A treatise on comforting afflicted consciences - The Digital Puritan

"AFFLICTED CONSCIENCES. 105by their cowardly flatteries (especially if they any waysdepend upon them for maintenance, rising, and preferment) ;rather than conscientiously to discharge that trust laid uponthem by their great Lord and Master in heaven, uponanswerableness for the blood of those souls which shallperish by their temporizing silence and flattering unfaithfulness.Healers of the hurt of their hearers with sweetwords (Jer. vi, 14), while their souls aie bleeding by thewounds of sin unto eternal death. Preachers of smooththings (Tsa. xxx, 10); which kind of men, the greatest part,and all worldlings, wonderfully affect and applaud, thoughto their own everlasting undoing. They swell under suchteachers with a pharisaical conceit that they are as safefor salvation as the precisest of them all. But, alas ! theirhope is but like a hollow wall, which being put to any stresswhen the tempest of God's searching wrath begins to shakeit, in the time of a final trial of its truth and soundness, itshatters into pieces and comes to nought. Hear the prophet: Now go, write it before them in a table, and noteit in a book, that it may be for the time to come for everand ever : that this is a rebellious people, lying children,children that will not hear the law of the Lord : which sayto the seers, See not ; and to the prophets. Prophesy notunto us right things ; speak unto us smooth things ;prophesydeceits : get you out of the way, turn aside out ofthe path, cause the. Holy One of Israel to cease from beforeus. Wherefore thus saith the Holy One of Israel, Becauseye despise this word, and trust in oppression and perverseness,and stay thereon ; therefore this iniquity shall be toyou as a breach ready to fall, swelling out in a high wall,whose breaking cometh suddenly at an instant. And heshall break it as the breaking of the potter's vessel that isbroken in pieces ; he shall not spare : so that there shallnot be found in the bursting of it a sherd to take fire fromthe hearth, or to take water withal out of the pit" (Is'a.xxx,8—14). "Daubers with untempered mortar" (Ezek.xiii, 11),who erect in the conceits of those who are willing to be deludedby them (pharisees ai the best) a rotten building offalse hope, like a " mud-wall without straw, or mortar madeonly of sand without lime to bind it," which in fair weathermakes a fair show for a while ; but when abundance of rainfalls and winter comes, it moulders away and turns to mirein the streets. Their vain-confidence in prosperous times,before it come to the touchstone of the fiery trial by God'ssearching truth, may seem current ; but in the tempest ofGod's wrath, when the stormy winter's night of death approacheth,or at furthest at the judgment-seat of the just