extinguishing all his former hopes of salvation. It confounds and casts a man infinitely backwards, as to his spiritual accounts. It degrades him from his assurance; renders his title to heaven dubious and perplexed; draws a great and discouraging blot over all his evidences; and even shakes in pieces that confidence which was formerly the very life and support of his soul, with new, terrible, and amazing objections. This is a man's condition immediately upon the prevalence of a temptation. For whatsoever makes a breach upon his innocence, in the same degree also certainly dashes his comforts. And for a man to be thus always in the dark, as to the greatest concern he has in both worlds, what is it but a kind of temporary hell, as hell itself is chiefly a perpetual darkness! And therefore, where men cannot arrive to the high privilege of a certainty, they are glad at least of a probability of their salvation. But he who has once rifled and laid open his soul to a base compliance with a temptation, has nothing to relieve his tottering, shaken hopes with, but the weak and glimmering light of God's general mercy, which many enjoy who shall never taste of his special favour. Look upon David, a person represented under as sublime and heroic a character of piety to posterity, as any one whatsoever; a person signalized with that peculiar elogy, of being "the man after God's own heart," (1 Samuel, xiii. 14.) And yet how did this glorious and great man, by yielding to a foul temptation, undermine and sap the very foundation of all that comfort and confidence in God, which by a long course of piety and strict living, he had for many years together been building up; so that immediately after that terrible blow given him, we find the horror of his sin and the terrors of the Almighty always fresh and fierce upon his spirit. "My sin," says he, "is continually before me," (Psalm li. 3.) Nay, though he received his pardon by a particular message from heaven, a pardon bearing date as early as the very confession of his sin, (for no sooner had he said, "I have sinned," but the prophet replies upon him immediately from God himself, 2 Sam. xii. 13, "The Lord also hath put away thy sin, thou shalt not die,") yet, notwithstanding all this, the wound hereby made upon his conscience was so broad and deep, so angry and inflamed, that we cannot find that it was ever perfectly cured and closed up; but still we have him complaining of broken bones and noisome sores, loss of God's presence and decay of spiritual strength, nournful days and restless nights; sometimes rising, and sometimes falling, with alternate hopes and fears, even to his dying day. The history of whose condition one would think abundantly sufficient to set a frightful look upon the fairest and best dressed temptation. For though in such a case, God by a sovereign restoring mercy should at the last secure a man's eternal interest, and keep him from a hell hereafter, yet is it not misery enough to endure one here? to be still carrying about him a sick, ulcerated mind, a mind perpetually almost harassed with the returning paroxysms of diffidence and despair? and to go drooping all his days under the secret girds and gripes of a dissatisfied, doubting, ill-boding conscience? Is it nothing to be haunted with the dismal apparitions of a reviving guilt, and the old black scores of our past, forgotten sins? Nothing to have that merciless "handwriting of the law against us," which we thought had been cancelled, presented anew in fresh and flaming characters to our apprehensions? In a word, is it nothing to be always walking upon the brink of damnation, like a man looking down with horror into a deep and black water from a slippery standing, from which he expects trembling to fall every minute, and from which if he does fall, he sees his death and his grave before him in the bosom of the merciless element, where he is sure to be swallowed up irrecoverably? A man may have the whole frame of his spiritual estate so broken and battered by a temptation, that he shall never be able to retrieve upon his heart so much rational confidence of his future happiness, as to afford him one cheerful day all his life after, but shall 66 pass the time of his pilgrimage here" in sadness and uncertainty, clouds and darkness, clouds that shall make all black and lowering over him, and intercept the view of all that is comfortable above him. Such, for the most part, is the case and condition of a sinner plunged by temptation into a great guilt; a condition so inexpressibly miserable, that it is impossible for a man under it to enjoy any thing. And that surely is or ought to be argument enough against it, though he should in the issue escape from it. For a wise man would live, not only with safety, but also with satisfaction. And therefore, as in this temporal life it is not the bare union of soul and body, or a power merely to subsist and breathe, which deserves the name of life, and much less of enjoyment, but to have those nobler super structures and advantages of nature, a healthful body and a sound mind, vigorous faculties and well-disposed organs, together with a happy symmetry and agreement of all the parts: So in the spiritual and supernatural life, will any one who has a true sense and relish of such things content himself with so poor a proportion of grace and sincerity, as just to keep him spiritually alive, and out of a state of death and reprobation, and in the mean time neglect the health, the growth, the flower and activity of the spiritual principle? Will he satisfy himself in having just as much oil in his lamp as to keep it from going out, when he might and should have