A complete body of divinity in two hundred and fifty expository lectures on the…A compleat body of divinity in two hundred and fifty expository lectures on the…

Me is living in a course of sin. Is called a departing from the living God, and every sin that […] committed is one step taken in this departure; and therefore by multiplied acts, men are sa•d to be gene far atory from Him, Jor. 2.5. Now the way in which this is done, is by strengthening and establishing sin in the heart; it fortifies the malignity, and maketh the man more vile: we are apt to say that acts strengthen the habit, and so it is here; and the more wickedness that men commit, the more wicked they grow. Hence that, 2 Tim. 3.13. Evil men shall wax worse and to rse. (3.) FOR this reason every actual sin makes the sinner more unreclaimable. There is a strange sort of obdurating is fluence that actual sin hath upon the hearts of men, and therefore the longer that men drive a trade or course of sin, the harder it is to reclaim them. There is emphasis in that, Jer. 13.23. Can the Ethiopian charge his skin, or the Leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil. It custom be a second nature, then custom in sin, must needs fortify the old nature that is in the sinner; and it is a thing very obvious, that the repeated acts of any sin do make men more in love with it, more shameless in the perpetration of it, more obstinately set to despise all counsels and warnings against it: Old sinners are therefore harder to treat and deal with than young ones. (4.) EVERY eduel sin also lays in more wrath for the sinner. And that also shows that his •ate is rendered more sinful by it. New wrath always holds a proportion to guilt, it is the wages that are paid the sinner for his work. Rom. 6.23. And it is said that God will render to men according to their deeds, Rom. 2.6. Now it is certain that original sin is equal in all the children of Adam; the slave of one by birth, is not more sinful than of another; so that on this account their wages are alike; and yet there will be found a vast difference in the day of judgment between the penal••es of these and those: it shall be more tolerable then for some than others, a•d w but because some have a greater ilt ewng to them than others; and that must be, because they have sinned more than they: for this reason we are told what sinners are doing, whiles they live and go on in the ways of sin, in,