A treatise on comforting afflicted consciences - The Digital Puritan

afflictp:d consciences. 207CHAP. XVI.Two Cases wherein pangs of Conscience are not healed, whatever theyseem.For a more full discovery of this mischief, and preventionof those miseries which may ensue upon this last miscarriage,let me acquaint you with four or five passages out ot pangsof conscience, which still lead amiss and leave a man tothe devil still, and for all his fair warning by the smart ota wounded spirit, drown him in the works of darkness andways of death.1. Some, when by the piercing power and application ofthe law, their consciences are pressed with the terrible andintolerable weight of their sins ; and the worm that neverdies, which hath been all this while dead drunk with sensualpleasures, is now awaked by the hand of Divine justice,and begins to sting ; they presently with unspeakable rageand horror fall into the most abhorred and irrecoverabledungeon of despair. The flames of eternal fire seize uponthem even in this life ; they are in hell upon earth, anddamned, as it were, above ground. Such they are commonlywho all their life long have been contemners of thegospel ministry ; scorners of the " good way ;" quenchers ofthe Spirit ; revolters from good beginnings and profession ofgrace ; harbour ers of some secret, vile, abominable lusts intheir hearts against the light of their conscience ;closeagents for popery and profaneness ;plausible tyrants againstthe power of godliness, and such other like notorious championsof the devil, and infamous rebels to the Highest Majesty: whom, since they have been such, and have so desperatelyand so lung "despised the riches of his goodnessand forbearance and long suflering, leading them to repentance,"God most justly leaves now in the evil day : whenonce the hot transitory gleam of worldly pleasures is past,and his judgments begin to grow upon their thoughts like atempestuous storm ; and death to stand before them irresistiblelike an armed man ; and sin to lie at the door likea bloodhound ; and the guilty conscience to gnaw uponthe heart like a vulture, &c. ;—I say, then he leaves themin his righteous judgment to sink or swim, " to eat thefruit of their own ways" to the fulness of that unquenchablewrath which by their innumerable sinful provocations,impenitency, and unbelief, they liave " treasured up againstthis day of wrath." That raging worm, which never diesin the damned, and naturally breeds in every graceless