so much as to feed it up to a brisk and glorious flame? Why should a man choose to go to heaven through sloughs and ditches, briars and thorns, diffidence and desertion, trembling and misgiving, and by the very borders of hell, and death staring him in the face; when he might pass from comfort to comfort, and have all his way paved with joy and assurance, and made easy and pleasant to him by the inward, invaluable satisfactions of a well-grounded peace? He who shuns the road of temptation may do so but he who will needs keep in it, is at best but like the man in the gospel, who, travelling from Jerusalem to Jericho, "fell amongst thieves. They stripped him, and wounded him, and left him half dead." After which, would any one, think we, in his right wits, who had seen all this, have ventured himself into the same hands, only because the man who fell into them was not actually despatched by them? Do wise men count the dangers and disasters of war as nothing, because every one who engages in the battle is not killed outright upon the place, but many escape and come off wounded and maimed, and leaving a good part of themselves behind them? emotion, but hospitals, not only the enemy, but the surgeon, not only the weapons of death, but the instruments of cure, should speak terror enough to dissuade considering minds from the peril of such adventures. But much otherwise is the discourse and arguing of those whom the tempter infatuates, when, in defiance of common sense and experience, they would reason away the dread of sin and the danger of temptation. They reason for the commission of a sin from the bare possibility of not being damned for it, but overlook the certainty of being made extremely wretched and miserable by it just like a sot, who purchases the short, worthless pleasure of a luscious, unwholesome morsel with a terrible surfeit, or a long sickness, only because a man may be sick and surfeited, and not die. These are the wise consequences 3dly, The third consequent of a prevailing temptation, is the exposing of a man to the temporal judgments of God in some signal and severe affliction. For though, in much mercy, God may (as we have shewn) save such an one from eternal death; yet it rarely happens that he frees him both from destruction and from discipline too; but that sometime or other he gives him a taste of the bitter cup, and teaches him what his sin has deserved, by what at present it makes him feel. When the Israelites, by that monstrous instance of ingratitude and idolatry, in changing the Deity for a golden calf, (the God that made them, for a god made by them,) had provoked God utterly to cut them off, and Moses by a mighty intercession kept off the killing blow, so that they were not then destroyed; yet for all that, they did not go unpunished, as appears from that remarkable place in Exodus, xxxii. 34, "Nevertheless," says God, "in the day when I visit, I will visit their sin upon them." And by many terrible items did the vengeance of God remind them of it for many succeeding generations. So that it was 2 common saying, even to a proverb, amongst the Jewish writers, that never any judgment befell the children of Israel from that time forward but there was an ounce of the golden calf in it. It seems there was an old score still to be reckoned for. As the killing malignity of many a distemper,may be removed, and yet the man not so absolutely cured of it, but that for many years after he may find it in his bones, and never recover the debauches of his youth so far, but that they may leave something behind them, which shall be sure to rub up his memory in his age. Some there are who hold, that when God has once pardoned a sin, as to its guilt and merit of eternal punishment, there is yet another guilt, binding the sinner over to temporal punishment, which remains yet unpardoned, and consequently to be expiated and cleared off, either by God's temporal judgments inflicted upon the sinner before or after his death, or to be satisfied for, by something voluntarily undergone, or otherwise commuted for by the sinner himself. sin, is false, and inconsistent with the infinite fulness and perfection of Christ's satisfaction. All satisfaction implies recompense and an equal compensation; but God intends no such thing in the calamities which he inflicts upon a pardoned person, but he inflicts them for quite other ends; as partly to give the world fresh demonstrations of his hatred of sin, and partly to inodiate and imbitter sin to the chastised sinner. So that to punish, properly taken, is one thing; and to afflict and chastise, perfectly another. The difference, therefore, in stating the ground or formal reason of this dispensation is very great, though the effect of it be materially the same, and the evil inflicted, whether by way of retribution or castigation, equally grievous. And since it is so, let no man, from any, even the most rational, persuasion that he can have of the main and final pardon of his sin, conclude that there shall be no other reckonings with him in temporal visitations. For he who has escaped the axe or the gallows, is not sure also to escape the lash; and though mercy has spared a malefactor's head, yet justice may leave him a small token in his hand to remember it by. For the proof and confirmation of which, can any thing be more apposite and express, than that emphatical place in Psalm xcix. 8, "Thou wast a God," says the Psalmist, "that forgavest them, though thou tookest vengeance of their inventions." What! Forgiveness and vengeance upon the same persons? Light and darkness in the same region and at the same time? Who can unriddle these obscurities, or