The works of the reverend and faithful servant of Jesus Christ M. Richard Greenham,…The workes of the reuerend and faithfull seruant af Iesus Christ M. Richard Greenham,…

But admit we have some good witness of conscience, and our heart telleth us that we have been thankful, then must we think that the Lord doth try us, and will bring us to acknowledge that the thing we had, was his only gift to give and take away at his pleasure, and that it came¹ not from our selves as a thing to command at our beck. Howbeit usually and for the most part our unthankfulness is the cause of this dullness. Now, albeit this kind of buffeting ⟨p. 274⟩be grievous unto us, yet we must not desire utterly to be freed from it, because by it our pride is cured. For if that chosen vessel and servant of the Lord, Paul, so abounding in graces of the spirit, so frequent in fasting, so often in prayer, watchings and temptations, could not prevail against this sin: seeing by all these former ways he could not subdue this corruption in the flesh, we must not dream and delude our selves, that we using nothing so many helps of mortification, should utterly be rid from the same. When the Lord then shall exercise us with this prick in the flesh, although it is the messenger of Satan to buffet us: yet we must take hold on this to our comfort, that the Lord disposeth and moderateth it: and though we be often and long assaulted with it, yet still we must mislike it, we must still be grieved for it, and pray in Christ against it; we must tremble and² he humbled in our selves, that we should have such strange and doubting thoughts of Gods wisdom, power, majesty, and providence, &c. and yet in such manner and measure as knowing it to be Gods mercy, that by these means the Lord would keep us from more vile and enormous crimes. Further and besides this, the Lord giveth us to see such monsters of the mind, to forewarn us, and to make us more afraid of falling into the outward action of sin. Thus we have often temptations of unbelief, to make us to fear³ the falling from the faith; we have privy discourses of Popery, to show what a dangerous thing it were to be given over unto Popery; we have often vile thoughts of adultery, murder and theft, to drive us more earnestly to pray that we never fall into th••e sins in action.