A treatise on comforting afflicted consciences - The Digital Puritan

;78 INSTRUCTIONS FOR COMFORTINGYet those few enlightened souls whose eyes have been happilyopened by spiritual eye-salve to " turn from darknessto light, and from the power of Satan unto God," behold adouble deformity and ugliness in so foul a monster, deceitfullydressed in the devil's counterfeit colours, and gildedover garishly in his personated angelical glory.3. It is most filthy : far filthier than the most offensivecollection of all the most filthy, fulsome, and loathsomethings in the world. And it must needs be so ; for whatevera man can conceive to be most contrary, distant, andopposite to the infinite clearness, purity, sweetness, beauty,and goodness of God ; all that and much more is sin in thehighest degree. Hence it is, that in the scriptures it iscompared to the filthiest mire, in which a sow will lie downto cool and cover herself ; to the loathsome vomit, not of aman, but of a dog (2 Pet. ii, 22) ; to the unsavoury poisonousdamp which rotten carcasses exhale out of openedgraves ( Kom. iii, 13) ; tomenstruousfilth (Ezek. xxxvi, 17)to the dirt under the nails, or the offensive exudations of thebody, or the putrified matter of some pestilent ulcer ; to thevery refuse which nature having severed from the purerpart of the meat, thrusts out of the stomach and casts intothe draught ; to the filthiness, ptdlutions, and impurities ofthe world, so called by a singularity, for sin is the transcendentfilth of the woild (2 Pet. ii, 20); to all the uncleannessesfor which the purifications, cleansings, washings,and sprinklings were appointed in the Levitical law ; toabomination itself ( Ezek. xxii, 2). Nay, and yet further,which makes for the further detestation of sin, whereas alloutward filth defiles only the body, this of sin, by thestrength and contagion of its insinuating poison, soaksthrough the flesh and the bone, and enters and eats intothe very "mind and conscience" (Tit. i, 16), defiles thepure and immortal soul of man. Hov/ long might we castdirt into the air before we were able to infect the brightshining beams of the sun ! Yet so filthy is sin, that atonce with a touch it infects the soul, a clearer and pureressence than it, and that with such a crimson and doubledyedstain, that the flood of Noah, when all the world waswater, could not wash it oft'. Neither at that last and dreadfulday, when this great universe shall be turned into a ballof fire for the purifying and lenewing of the heaven and theearth, yet shall it have no power to purge or cleanse theiea'^t sin out of the impenitent soul ; nay, the fire of hell,which burns night and day even through all eternity, shallnever be able to raze it out.4. It is most infectious, spits venom on all sides far and