The real Christian, or, A treatise of effectual calling wherein the work of God…

To return to our Heads: It is this discovery of God to the Soul, which make sin, guilt, and creature appear like themselves. We read in the new Covenant, this is one branch of it, They shall know the Lord, Jer. 31.34. Hos. 2.20. Jer. 24.7. Why, did not Israel know God now? Ask Israel, What is God? Israel will tell you, as many Children can from their Catechism. Yea, but this same Covenant-knowledge of God is another thing; not as if the meaning were only, they shall know God to be their God; that is another thing different from this: There is many a poor Christian, that knows God with a Covenant knowledge, that cannot say, I know him to be my God: Eternal purpose towards the elect now breaking forth, and his intention being to draw the elect Vessels into Covenant, the Lord beginneth the fulfilling of this Promise, some beams of that Majesty are let in, and now take that wanton heart which played with sin before, what sayest to sin now? doest thou see him against whom this sin rebels? Now take the profane heart, that could jest at, and scorn such Ministers and Sermons which told him of the wrath of God (as that profane Poet, abusing of a reverend Divine, upon this account, calls him, the Geneva Bull-Hell and Damnation a Pulpit full.) But what sayest now to the everlasting burnings, and devouring fire? Isa. 33.14. Doest now think this wrath of God is a thing to be dreaded or not? Oh now the Soul hath other manner of apprehensions concerning these things; it is a wonder that Christ himself did escape a jeer, because three times in that ninth of Mark he tells us. Where the worm never dies, and the fire is not quenched. ⟨p. 42⟩How gallantly these Canary-Poets will carry it, when that day cometh, that Kings of the earth, great men, and rich men, &c. shall hide themselves in dens, and in the rocks of the mountains, and say to the mountains and rocks, fall on us, Rev. 6.15, 16. we shall see. But oh the Atheism of our hearts. I thought it a sad answer a dying woman gave me (though she did not jeer at hell) when I went to visit her and being but a stranger to her, newly come to the Town, I treated with her concerning her spiritual estate, and upon examination I found her a stranger to Christ, had not the least savour or knowledge of any thing that concerned her salvation; nor did she care to hear me speak about any such things, though I saw she could not live many days: