A treatise on comforting afflicted consciences - The Digital Puritan

AFFLICTED CONSCIENCES. 35put on stench instead of sweet smell ; baldness instead ofwell-set hair ; burning instead of beauty. Worms shallmake their nests ia your breasts, and shall eat out thosewanton windovvs and messengers of lust; yea, rottennessand stench, slime and filth shall ascend and sit down in thevery throne of beauty, and shall dwell between your eyebrows."All this is very woful ; and yet there is a thousand timesworse. Besides all this, thou that now layest about thee forthe world and wealth ; for transitory pelf and rotten pleasures,that liest soaking in luxury and pride, and vanity,and all kind of voluptuousness, shall most certainly veryshortly lie upon thy bed of death, like " a wild bull in a net,tuU of the fury of the Lord ;" either sealing thee up finally inthe desperate senselessness of thine own dead heart, with thespirit of slumber for everlasting vengeance even at the door,or else exemplarily enragiag the guilty conscience upon thatthy last bed with hellish horror even beforehand. For ordinarilythe more notorious servants of Satan and slaves oflust depart this life either like Nabal or Judas ; though moreby many thousands die like hard-hearted sots in security,than in despair of conscience. If it be so with thee, then,that thine heart when th .u shalt have received the sentenceof death against thyself die within thee, as Nabal's " ; andmost commonly," saith a worthy divine, " conscience inmany is secure at the time of death, God in his justice soplaguing an affected security in life with an inflicted securityat death ;— 1 say, then, thou wilt become as a stone,most prodigiously blockish ; as though there were no immortalityof the soui ; no loss of eternal bliss ; no tribunal inheaven ; no account to be made after this life ; no bsming inhell for ever. Which will make the never dying fire morescorching, and the ever-living worm more stinging, by howmuch thou wast more senseless and fearless of that fierylake into which thou wast ready to fall. " Death itself,"saith the same man, " cannot awake some consciences ; butno sooner come they into hell but conscience is avvakened tothe full, never to sleep more ;and then she teareth with, implacablefury, and teacheth forlorn wretches to know thatforbearance was no payment." But if it please God to takethe other course v/ith thee, and to let loose the cord of thyconscience upon thy dying bed ; thou wilt be strangled evenwith hellish horror upon earth, and damned above ground.That worm of hell which is a continual remorse and furiousreflection of the soul upon its own wilful folly, whereby ithath lost everlasting joys, and must now lie in endless,easeless, and remediless torments, is set on work whilst