Mercy magnified on a penitent prodigal, or, A brief discourse

3. I call it the first legal work: my meaning is that God usually begins here, and so man for the most part is made to look upon the effect, before he discovers the cause, yea is led by it thereunto: he first sees and feels misery upon himself, and thence is led to see sin as the blameable & meritorious cause of all this misery. Man usually apprehends that he is condemned, before he apprehends sin to be the just condemnation, he feels himself miserable, before he justifieth God: for though it be sin which the law condemns, and hence he must so far see sin, as to know that he hath broken this law, yet he is not made to know sin in its just merit, but rather counts it a rigour of the law which makes him angry, with that and not with sin, Rom. 7. 5.

3. The proper effect of this conviction is to make him know and feel his perishing condition at present, that he is now going to perdition, viz. that he is under the curse of the law, bound over to eternal death, and that he is in the way to it, being held under the curse: the young man found himself perishing with hunger.

4. The efficacy of this conviction is that it unmasks the former delusion under which he lay, making him to see that he hath no remedy ⟨p. 96⟩against this misery either in himself, or in the world. In respect to himself, he finds that he hath spent all, in regard to the world, he finds that there is a famine in that land, and the conclusion that ariseth from hence is, that he is sensibly in what: i. e. he still wants that freedom from the curse, notwithstanding all God's favours, or his interest in the creature, this is the sum of this conviction: in which, though we must confess that there is a change now made in the sinner, yet it is not a saving change of his state. For,