The application of redemption

INSTRUCTION, Sound contrition and brokenness ¹of heart brings a strange & a sudden alteration into the world, varies the price and value of things and persons beyond imagination, turns the market upside down; makes the things appear as they be, & the persons to be honoured and respected as they are in truth, that look what the truth determines, reason approves, and Conscience witnesseth, that account is current in the hearts and […] of those, whose hearts have been pierced with godly sorrow for their sins. Because […] not by outward appearance as it is the guise of men […] corrupt minds, but upon experience, that which they have found and felt in their own hearts, what they have seen and judged in their own spirits, they cannot but see so and judg so of others. Those who were mocked as men full of new wine, are now the precious servants of the Lord, flouted to their […] not long since, now they attend them, honour and reverence them, yea fall at their very […]. It was before men and drunkards, now men and brethren, the world you see is well amended but strangely altered. It was said of John Baptist the fore-runner of our Saviour, and the scope of […] doctrine was mainly to prepare the way for the Lord, it's said of him that Elijah is come and hath reformed all, […] a new face […] frame in the profession of the ⟨p. 558⟩Gospel, Math. 17. 11. Turned the disobedient to the wisdom of the just men, the hearts of children to the fathers, that though they were so degenerate that Abraham would not own them had he been alive, yet when the Ministry of John had hammered and melted them for the work of our Saviour, they became to be wholly altered, their judgments altered and their carriage also. For in truth the reason why men see not the loathsomeness of other mens sins, or else have not courage to pass a righteous sentence upon them, It is because they were never convinced to see the Plague sore of their own corruptions, never had their hearts affected with the evil of them in their own experience but their own Conscience was misled out of authority, and stifled that it durst not outwardly condemn that which inwardly they could not but approve. They therefore who either do not see their own evil, or dare not proceed in open judgment to condemn, they will either not see or not pass a […] judgment upon others, so Paul intimates to Agrippa,