A treatise on comforting afflicted consciences - The Digital Puritan

346 INSTRUCTIONS FOR COMFORTINGown experience and precedency might sweetly inform anddirect such a poor panting soul in a comfortable way to comeout of the place of dragons and depths of sorrow, by teachingand telling him the manner and means of his rising andrecovery. Meditations of God's singular goodness and extraordinarymercy to himself, his church, and childienaforetime, gave the first lift, as it were, to raise his droopingsoul out of the dust. And no doubt ever since the sameconsideration, by the blessing of God, hath brought againmany a bruised spirit from the very gates of hell and brinkof despair. And in his happy perusal of ancient times, andGod's compassions of old, it is very probable that his memoryfirst met with Adam, a most wonderful and matchlesspattern of God's rarest mercies to a most forlorn wretch.For he was wofully guilty by his transgression of castingboth himself and all his sons and daughters from the creationto the world's end out of Paradise into the pit of hell,and also of poisoning with the cursed contagion of originalcorruption, the souls and bodies of all that ever were orshall be born of woman, the Lord Jesus only excepted.And yet this man, as best divines suppose, though he hadcast away himself and undone all mankind, was received tomercy. Let never poor soul, then, while the world lasts,upon true and timely repentance, suffer the heinousnessand horror of his former sins, whatsoever they have been,to hinder his hopeful access unto the throne of grace, forpresent pardon of them all ; or at any time afterward confoundhis comfort and confidence in God's gracious promises.Thus, no doubt, the weary soul of this m.an of Godwaded further into those bottomless seas of mercies, manifestedand made good from time to time upon his servants.His heavy heart might sweetly refresh and repose itselfupon the contemplation of God's never-failing compassionin not casting off Auron everlastingly for his fall into mosthorrible idolatry ; in not suffering the murmuring and rebelliousJews to perish all and utterly in the wilderness,considering their many prodigious provocations and impatiencies,&c. But at length, as we may see in the fore-citedpsalm, his soul sets its triumphant Selali upon that great andmiraculous deliverance at the Red Sea, one of the mostglorious and visible miracles of mercy that ever shone fromheaven upon the sons of men, and also a blessed type of thesalvation of all truly penitent and perplexed souls from thehellish Pharaoh and all infernal powers, in the Red Sea ofour Saviour's blood. How fairly now and feelingly mightthese experimental instructions, and this passage of proof,trodden and marked out by this holy man, enlighten and