A Continuation of morning-exercise questions and cases of conscience practically resolvedA Continuation of morning-exercise questions and cases of conscience practicaly resolved

I. It is too notorious that overmuch Sorrow for Sin, is not the ordinary Case of the World. A stupid blockish Disposition is the common Cause of mens perdition. The Plague of a hard Heart and seared Conscience keeps most from all due sense of Sin, or Danger, or Misery, and of all the great and everlasting Concerns of their guilty Souls. A dead sleep in sin doth deprive most of the use of Sense and Understanding; they do some of the outward Acts of Religion, as in a Dream; they are vowed to God in Baptism by others, and they profess to stand to it themselves; they go to Church, and say over the Words of the Creed, and Lords Prayer, and Commandments, they receive the Lords Supper, and all as in a Dream! They take on them to believe that Sin is the most hateful thing to God, and hurtful to man, and yet they live in it with delight and obstinacy; they dream that they repent of it, when no persuasion will draw them to forsake it, and while they hate them that would cure them, and will not be as bad and mad as they who feel in them any effectual sorrow for what is past, or effectual sense of their present badness, or effectual resolution for a new and holy Life. They dream that there is a Judgment, a Heaven and a Hell; but would they not be more affected with things of such unspeakable Consequence if they were awake? would they be wholly taken up with the Matters of the Flesh and World, and scarce have a serious thought or word of Eternity, if they were awake? O how sleepily and senselessly do they think, and talk, and hear of the great Work of mans Redemption by Christ, and of the need of Justifying and Sanctifying Grace, and of the Joys and Miseries of the next Life, and yet they say that they believe them! When we preach or talk to them of the greatest things, with the greatest evidence, and plainness, and earnestness that we can, we speak as to the dead, or to men asleep; they have Ears, and hear not; nothing goeth to their hearts. One would think that a man that reads •n Scripture, and believes the everlasting Glory offered, and the dreadful punishment threatened, and the necessity of ⟨p. 265⟩Holiness to Salvation, and of a Saviour to deliver us from Sin and Hell, and how sure and near such a passage into the unseen world is to us all, should have much ado to moderate and bear the sense of such overwhelming things.

I. It is too notorious that overmuch Sorrow for Sin, is not the ordinary Case of the World. A stupid blockish Disposition is the common Cause of mens perdition. The Plague of a hard Heart and seared Conscience keeps most from all due sense of Sin, or Danger, or Misery, and of all the great and everlasting Concerns of their guilty Souls. A dead sleep in sin doth deprive most of the use of Sense and Understanding; they do some of the outward Acts of Religion, as in a Dream; they are vowed to God in Baptism by others, and they profess to stand to it themselves; they go to Church, and say over the Words of the Creed, and Lords Prayer, and Commandments, they receive the Lords Supper, and all as in a Dream! They take on them to believe that Sin is the most hateful thing to God, and hurtful to man, and yet they live in it with delight and obstinacy; they dream that they repent of it, when no perswasion will draw them to forsake it, and while they hate them that would cure them, and will not be as bad and mad as they who feel in them any effectual sorrow for what is past, or effectual sense of their present badness, or effectual resolution for a new and holy Life. They dream that there is a Judgment, a Heaven and a Hell; but would they not be more affected with things of such unspeakable Consequence if they were awake? would they be wholly taken up with the Matters of the Flesh and World, and scarce have a serious thought or word of Eternity, if they were awake? O how sleepily and senselesly do they think, and talk, and hear of the great Work of mans Redemption by Christ, and of the need of Justifying and Sanctifying Grace, and of the Joys and Miseries of the next Life, and yet they say that they believe them! When we preach or talk to them of the greatest things, with the greatest evidence, and plainness, and earnestness that we can, we speak as to the dead, or to men asleep; they have Ears, and hear not; nothing goeth to their hearts. One would think that a man that reads n Scripture, and believes the everlasting Glory offered, and the dreadful punishment threatned, and the necessity of