208 FIFTY REASONS. 9. Yea) more than that, the longer you stay, the harder it will "Qe. If it be hard to-day, it is like to be harder to-morrow. For as the Spirit of Christ is like to forsake you for your wilful delays, so custom will strengthen sin: and custom in sinning will harden your hearts, and make you" past feeling, to work all uncleanness with greediness." Cannot you crush this serpent when it is but weak; and can you encounter it in its serpentine strength? Cannot you pluck up a tender plant; and can you pluck up an oak or cedar? 0 sinners! what do you mean, to make your recovery so difficult by delay? You are never like to be fairer for heaven, and to find conversion an easier work, than now you may do. Will you stay till the work be ten times harder, and yet do you think it so hard already? 10. Consider also, that sin gets daily victories by your delay. We lay out batteries against it, and preach, and exhort, and pray against it, and it gets a kind of victory over all, as long as we prevail not with you to turn. It conquereth our persuasions and advice; it conquereth all the stirrings of your consciences; it conquereth all your heartless purposes and deceitful promises. And these frequent conquests strengthen your sin, and weaken your_resistance, and leave the matter almost hopeless. Before a physician hath used remedies, he hat.h more hope of a cure, than when he hath tried all means, and finds that the best medicines do no good, but the man is still as bad or worse. So when all means have been tTied with you, and yet you are uncon- . verted, the case draws towards desperation itself: • the very means are disabled more than before; that is, your hearts are harder to be wrought upon by them. When you have long been under sermons and reading, and among good examples, and yet you are unconverted; these ordinances lose much of their force with you. Custom will make you slight them, and be dead-hearted under them. And it is . these· very same means and truths, that you have
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTcyMjk=