Three treatises of the vanity of the creature. The sinfulness of sin. The life…Three treatises of the vanity of the creature. The sinfulnesse of sinne. The life…

Thirdly, by the conviction and manifestation of the Law; laying open the wideness of sin to the conscience. Man naturally is full of pride and self-love, apt to think well of his spiritual estate upon presumptions and principles of his own; and though many profess to expect salvation from Christ only, yet in as much as they will be in Christ no way but their own, that shows that still they rest in themselves for salvation. This is that deceit, and Guile of spirit, which the scripture mentions, which makes the way of a fool right in his own eyes. The Philosopher tells us of a Sea, wherein, by the hollowness¹ of the earth under it, or some whirling and attractive property that sucks the vessel into it, ships use to be cast away. in the midst of a calm: even so many mens souls do gently perish in the midst of their own securities and presumptions. As the fish Polypus changeth himself into the colour of the Rock, and then devours those that come thither for shelter: so do men shape their mis-persuasions into a form of Christ and faith in him, and destroy themselves. How many men rest in pharisaical generalities, plod on in their own civilities, moralities, external Justice, and unblameableness, account any thing indiscretion and unnecessary strictness that exceeds their own model; every man in Hell that is worse then themselves (I am not as this Publican) and others that are better, but in a fools paradise? and all this out of ignorance ⟨p. 133⟩of the Law. This here was the Apostles Case, when he lived after the strictest sect of the Pharisees▪ sin was dead, he esteemed himself blameless: but when the Commandment came, discovered its own spiritualness, & the carnalnesse of all his performances; removed his curtailed glosses, and presumptuous prejudices; opened the inordinateness of natural concupiscence, showed how the lest atom doth spot the soul the smallest omission qualify for hell, make the conscience see those infinite sparkles and swarms of lust that rise out of the hart, and that God is all eye to see, and all fire to consume every unclean thing, that the smallest sins that are, require the preciousest of Christs blood to expiate and wash them out; then he began to be co• vinc'd that he was all this while under the Hold of Sin, that his conscience was yet under the paw of the Lyon;