A treatise on comforting afflicted consciences - The Digital Puritan

218 INSTRUCTIONS FOR COMFORTINGwhich he was ready to pass, and fearfulness of that infernalfiery lake from which no greatness can privilege gracelessmen. I fear there are many time-serving ministers of the truereligion also, who are ready to do proportionable service toungodly great ones upon whom they depend, by promisingthem life. But many and dreadful are the mistakings andmiseries which fall upon the souls of men, both patientsand by-standers, by these flattering formal visitations andfuneral panegyrics which ordinarily follow after. Happythen, and hopeful is that man, who in the troubles of hissoul meets with that " one of a thousand" (Job xxxiii, 23),with those sons both of consolation and thunder, who areas able, ready, and willing rightly to bind up a bruisedspirit with the balm of mercy and promises of life, as tobreak in pieces a stubborn heart with the terrors of thelaw : who, as they labour in the first place to frighten menout of their sinful courses into penitent dejections of conscience,a needful preparative to a saving conversion, sothey have learned both speculatively and experimentally toconduct them through the pangs of the new birth to soundcomfort in Christ, mortification, new obedience, walkingwith God, &c.CHAP. XVIII.Three Cases more, wherein the pangs of Conscience are not healed.4. Others there are who pass out of trouble of consciencefor sin into some more tolerable courses for the time tocome ;bui yet not thoroughly and savingly into the truthand pursuit of Christianity. For when Satan once perceivesthat sorrow for sin lies so heavy upon a man's heart,and the rage of guiltiness doth sting him still with suchrestless anguish, that in all likelihood it will at lengthdraw and drive him to some alteratiou at least, and workout at last some measure of amendment, then doth he, outof an insatiable hellish thirst to hold him still in his clutches,bend and employ all his power and policy to make himsatisfy himself, and rest finally, as sufficiently fitted forsalvation, in some partial, insufficient, half conversion ;and to sit down contentedly with religious forms only, andsome outward reformation. The devil's first desire in workingour destruction is to keep a man who is notoriouslynaught in the highest strain of impiety ; a traitor in grain.