A treatise on comforting afflicted consciences - The Digital Puritan

—AFFLICTED CONSCIENCES. 321were able to put a man into the very mouth of hell. ButI speak of God's more ordinary ways and dealings with thesons of men ; and so I say, God may sometimes, for somehidden and holy ends seen and seeming good to his heavenlywisdom, bring a less heinous sinner through extraordinaryhorror out of his natural state into the goodway.CHAP. IX.A Second and Third Thing to be considered for the cure of the formerMalady.2. Aggkavation of horror is occasioned, terrors and troublesmay be multiplied and enlarged, in our enlargementfrom the state of darkness and chains of the devil, by(1.) Some precedents and preparatives which God sometimesin his unsearchable wisdom doth immediately premiseor suffer to fall out, as,1st. Some heavy cross and grievous affliction, to makethe power of the law more forcible and fall more heavilyupon our stubborn and stony hearts. This we see in Manasseh,who was, as it were, terrified out of his bloody andabominable courses by the heaviness and horror of hischains, and so " was humbled greatly before the God ofhis fathers," (2 Chron. xxxiii, 12). God's extraordinaryangry visitations make men many times cry with troubledand grieved hearts, " Come, let us turn unto the Lord, hehath wounded us," &c.2d, Strange terrors sometimes arising from external accidents,yea hidden natural causes, uncouth visions, andapparitions full of amazement and fear, bodily distempers,horrible injections, hideous thoughts, whereby theyare mightily affrighted beforehand, and prepared to passthrough the pangs of the new birth more terribly.3d. Some heinous and crying sin which he suffers some tofall into, and immediately upon it awakes the conscience.That almighty physician, who is able to bring health out ofpoison, death out of life, light out of darkness, heaven outof hell, may by accident as it were prepare one to conversionby giving him over to the height of some one or moreabhorred abominations and crimson sins ; as we may see inPeter's hearers (Acts ii), Paul, Manasseh, the sinful woman,publicans and harlots, left to the killing of Christ,spilling the blood of the saints, those horrible outrages, ex-