A treatise on comforting afflicted consciences - The Digital Puritan

—AFFLICTED CONSCIENCES. 373case is not singular and incompatible with a saving state ;for even the Son of God himself surpassed us in the samesufferinff. Secondly, That he might take the venom stingand guilt from this hateful and horrible temptation for allhis to the world 's.end. Thirdly, that having himself tastedthe devil's malice herein, he might out of his own feelingand experience more tenderly take to heart our troubles andterrors that way ; more mightily fortify and free our spiritsagainst the invasion and surprise of all such prodigious injectionsand ilashes of hell.2. It is the concurrent judgment of learned and holydivines, that these monstrously blasphemous thoughts andsatanical suggestions, resisted and not consented unto, arenot our sins, but our crosses. Or suppose there would beany tainture on our parts, yet condemning them in ourjudgments and abhorring them with our hearts, we may bemost assured that the blood of Jesus Christ is infinitelymore mighty and sovereign to take away the venom andvileness of them, than the devil malicious and subtle to inject.I will imagine that some bloody popish powder traitorhad pressed upon thee at that time, and suggested thus•'We are plotting, and purpose to blow up the parliamentwith gunpowder ; to destroy at one blov*' the king, queen,prince, nobility, (Sec, and afterward to cut the throats ofall the protestants in the kingdom ; to root the gospel outof it for ever, (S:c. ; and then to lay the fault upon the puritans."These and the like were injections of much horrorand monstrous nature. For thus men learned both in themystery of Christ and depths of state spoke of that plot atthat time :^"}lemember but the powder treason, the uttermostpart of all villany ; beyond which it is terra incognita,no man can devise what should be between hell and it*."" Consider but this day, the birthday, as I may term it, ofour country, in which both prince and people came, as itwere, anew into the world, delivered from the fearfulpowder vault, the very belly of hell and confusion, as Jonahsometime did from the belly of the whale t." "Beholdthat which so many millions of eyes, since those windowswere first opened in the head of man to behold the light ofheaven ; I say, so many millions of eyes in their severalgenerations now sunk down into their holes, and consumedwithin their tabernacles, never saw ; never those gloriousand constant lights of ihe firmament, those clear and crystallineeyes of nature, which walk through the whole worldand give no rest to their temples ; the sun that wandereth* Dr. WliitP, in his Sermon at Paul's Cross.t Dr. Tynlev, in his Sermon at Paul's Cross.2K