reconcile the seeming contradiction? Why, the resolution is not so very difficult, if we consider that eternal mercy may very well consist with temporal severities, and the pardon of the sin with the correction of the sinner. See this farther exemplified in the person of David himself, (the great instance whom we shall still have recourse to, in treating of this subject.) Could or can any one act a higher repentance than he did, whose repentance stands upon record as a pattern to the penitents of all succeeding ages? Or can any one pretend to a greater assurance of his forgiveness than the same David, whose pardon (as we have shewn) was immediately sealed in heaven, and infallibly declared to him by the mouth of an inspired prophet? Yet for all this, cast but your eyes forward, and certainly from that time you will find but very few fair days in the following part of his life. For first of all, he hears the doom of his darling child; and then, by a strange intermixture of judgments and pardons together, in the very same breath almost that the prophet tells him, "that he should not die," he tells him also, "that the sword should never depart from his house." And how was his royal family broken and dishonoured by strange, And no wonder; for as guilt is inseparable from sin, so sorrow and suffering are inseparable from guilt. "Tribulation and anguish," says the apostle, "upon every soul of man that doeth evil." The sentence is universal, and we find no reserve or exempt case in the execution. And therefore let that man, who can be so far taken and transported with the present pleasing offers of a temptation, as to overlook those dreadful after-claps which usually bring up the rear of it; let him, I say, take heed, that vengeance does not begin with him in this life, and mark him in the forehead with some fearful, unlooked-for disaster. And if this once comes to be the case, I cannot see, but that those high blades, who pretend to outbrave hell, and laugh at all apprehensions of future misery, yet when they come to feel the hand of God' upon their worldly interests, can as sadly and sharply resent the calamity of a languishing body or a declining family, a blasted name or broken estate, and bend under it as poorly as the meanest and lowest spirited man what soever. a But let them bear it as they can; such for the most part are the dolorous effects and bitter appendages of a prevailing temptation. After all which, if pardoning mercy should come in, and save a man at the last, yet surely no serious, considering person would need any greater argument against the commission of a sin, than to have these the circumstances of its pardon. 4thly, The fourth and last mischievous consequence of a prevailing temptation is the disgrace, scandal, and reproach, which it naturally brings upon our Christian profession. The three former consequences terminated within the compass of the sinner's own person; but this last spreads and diffuses the mischief much farther; nothing in nature casting so deep a stain upon the face of Christianity, as the blots which fall upon it from the lewd and scandalous behaviour of Christians. Forasmuch as every ill practice naturally reflects a disrepute upon a man's principles, as being still supposed either to influence him to that practice, or at least not to restrain him from it; either of which is justly a discredit to them. For if the first be true, his principles are evil and immoral; if the latter, they are imperfect. From whence it is, that constant experience has found it to be the common course and custom of the world, to except and inveigh against professions, offices, and things themselves, only for the faults of persons. A way of arguing indeed as absurd as spiteful, but yet very easy and usual, and with gross vulgar minds (not well able to distinguish or discern any thing, but as it is exemplified and embodied in persons) almost unavoidable. And this certainly should make every wise and good man very tender and cautious of being drawn into those ways, which may both bring upon him a personal guilt, and render him a public scandal. For why in all reason should the profession or society, the church or religion, which a man is of, suffer by his lewdness, or share the infamy of those crimes which they are not in the least concerned in, otherwise than to disown, hate, and detest them? Common ingenuity (one would think) should stop the foul mouth of any temptation with such reasonings and replies as these. Nay, should a man take up his religion, not out of conscience, but design, yet surely it would be his interest to keep it fair and creditable and should he (as too many do) wear it only as a cloak, yet prudence and common decency would teach him to wear it clean, and without spots. For he who is not concerned for the honour of his religion, may justly be supposed to have neither honour nor religion. If indeed a man could be wicked and a villain to himself alone, the mischief would be so much the more tolerable. But the case is much otherwise. The plague flies abroad, and attacks the innocent neighbourhood. The guilt of the crime lights upon one, but the example of it sways a multitude; especially if the criminal be of any note or eminence in the world. For the fall of such an one by any temptation (be it never so plausible) is like that of a principal stone, or stately pillar, tumbling from a lofty edifice into the deep mire of the street: it does not only plunge and sink into the black dirt itself, but also dashes and bespatters all that are about or near it when it falls. Was it not thus with Samson? who, of a judge of Israel, and a terror to his enemies, a man all made up of