An Alarm to Unconverted Sinners

But, Lord, how insufficient am I for this work! I have been many a year wooing for thee, but the damsel would not go with me. Lord, what a task hast thou set me to! Alas wherewith shall I pierce the scales of Leviathan, or make the heart to feel that is firm as a stone, hard as a piece of the nether millstone! Shall I go and lay my mouth to the grave, and look when the dead will obey me and come forth? shall I make an oration to the rocks? or declaim to the mountains, and think to move them with arguments? shall I give the blind to see? From the beginning of the world was it not heard, that a Man opened the eyes of the blind. But thou, O Lord, canst pierce the scales, and prick the heart of the sinner. I can but shoot at rovers, and draw the bow at a venture; do thou direct the arrow between the joints of the harness, and kill the sin, and save the soul of the sinner, that casts his eye into these labours.

But, Lord, how insufficient am I for this work! I have been many a year wooing for thee, but the damsel would not go with me. Lord, what a task hast thou set me to! Alas wherewith shall I pierce the scales of Leviathan, or make the heart to feel that is firm as a stone, hard as a piece of the nether milstone! Shall I go and lay my mouth to the grave, and look when the dead will obey me and come forth? shall I make an oration to the rocks? or declaim to the mountains, and think to move them with arguments? shall I give the blind to see? From the beginning of the world was it not heard, that a Man opened the eyes of the blind. But thou, O Lord, canst pierce the scales, and prick the heart of the sinner. I can but shoot at rovers, and draw the bow at a venture; do thou direct the arrow between the joints of the harness, and kill the sin, and save the soul of the sinner, that casts his eye into these labours.

But I must apply my self to you, to whom I am sent: yet I am at a great loss. Would to God I knew how to go to work with you! ⟨p. 3⟩would I stick at the pains? God knoweth, you your selves are my witnesses, how I have followed you in private, as well as in public, and have brought the Gospel to your doors; testifying to you the necessity of the new birth, and persuading you to look in time after a found and through change. Beloved, I have not acted a part among you, to serve my own advantage; our Gospel is not yea, and nay. Have not you heard the same truths from the Pulpit, by public labours, and by private letters, by personal instructions? Brethren, I am of the same mind as ever, that holiness is the best choice; that there is no entering into Heaven, but by the strait passages of the second birth: that without holiness you shall never see God,