A SERMON OF RERENTANCE. a .331 felicities, but for crimes. Conscience keepeth in its own court, and meddleth but with moral evils, which we are conscious of. (2.) And also it is sin that is loathed by God, and makes the creature loathsome in his eyes ; and repentance conformeththe soul to God, and therefore causeth us to loathe as he doth, and on his grounds. And, (3.) There is no evil but sin, and that which sin pro- cureth; and therefore it is for sin that the penitent loathes himself. 5. Note, also, that it is here implied, that, till repentance, there was none of this remembering of sin, and loathing of themselves. They begin with our conversion, and, as before described, are proper to the truly penitent. For, to consider them distinctly, (1.) The deluded soul that is bewitched 'by his own, concupis- cence is so taken up with remembering of his fleshly pleasures, and his alluring objects, and his honors, and his earthly businesses and store, that he bath no mind or room for the remembering of his foolish, odious sin, and the wrong that he is doing to God, and to himself. Death is oblivious, and sleep hath but a. distracted, ineffectual memory, that stirreth not the busy dreamer from his pillow, nor despatcheth any of the work he dreams of. And the unconverted are asleep, and dead in sin. The crowd of.cares and worldly businesses, and the tumultuous noise of foolish sports, and other sensual passions and delights, do take up the minds of the unconverted, and turn them from the observation of the things of greatest everlasting consequence. They have a memory for sin and the flesh, to which they are alive, but not for things spiritual and eternal, to which they are dead. They remember not God himself as God, with any effectual remembrance. God is not in all their thoughts ; Psal. x. 4. They live as without him in the world; Eph. ii. 12. And if they remember not God, they cannot remember sin as sin, whose malignity lieth in its opposition to the 'will and holiness of God. They . forget themselves, and therefore must needs forget their sinfulness. Alas! they remem- ber not effectually and savingly what they are, and why they were made, and what they are daily nourished and preserved for, and what business they have 'to do here in the world. They for- get that they have souls to save or lose, than must live in endless joy or torment. You may see by their careless and ungodly lives that they forget it. You may hear by their carnal, frothy speech that they forget it. And he that remembereth not himself, re- membereth not his own concernments. They forget the end to which they tend; the,life which theymust live, forever; the mat- ters everlasting, whose greatness and duration, one would think, should so command the mind of man, and take up all his thoughts and cares, in despite of all the little trifling matters that would avert them, that we should think almost of nothing else. Yet
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