The Soul's Preparation for Christ

First, let me show you what this piercing or pricking of the heart is.

First, let me shew you what this piercing or pricking of the heart is.

Secondly, what is meant by heart. You must know, that sound sorrow, or sorrow soundly set on, is here meant by pricking, and this word pricking resembles sorrow in three degrees: For the word in the original imports not only a bare pricking, but a searching quite through; and we have no word in our English tongue to answer the ⟨p. 129⟩same word, but only a shiverednesse of soul all to pieces. I say there are three things wherein pricking resembles sorrow. First, the body cannot be pricked, but there must be some pain, some grief, some trouble wrought by it, and accompanying of it. Secondly, it is the separation of one part from another, as the natural Philosophers conceive, and as the Physician gives us to understand, it is the sundering of two parts. Thirdly, the parts being thus pricked, there is the letting of it out, and if any blood or water be in that part thus pricked, so answerably in this sound sorrow in heart, there are three things; I mean in that sorrow which is set home by the Almighty: First, there is a great grief and vexation of soul: Secondly, by reason of the burden that lieth upon the heart, that cursed knot, and union, and combination between sin and the soul comes in some measure to be severed and parted; the soul being thus grieved with the sin, is content to be severed from it: this is the thing we aim at. Thirdly, this knot of corruption being loosened, and this closure being broken, and the soldering between sin and the soul being removed, there is now a passage for the letting out of all these corruptions, that the heart may be taken from under the power of sin and be subject to the power and guidance of God: This is the true nature of sorrow. And by the way, consider this, unless the Lord should thus wound and vex the soul, the heart that prizeth corruption as a God (as every ⟨p. 130⟩