The justice of God in the damnation of sinners. Illustrated in a sermon

Now ministers meet their people in order to enlighten and awaken the consciences of sinners; setting before them the great evil and danger of sin, the strictness of God's law, their own wickedness of heart and practice, the great guilt they are under, the wrath that abides upon them, and their impotence, blindness, poverty, and helpless and undone condition: But all is often in vain; they remain still, notwithstanding all their ministers can say, stupid and unawakened, and their consciences unconvinced. But it will not be so at their last meeting at the day of judgment; sinners, when they shall meet their minister before their great Judge, will not meet him with a stupid conscience: They will then be fully convinced of the truth of those things which they formerly heard from him, concerning the greatness and terrible majesty of God, his holiness, and hatred of sin, and his awful justice in punishing of it, the strictness of his law, and the dreadfulness and truth of his threatenings, and their own unspeakable guilt and misery: And they shall never more be insensible of these things: The eyes of conscience will now be fully enlightened, and never shall be blinded again: The mouth of conscience shall now be opened, and never shall be shut any more.

Now ministers me•• with their people, in public and private, in order to enlighten them concerning the state of their souls; to open and apply the rules of God's word to them, in order to their searching their own hearts, and discerning the state that they are in: But now ministers have no infallible discerning the state of the souls of their people; and the most skilful of them are liable to mistakes, and often are mistaken in things of this nature: nor are the people able certainly to know the state of their minister, or another's state; very often those pass among them for saints, and, it may be, eminent saints, that are grand hypocrites; and on the other hand, those are sometimes censured▪ or hardly received into their charity, that are indeed some of God's jewels. And nothing is more common than for men to be mistaken concerning their own state: Many that are abominable to God, and the children of his wrath, think highly of themselves, as his precious saints and dear children. Yea, there is reason to think, that often some that are most bold in their confidence of their safe and happy state, and think themselves not only true saints, but the most eminent saints in the congregation, are in a peculiar manner a smoke in God's nose. And thus it undoubtedly often is in those congregations where the word of God is most faithfully dispensed, notwithstanding