miracle, rendered himself both the shame of the former and the contempt of the latter; a scoff and a by-word to all the nations round about him, (as every vicious and voluptuous prince must needs be;) and all this by surrendering up his strength, his reason, and his royal trust to the charms of a brutish temptation, which quickly transformed and made him a more stupendous miracle of folly and weakness than ever he had been of strength; and a greater disgrace to his country than ever he had been a defence; or in a word, from a judge of Israel, a woful Judgment upon it. And was it not thus also with David? This was the worst and most killing consequence of the temptation which he fell by, (2 Sam. xii. 14,) that he had, by that enormous act, "given the enemies of God," as the prophet told him, "great occasion to blaspheme." And no doubt the religion he professed, as well as the sin he had committed, was thereupon made "the song of the drunkards ;" and many a biting jeer was obliquely cast at one, as well as directly levelled at the other. For to be vicious in the sight of a man's enemies, and those not more the enemies of himself than of his religion, what a bitter aggravation is it of his guilt, and what an indelible reproach to his person! Yet thus it is and ever will be in such cases; where the person of the criminal is public, the infamy of the crime can hardly be private. It is too great and too diffusive to be confined to one place, or circumscribed within one person. But the report of it shall whirl and rattle over a whole nation, damping the spirits of some, and rejoicing the hearts of others, but opening the mouths of all; those of enemies in taunts and sarcasms, and those of friends in sighs and complaints; when it shall be said of any person of credit and repute, what a false or foul step he made, either in point of conscience or honour, throwing off all obligation of one, and all sense of the other, only through a blind, aspiring ascent to some pitiful station of worldly wealth and greatness, where the curse of men will be sure to follow, and the curse of God to overtake him. These two things therefore let every one rest assured and persuaded of. First, that in every temptation the tempter's design is not only the single guilt and damnation of the person tempted, but, if possible, to make him a means or instrument to carry and convey the infection of the crime to many more. And if he fails in that, so that he cannot defile or destroy persons, he will endeavour at least to derive a slur upon professions. This being most certain, that there is not a man of remark in any religion in the world, but has thereby got it into his power to do his religion a great mischief. To which I shall add one note more; that every man living has it in his power to do more mischief than he can do good. And this directly introduces that other thing, which I would have every man fix and keep in his thoughts; namely, that it is the most unworthy, base, and ignoble thing, that can be incident to human nature, for a man to make himself a plague and a public calamity, a blot to a church, and a blemish to his religion. For what is it else, but to make himself a tool and an underagent to the great enemy of God and man, and to do that for the Devil, which the Devil, without the help of such instruments, could not possibly do by himself? But such a wretch is every one, who, by complying with a temptation in any vile or dishonest practice, does as much as in him lies to libel his very calling, to reproach his Saviour, and to put Christianity itself to the blush. But above all, scandalous and inexcusable would it be for a minister of the church, to suffer himself to be tempted to any thing wicked or dishonourable. For such an one, by so doing, first puts his foot into the mire, and then tramples upon the altar. And thus having set before you four of the most dire and fatal consequences of a prevailing temptation, I suppose it will be no hard matter to take an estimate of the greatness of the mercy of being delivered from it. For first, Is there any happiness in being free from the cruel bites and tortures of a perpetually accusing conscience; a conscience labouring under the guilt of some great sin, which, like a remorseless vulture, shall lie daily and hourly gnawing and preying upon his heart; or like a poisonous adder, rolling in his bosom, and from thence always hissing in his face? Is it a blessing to be secured from poverty and sickness, infamy and disgrace, and all the terrible lashes of an angry, provoked vengeance, which are able to make life itself all anguish, horror, and astonishment, and death, in respect of it, a relief and a sanctuary to fly to? It is a mercy to be kept clear and innocent, and to be preserved from such courses and practices, as shall render a man a public nuisance and a common grievance, the abhorrence of the age he lives in, and the detestation and curse of the ages after him? And lastly, Is it not an act of a superlative, divine goodness and compassion, to hinder a man from running headlong into a state of final and eternal perdition? A state of judgment without mercy; where there is no repentance, and from whence there is no return. A state of torment and despair; torment, "which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man to conceive." I say, let a man rally up his best attention, his severest and exactest thoughts, and let him consider and weigh these things, each of them in particular, and all of them together, the misery of enduring, and the felicity of escaping them; and then he shall be able to comprehend, or at least to adore the height and depth, the compass and |