SPIRITUAL PEACE AND COMFORT. 433 you are guilty ofthis ? If you be, then you do not believe that Christ is the Sonof God, and the Messiah, and his gospel true. And then,you will sure oppose him, and maintain that he was a de- ceiver, and that the devil was the author of all the miraculous and gracious workingsof his Spirit. Thenyou will never fear his dis- pleasure, nor call him seriously either Lord or Savior; nor tender . him any service, any more than you do to Mahomet. None but infidels do commit theblasphemy against the Holy Ghost ; nor but fewof them. Unbelief is eminently called "sin" in the gospel; and that "unbelief" which is 'maintained by blaspheming the glo- rious works of the Holy Ghost, which Christ and his disciples through many years time did perform for a testimony to his truth, that is called, singularly, "the sin against the Holy Ghost!" You may meet with other descriptions of this sin, which may occasion your terror; but Ì am fully persuaded that this is the plain truth. Doubt 14. '' But I greatly fear lest the time of grade be past, and lest I have out-sat the day of mercy, and now mercy hath wholly forsaken me. For I have oft heard ministers tell me from the word, "Now is the accepted time, now is the day of-your visi- tation; to-day, while it is called to-day, harden not your hearts, lest God swear in his wrath, that they shall not enter into his rest." But I have stood out long after.; I have resisted and, quenched the Spirit ; and now it is, I fear, departed from me.' Anew. Here is sufficient matter for humiliation, but the doubt- ing.ariseth merely from ignorance. The day of grace may in two respects be said to be over: The first (and most property so called) is, When God will not accept of a - sinner, though he should repent and return. This is never in this life for. certain. And he that imagineth any such thing as that it is too late, while his soul is in his body, to repent and . accept of, Christ and mercy, is merely ignorant of the tenor and, sense of the gospel. For the new law of grace doth limit no time on earth for God's accepting of a .re- turning sinner. True faith and repentance do as surely save at the last hour of the day as at the first. God bath said, that whosoever believeth in Christ shall not perish, but have everlasting life. He bath no where excepted late believers or repenters. Show any such exception ifyou -can. The second sense in which it may be said that the day of grace is over, is,this: When a man bath so long resisted the Spirit, that God bath given him over to the willful, obstinate refusals of mercy, and of Christ'sgovernment, resolving that he will never give him the prevailing grace .of his Spirit. Wherenote, 1. That this same man might still have grace as soon as any other, if he were but willing to accept Christ and grace in him. 2. That no man can vox.. r. 55
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