The application of redemption

We must see it clearly in its own Nature, its Native §1colour and proper hue: It's not every slight conceit, not every general and cursory, confused thought or careless consideration that will serve the turn, or do the work […], we are all sinners; it is my infirmity, I cannot help it; my weakness, I cannot be rid of it; no man lives without faults and follies, the best have their failings, In many things we offend all. But alas all this wind shakes no Corn, it costs more to see sin aright than a few words of course; It's one thing to say sin is thus and thus, another thing to see it to be such; we must look wishly and steadily upon our distempers, look sin in the face, and discern it to the full; the want whereof is the cause of our mistaking our estates, and not redressing of our hearts and ways, Gal. 6. 4. Let a man prove his own work. Before the Goldsmith can sever and see the Dross asunder from the Gold, he must search the very bowels of […] […], and try it by touch, by cast, by hammer, and by fire; and then he will be able to speak by proof what it is; So here. We perceive sin in the crowd and by hearsay, when we […] some common […] customary expressions taken up by persons in their common converse, and so report what others speak, and yet never knew the Truth, what either others or we say, but we do not single out our corruptions and survey the loathsomeness of them, as they come naked in their own Natures; this we ought to do: There is great odds betwixt the knowledge of a Traveller, that in his own person hath taken a view of many Coasts, past through many Countries, and hath there taken up his abode some time, and by Experience hath been an Eye-witness of the extreme cold, and scorching heats, hath surveyed the glory and beauty of the one, the barrenness and meanness of the other; he hath been in the Wars, and ⟨p. 54⟩seen the ruin and desolation wrought there; and another that sits by his fire side, and happily reads the story of these in a Book, or views the proportion of these in a Map, the odds is great, and the difference of their knowledge more than a little: the one saw the Country really, the other only in the story; the one hath seen the very place, the other only in the paint of the Map drawn. The like difference is there in the right discerning of sin;