The touchstone of sincerity, or, The signs of grace and symptoms of hypocrisy opened…The touchstone of sincerity, or, The signs of grace and symptomes of hypocrisie opened…

•4.) Fourthly, the behaviour and carriage of the soul with respect to subjection •o the commands of sin, shows what our estate ⟨p. 100⟩and condition is. This will separate dross from gold. All unregenerate men ar• the servants of Sin, they subject themselves […] its commands. This the Scripture sometime calls a Conversation in the lusts of the flesh, Eph▪ 2. 3. sometimes the selling of themselves to sin 1 King. 21. 20. Now as a judicious Divin• observes, tho' the Children of God complain with Paul, Rom. 7.14, 15. that they are sold under sin, ¹yet there is a vast difference betwixt these two the Saints are sold to it by Adam, but other by their own continued consent. But to she• you the difference in this matter, I conceive it necessary to show, wherein the reigning power of sin doth not consist, and the• wherein it doth: that you may plainly discern who are in subjection to the reigning power of their corruptions, and who ar• not. Now there be divers things common both to the regenerate and unregenerate and we cannot say the dominion of sin lie in any or in all of them, viz. abstractly an simply considered.