A treatise on comforting afflicted consciences - The Digital Puritan

AFFLICTED CONSCIENCES. 15a good conscience. The glory, preciousness, and power ofwhich hidden treasure, purchased with the sale of all sin,doth many times shine most fairly upon the soul in thesaddest times, inspires for the most part into the hearts ofthe owners the greatest courage and constancy of spiiit, evenill the days of adversity and vexation, and enables them todigest and bear without any great wound or passion thosecrosses and cruelties which would break the back, and crushthe heart of the stoutest temporizer. Was there not a greatdeal of difference think you betwixt the heart of Hezekiah,who had walked before God " in truth and with a perfectheart" (Isa. xxxviii, 3) when he heard the news of deathfrom the mouth of the prophet, and the heart of Belshazzarwhen he saw the handwriting upon the wall t (Dan.v, 5,6.)Give me a great man who carries away the credit andcurrent of the times, with all bravery and triumph wallowsand tumbles himself in the glory and pleasures of the present; throw him from the transitory top of his heaven uponearth upon his last bed, present unto his eye at once theterrible pangs of approaching death, the rageful rnalice ofthe powers of hell, the crying wounds of his bleeding conscience,the hideous forms of his innumerable sins, his finalfarewell with all worldly delights, the pit of fire and brimstoneinto which he is ready to fall, and I tell you true, Iwould not endure an hour's horror of his woful heart, for hispresent paradise to the world's end. But on the other side,let me be the man whom the corruptions of the time confineto obscurity, who mourns in secret for the horrible abominationsand ci-ying sins that reign among us, who thinkstliat day best spent wherein he hath gathered most spiritualstrength against that last and sorest combat; and by themercies of God and humble dependence upon his omnipotentarm, I will look in the face the cruellest concurrence ofall those former terrors with confidence and peace.2. By this spiritual hoarding of comfortable provisionagainst the evil day, we may prevent a great deal of inipatience,dependence upon the arm of flesh, base fears, sinkingsof heart, unmanly dejections of spirit, desperate resolutions,and many passionate distempers of such raging anddistracted nature, which are wont to seize upon and surpriseunholy and unprepared hearts when the hand of Godis heavy upon them. How bravely and heroically did patient.Tob bear and break through a matchless variety and extremityof calamities and conflicts, the softest of whose suffer*ings would have struck full cold to the heart of many acarnalist, and made it to die vvithin him like a stone, asNabal's did ! One of the least, the loss of his goods, I am