The Soul's Conflict with Itself

When therefore Conscience joining ⟨p. 357⟩with Satan, sets out thy sin in its •ours, labour thou by faith to set out God in his colours, infinite in mercy and loving kindness. Here lies the art of a Christian; It is divine Rhetoric thus to persuade and set down the soul. Thy sins are great, but Adams was greater, who being so newly advanced above all the creatures, and taken into so near an acquaintance with God, and having ability to persist in that condition if he would, yet willingly overthrew himself and all his whole posterity, by yielding to a temptation, which though high (as being promised to be like unto God,) yet such as he should and might have resisted; No sin we can commit, can be a sin of so tainting and spreading a nature, yet as he fell by distrust, so he was recovered by trusting, and so must we by relying on a second Adam, whose obedience and righteousness from thence ¹reigns, to the taking away not only of that one sin of Adam, and ours in him, but of all, and not only to the pardon of all sin, but to a right of everlasting ⟨p. 358⟩life. The Lord thinks himself disparaged, when we have no higher ²thoughts of his mercy, then of our sins, when we bring God down to our Model, when as, the heavens are not so much higher then the earth, then his thoughts of ³love and goodness, are above the thoughts of our unworthiness. It is a kind of taking away the Almighty, to limit his boundless mercy in Christ, within the narrow scantling of our apprehension; yet infidelity doth this, which should stir up in us a loathing of it above all other sins. But this is Satan's fetch, when once he hath brought us into sins against the Law, then to bring us into sins of a higher nature, and deeper danger, even against the blessed Gospel, that so there may be no remedy, but that mercy it self might condemn us.

When therefore Conscience joyning ⟨p. 357⟩