Returning unto God the great concernment of a covenant people. Or A sermon preached…

Q. 1. What Falling in respect of Iniquity is it, that the Lords People are subject unto?

Answ. 1. The Lords own People are subject to decays of Grace. Indeed they that are sincere, cannot fall totally and finally, yet they may be subject to partial Apostasies from God, and from his blessed ways. They may be, and too often are, on the losing hand, as to the degrees and measures of Grace. There may be sad intermissions as to the timely actings & exercise of Grace. The Spouse in the Canticles, confesseth that she was asleep. And all the Virgins, (wise as well as foolish) slept and slumbered. Mat. 25. 8. And it was said to the Church in Ephesus, Thou hast left (though not wholly lost) thy first Love, and that therefore they should remember whence they were Fallen, and do the first works. Rev. 2. 5. Intimating, that Grace was not so lively in them, nor were they so much in the practice of Religion, as sometimes they had been. Thus is it noted concerning Solomon, that in his Old age, when one would have thought, he should have walked most closely with God, His heart was turned after other Gods, and he did evil in the sight of the Lord. 1. Kin. 11. 4, 6. And Asa was much declined in his latter time: which judicious Interpreters ^(c)take to be the true meaning and intendment of ⟨p. 3⟩that Scripture, 2 Chron. 17. 3. where it is said of Jehoshaphat, that he walked in the first ways of David his Father, so it is expressed in our Translation, but in the Hebrew, the words run thus, He walked in the ways of David, of his father the first. Now Asa was Jehoshaphats Father, and his first ways were better then his last. He acted so in his latter times, as we do not read the like of any good man, mentioned in the Scripture: whence a judicious Divine