164 FOURTH SERMON a disease, exceedingly dangerous, yet God is some- times pleased to forgive and heal it. The other kind of apostacy is proud and malicious : when, after the taste of the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come, men set themselves to . hate, oppose, persecute godliness, to do despite to the Spirit of grace, to fling off the holy strictness of Christ's yoke, to swell against the searching power of his word, to trample upon the blood of the covenant ; and when they know the spiritualness and holiness of God's ways, the innocency and piety of his servants, do yet notwithstanding set themselves against them for that reason, though under other pretences. This is not a weak but a wilful, and, if I may so speak, a strong and a stubborn apostacy. A sin which wholly hard - eneth the heart against repentance, and by conse- quence is incurable. To speak against the Son of man, that is, against the doctrine, disciples, ways, ser- vants of Christ, looking on him only as a man, the leader of a sect, as master of a new way, (which was Paul's notion of Christ and christian religion when he persecuted it, and for which cause he found mercy, for had he done that knowingly, which he did igno- rantly, it had been a sin incapable of mercy, Acts. xxvi. 9. 1 Tim. i. 13.) thus to sin, is a blasphemy that may be pardoned : but to speak against the Spirit, that is, to oppose and persecute the doctrine, worship, . ways, servants of Christ, knowing them and acknow- ledging in them a spiritual holiness, and to do it, so that the formal motive of malice against them, is the power and lustre of that Spirit which appeareth in them ; and the formal principle of it, neither igno- rance, nor self-ends, but very wilfulness, and imme- diate malignity ; wo be to that man whose natural enmity and antipathy against godliness do ever swell
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