A treatise on comforting afflicted consciences - The Digital Puritan

318 INSTRUCTIONS FOR COMFORTINGsecutors, who although he hath shined all the while " as alight in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation,"yet they were ever so far from being heated with love ofheavenly things by his holy life, or won unto good by hisgracious example, that like so many bats and owls, impatientof all spiritual light, they did either fly from it as far as theycould in affection and practice, if not in habitation, or fellupon it fiercely with their envenomed claws of spite andcruelty, to extinguish quite, if it were possible, such blessedbeams of saving light ; and to darken, with hellish mists ofignorance and ill life, the place where they live. Theywillfully blinded themselves with a pestilent conceit, thathis sincerity was nothing but hypocrisy ; his holiness onlyhumour ; his forwardness f.tntasticalness, his sanctificationsingularity. And thereupon resolved and boisterously combinedagainst him with all their policy, purses, and possibilities,like those ungodly ones mentioned in the book ofWisdom, " Let us lie in wait for the righteous ; because heis not for our turn, and he is clean contrary to our doings ;he upbraideth us with our offending the law, and objectethto our infamy the transgressings of our education," &cc. Isay, God may sutler such a man upon his death-bed to fallinto some more extraordinary observable discomfort anddistress of conscience ; of which those graceless wretchestaking notice, may thereby be made desperately obstinateand hardened in their lewd and carnal courses. For seeingGod's hand upon him in that fearful manner, and wantingthe spirit of discerning, they conclude most peremptorily,that notwithstanding his great shows, he was most certainlybut a counterfeit. And so themselves become many timesupon that occasion most implacable enemies to grace andall good men. They are more strongly locked up in thearms of the devil, faster nailed to formality or good-fellowship; and, which is the perfection of their madness andmisery, " bless themselves in their hearts," saying merrilyto their brethren in iniquity: "You see now what thesemen are, which make themselves so holy and are so hotin religion : these are the fellows which pretend to be soscrupulous and precise ; and of that singular strain of sanctitythat they think none shall be saved but themselves. Yousee in this man the desperate end of such hypocriticalpuritans." Thus the glory of God's justice is justly magnified,by letting them grow stark blind who wilfully shuttheir eyes against the light of grace, by giving ihem over toa reprobate mind v.'ho so maliciously hated to be reformed ;and so too often they walk on for ever after, with confidenceand hardness of heart which cannot repent, in a peipetual