A treatise on comforting afflicted consciences - The Digital Puritan

72 INSTRUCTIONS FOR COMFORTINGfurious mastiffs muzzled for the present, they have recourseunto and improve both variety of delights and multiplicityof employments. For the first: "This is the reason," asone saith wittily, " that many are so eager in the pursuitof their pleasures, because they would make God's sergeant,their own conscience, that pursues thera, drunk with thesepleasures ;just as many men use to do, getting the sergeantthat comes to arrest them into the tavern, and there makinghim drunk that so they may escape." For the second. Howwas it possible that Ahithophel should hold out so long fromhanging himself and horrible confusion of spirit, especiallysince he harboured in his bosom such a false, rotten, abominableheart, as appeared by that villanous counsel he gaveAbsalom, to lie with his father's concubines " in the sight ofall Israel ; " except he had been a counsellor of state, andso necessarily taken up continually with extraordinaryvariety, vicissitude, and succession of most weighty andimportant affairs, which would wholly possess his mindwith an uninterrupted attention, agitation, and exercise,and not give it any leave to reflect upon itself with thoseseverer cogitations in cold blood which are wont to correctand condemn the enormity of exorbitant courses 1 Andthus in all ages, many great men of great wisdom, bemggreat offenders, purposely put and plunge themselves intomultitude of business, that they may have no leisure tolisten unto that which their consciences would secretly tel)them in their ear of their JNIachiavelian plots, prodigiouslusts, and plausible cruelties. The noise of attendants, visitants,dependents, and great employments, drown the voiceof conscience in such cases, as the drums in the sacrificesto Moloch drowned the cry of the infants. But while themen of the world are thus wholly detained, and do sogreedily and purposely pass away the time with cares of tliislife and dealings in the v/orld, their consciences deal withthem as creditors with their debtors ; while they have anydoings, and are in trading, in policy they let them aloneand say nothing ; but if once down the wind, in sickness,poverty, disgrace, then conies sergeant after sergeant, arrestupon arrest, action upon action. All their sins are set inorder before them and fall full foul upon the now di>tressedsoul, as ravens upon the fallen sheep to pick out the veryeyes and heart of il, and to keep it down in the dungeon ofdespair for ever.[5.J Nor others, because they cozen themselves with aformal false conceit of a comfortable spiritual state, as didthe pharisee, Luke xv, 11 ; with a groundless presumptionthat they are in God's favour, as did those, Matt, vii, 22 ;