The fourth (and last) volume of discourses, or sermons, on several scriptures

First,¹ Every quiet Conscience is not a clear Conscience. Some are lulled asleep in security, and their Consciences are quiet merely because they are insensible; it may be they have so harassed and wasted their Consciences by dreadful ⟨p. 338⟩Sins, so often mortally wounded them, that now they have not Strength enough to become quarrelsome and troublesome, and this they call Peace; indeed it is such a Peace as Galgathus reproaches the Romans with in Tacitus, when they had laid all wast, then they called it Peace: So these Sinners think they have good peaceable Consciences because they do not menace, torment and worry them; and, alas, how can they? their Consciences are murdered, there is no Sense nor Life left in them. This is no Peace, but a mere Solitude and Desolation of Conscience; and yet, believe it too, these quiet and peaceable Consciences will not be long so; at the Hour of Death, or if not then, the next moment after Death, these peaceable Consciences will be startled out of their Sleep, and with fearful Screeches fly in their Faces and roar so loud, that Heaven and Hell shall hear them. As in still Weather many times Matter is gathering for a Storm; so while Conscience seems so still and quiet, it is only gathering Matter for a Tempest, that will one Day pour upon your Heads; and O! how grievous will it be when those Consciences, that never gave them ⟨p. 339⟩an ill Word before, shall on a sudden drag them before the Tribunal of God, and there bitterly accuse them of those horrid Sins that once they seemed to take no notice of, and call for the severest execution of divine Wrath and Vengeance upon them? And possibly many that speak of the Peace of their Consciences, do not find it so neither, they are as far from a peaceable Conscience, as they are from a raving and a raging Conscience: A raving Conscience soon discovers it self in hellish Despair, but there are many whose Consciences do not rave and yet are never quiet, they give them many a secret twitch and gird at the very Heart, not outwardly discernible by others; as Thunder rumbles long in the Entrails of a Cloud, that never breaks forth into dreadful and terrible Cracks; so a Man may have a rumbling and a grumbling Conscience, a Conscience that may murmur and school upon him, and yet he may carry it as if all were calm and serene with him: