A treatise on comforting afflicted consciences - The Digital Puritan

164 INSTRUCTIONS FOR COMFORTINGflatter him with their mouth, and they lied unto im with'their tongues. For their heart was not right with him."They promise very fair, and protest gloriously what mendedmen they will be if the Lord restore them. But all thesegoodly promises are but as a morning cloud, and as theearly dew. i hey are like those of a thief or murderer atthe bar, who being now cast, and seeing there is now noway but one, O what a reformed man would he be, if hemight be reprieved ! Antiochus, as the apocryphal book ofthe Maccabees reports (2 Maccab. ix), when the hand ofGod was upon him horribly, vowed excellent things. Owhat he would do : so and so extraordinarily for the peopleof God ! yea, and that "he himself also would become aJew ; and go through all the world that was inhabited anddeclare the power of God." But what was it, think you,that made this raging tyrant to relent and thus seeminglyrepent 1 "A pain of the bowels that was remediless cameupon him, and sore torments of the inner parts ; so that noman could endure to carry hini for his intolerable stench ;and he liimself could not abide his own smell." Manymay thus behave themselves upon their beds of death withvery strong shows and many boisterous representations oftrue turning unto God, whereas in truth and trial they are.as yet rotten at heart-root; and as yet no more comfortupon good ground belongs unto them than to those in thefore-cited places ; and if any spiritual physician in such acase do press it hand over head, or such a patient presumeto apply it, it is utterly misgrounded, misapplied. Hearwhat one of the worthiest divines in Christendom saith * :" Now put the case, one cometh to his ghostly father withsuch sorrow of mind as the terrors of a guilty conscienceusually do produce, and with such a resolution to castaway his sins as a man hath in a storm to cast away hisgoods ; not because he doth not love them, but because hefeareth to lose his life if he part not with them : doth nothe betray this man's soul, who putteth into his head thatsuch an extorted repentance as this, which hath not onegrain of love to season it witiial, will qualify him sufficientlyfor the receiving of an absolution ?" ike. And another,excellently instructed unto the kingdom of heaven t: " Repentanceat death is seldom sound. For it may seemrather to arise from fear of judgment, and a horror of hell,than for any grief for sin. And many seeming to repentaflectionately in dangerous sickness, when they have re-* Dr. Usher, in his Answer to a Jesuit's Challenge,t Dvke, of Kepenfance, chap. xvi.