A treatise on comforting afflicted consciences - The Digital Puritan

40 INSTRUCTIONS FOR COMFORTINGders, oppressions, malice, contempt. But at length theword so got within him and hampered him, and the terrorsof the Almighty took hold upon him with such irresistiblerage, that he came trembling and quaking unto that man ofGod whom he had so wickedly wronged, and dared not stira foot from him, for fear the devil should take him awayalive, or the earth open her mouth and swallow him upquick, or some other strange remarkable judgment seizeupon him suddenly, and brand him for a notorious beastand cursed castaway. So, or to such sense he spoke.(3.) Many of them come to very horrible, exemplary, andwoful ends. Pharaoh long since, by a dreadful confusion atthe Red Sea, was, as it were, hanged up in chains, a spectacleof terror for persecutors to all posterity, Antiochusswelling with anger, and breathing out fire in his rageagainst the people of God, did proudly protest, that " hewould come to Jerusalen, and make it a common buryingplace of the Jews. But the Lord Almighty, the God ofIsrael, smote him with an incuiable and invisible plague.For as soon as he had spoken these words, a pain of thebowels that was remediless came upon him, and sore tormentsof the inner parts. So that the worms rose up out ofthe body of this wicked man, and while he lived in sorrowand pain, his flesh fell avvay, and the filthiness of his smellwas noisome to all his army " (2 M