A SERMON OF REPENTANCE. .e 333. ends, and everlasting state, and to remember your misdoings, that you may loathe yourselves, and in returning may find life ; but shine either scorn them, or, quarrel with them, or sleep under their most serious and importunate solicitations, or carelessly and stupidly give them the hearing, as if theyspoke but words of course, or treated about uncertain things,. and spoke not to them from the God of heaven, and about the things that every man of you shall very shortly see or feel. Sometimes you are called on by the voice of conscience within, to remember the unreasonableness and evil of your ways; but conscience is silenced, because it will not be conformable to your lusts. But little do you think what a part your too late awakened conscience hath yet to play, if you give it not amore sober hearing in time. Sometimes the voice of common calamities, and national or Iocal judgments, call on you to remem- ber the evil of your ways; but that which is spoken to all, or many, doth seem to most of them as spoken unto none. Some- times the voice ofparticular judgments, seizing upon your families, persons or estates, doth call on you tb remember the evil of your ways ; and one would think the rod should make you hear. And yet you most disregardfully go on, or are only frightened into a few good purposes and promises, that die when health and prosperity revive. Sometimes God joineth all these together, and pleadeth both by word and rod, and addeth also the inward pleadings of his Spirit ; he sets your sins in order before you, (Psalm 1. 21.) and expostulateth with you the cause of his abused love, despised sovereignty, and provoked justice; and asketh the poor sinner, Hast thou done well to waste thy life in'vanit'y, to serve thy flesh, to forget thy God, thy soul, thy happiness; and to thrust his services into corners, and give him but the odious leavings of the flesh?' But these pleas of God cannot be heard. O horrible impiety! By his own creatures; by reasonable creatures (that would scorn to be called fools or madmen) the God of heaven cannot be heard ! The brutish, passionate,furious sinners will not remember. They will not remember what they have done, and with whom it is that they have to do, and what God thinks and saith of men in their condition ; and whither it is that the flesh will lead them; and what will be the fruit and end of all -their lusts and vanities; and bow they will look back on all at last; and whether an holy or .a sensual life will be sweetest to a dying man; and what judgment it is that they will all be of, in the con- troversy between the flesh and Spirit, at the latterend. Though they have life and time, and reason for their uses, we cannot en- treat them to considerof these things in time. If our lives lay on it, as their salvation, which is more, lieds on it, we cannot entreat them. If we should kneel to them, and with tears beseech them,
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