A treatise on comforting afflicted consciences - The Digital Puritan

REV. ROBERT BOLTON.xxxiHe made a proposal that they should repair to anEnglish seminary on the Continent ; and Mr. Bolton sofar acceded as to appoint a place and day in Lancashirein which they were to meet, embark, and be gone.Mr. Bolton himself was faithful to his engagement,but some unforeseen accident delayed the arrival ofMr. Anderton : he therefore escaped from his undertaking,and returned to Oxford. He soon after becameintroduced to an eminent clergyman at Oxford of thename of Peacock ; and through conversation with himGod was pleased to afford to him the knowledge of thevalue and method of obtaining eternal life. The process,however, was in his case different from that inmost others : it perhaps corresponded to his qualitiesand habits of mind, and to the purposes which God hadintended him to answer in after-life. Instead of theaffections yielding under the attractive influence of thelove of Christ to mankind, and of his being thus graduallybrought to acknowledge the error and danger ofhis ways, he appears to have been reclaimed with themost appalling terrors. Often did he rise from his bedin the night and pace his chamber under the deepestagitation, upon beholding himself obnoxious to thewrath of a just and holy God. The sins of his pastlife, which he had either forgotten or not estimated assuch, appeared to his distracted conscience in all theirmultitude and odiousness. He experienced also thegreatest augmentation of his misery from the assaultsof Satan, his mind being harassed with the most blasphemousand revolting ideas respecting the blessedGod. His biographer compares the strength of hisconvictions of sin to those felt by Luther, who in hisepistle to Melancthon describes himself as being ren-