The saints everlasting rest

Now the sinner reads and hears the reproofs of sin, as words of course; but when you mention his sin, he feels you speak at his very heart, and yet is contented you should show him the worst: he was wont to marvel, what made men keep such a stir against sin, what harm it was for a man to take a little pleasure; he saw no such heinousness in it. But now the case is altered; GOD hath opened his eyes to see its inexpressible vileness.

Now the sinner reads and hears the reproofs of sin, as words of course; but when you mention his sin, he feels you speak at his very heart, and yet is contented you should shew him the worst: he was wont to marvel, what made men keep such a stir against sin, what harm it was for a man to take a little pleasure; he saw no such heinousness in it. But now the case is altered; GOD hath opened his eyes to see its inexpressible vileness.

2. The soul in this great work is convinced and sensible, as of the evil of sin, so of its own misery by reason of sin. They who before read the threats of GOD's law, as men do the stories of foreign wars; now find it is their own story, and perceive they read their own doom, as if they found their names written in the curse, or heard the law say, as Nathan, thou art the man. The wrath of GOD seemed to him but as a storm to a man in a dry house: but now he finds the disease is his own, and feels the pains in his own bowels. In a word, he finds himself a condemned man, dead and damned in point of law, and that nothing is wanting but mere execution to make him absolutely and irrecoverably miserable.

Whether you will call this a work of the law or gospel, it is a work of the Spirit wrought in some measure in all the regenerate: And though some judge it unnecessary bondage, yet it is beyond my conceiving, how he should come to Christ for pardon, that first ⟨p. 74⟩