Twenty sermons preached at Oxford before His Majesty, and elsewhere

2. But what's become of the soul now? Why, if thou didst but see the cursed soul, that thou carriest in thy body, it would amaze thee. These outward curses, are but flea-bitings to the blow that is given to the soul of an unregenerate man, that deadness of spirit, that is within: didst thou but see the curse of God that rests upon the soul of this man, even while he is above ground, it would even astonish thee.

1. Consider there are two kinds of blows that God gives unto the soul of an unregenerate man. The one is a terrible blow. The other, which is the worst of the two, is an insensible blow. The sensible blow is when God lets the conscience out, and makes it fly into the face of a man, when the conscience shall come, and terribly accuse a man for what he hath done. This blow is not so usual as the insensible blow; but this insensible is far more heavy. But as it falls out, that as in this World, sometimes before the glory in Heaven, the Saints of God have here a glimpse of Heaven, and certain communion with God and Christ, certain love tokens, a white stone, a new name engraven, which no man knoweth, but he that receiveth it: And this is the testimony of a good conscience, which is hidden joys: Privy intercourse ⟨p. 52⟩is between Christ and them, secret kisses: And as Gods Children do, as it were, meet with a Heaven upon Earth sometimes, and are, as we read of Paul, caught up into the third Heaven, which to them is more then all the things in the World besides: So the wicked have sometimes flashes of Hell in their consciences. If you had but seen men in the case that I have seen them in, you would say they had an Hell within them; they would desire rather, and they have expressed it, to be torn in pieces by wild horses, so they might be freed from the horrors in their consciences. When the conscience recoils and beats back upon it self, as a musket o'er charged, it turns a man over and over: And this is a terrible thing. This sometimes God gives men in this World: And mark, where the word is most powerfully preached, there is this froth most raised, which is the cause many desire not to come where the word is taught, because it galls their consciences, and desire the Mass rather, because they say, the Mass bites not: They desire a dead Minister, that would not rub up their consciences, they would not be tormented before the time: They would so, but it shall not be at their choice, God will make them feel here the fire of Hell, which they must endure for ever hereafter. This is the sensible Blow, when God lets loose the conscience of a wicked man; and he needs no other fire, no other worm to torment, nothing else to plague him: he hath a weapon within him, his own conscience, which if God lets loose, it will be Hell enough.