A guide to godliness or a Treatise of a Christian life showing the dutiesA guide to godlynesse or a Treatise of a Christian life shewing the duties

§. Sect. 4 The peace of a good conscience proceedeth from spiritual life: of an evil, from senselessness and deadness.

§. Sect. 4 The peace of a good conscience proceedeth from spirituall life: of an euill, from senselesnesse and deadnesse.

Secondly, peace of conscience doth often proceed, not from spiritual life and motion, knowing and doing Gods will, but from the clean contrary, as from spiritual deadness, idleness and sloth in performing those duties which God requireth. For as when the body is dead, it hath no sense of sickness, wounds, or any hurt which can be done unto it: so when ⟨p. 75⟩the soul is dead in sin, the conscience hath no feeling of any weight that lieth upon it, nor of any wounds or sores of sin, wherewith it is mangled and deformed. And though corruption and guilt, like a gangrene, endangereth it, even unto the very death, yet it never complaineth, because it hath no sense and feeling of this mischief and misery. Besides, whilst men snort in this lethargy of sin, the devil never wakeneth nor disquieteth them, because he knoweth that this temporary rest will end in restless torments; and that the disturbing them of this ease may happen to awake them; and so having a sense of their disease, may work a desire and resolution to use all means whereby they may be cured. Neither will it stand with his policy, to let them, who are in his thraldom, and ready with all cheerfulness to do his will, come unto a sight and sense of their misery, which might make them desirous to come out of it; and therefore he never terrifieth their consciences with his tentations, but rather more blindeth their eyes, that they may not see their woeful state, and stoppeth their mouths, that they may not complain of it. And so our flesh and carnal corruptions are quiet, and never go about to disturb our peace, whilst we suffer them to live and reign in us: but when we go about to depose them from their regency, and like slaves, to bring them in subjection, then they rebel, and taking arms against the part regenerate, make us feel the uproars and garboils of a civill and intestine war. Thus corrupt humours in the body, though they endanger our lives, yet oftentimes are scarce discerned before they be moved; but when we stir them with some wholesome potion, which serveth to purge us of them, then they rage and make us more sick in our own sense then we were before. Thus the sea it self is calm and quiet, when there is no wind to move it, but in the time of a storm it rageth and roareth, as if it would at once swallow up the earth.