requires much time, and leaves a man in the same degree of hope of pardon, as in his restitution to the state of righteousness and holy living for which we covenanted in baptism. For we must know, that there is but one re pentance in a man's whole life, if repentance be taken in the proper and strict evangelical covenant sense, and not after the ordinary understanding of the world; that is, we are but once to change our whole state of life, from the power of the devil and his entire possession, from the state of sin and death, from the body of corruption, to the life of grace, to the possession of Jesus, to the kingdom of the Gospel; and this is done in the baptism of water, or in the baptism of the Spirit, when the first rite comes to be verified by God's grace coming upon us, and by our obedience to the heavenly calling, we working together with God. After this change, if ever we fall into the contrary state, and be wholly estranged from God and religion, and profess ourselves servants of unrighteousness, God hath made no more covenant of restitution to us; there is no place left for any more repentance, or entire change of condition, or new birth: a man can be regenerated but once; and such are voluntary, malicious apostates, witches, obstinate impenitent persons, and the like. But if we be overtaken by infirmity, or enter into the marches or borders of this estate, and commit a grievous sin, or ten, or twenty, so we be not in the entire possession of the devil, we are, for the present, in a damnable condition, if we die; but if we live, we are in a recoverable condition; for so we may repent often. We repent or rise from death but once, but from sickness many times; and, by the grace of God, we shall be pardoned, if so we repent. But our hopes of pardon are just as is the repentance; which, if it be timely, hearty, industrious, and effective, God accepts; not by weighing grains or scruples, but by estimating the great proportions of our life. A hearty endeavour, and an effectual general change, shall get the pardon; the unavoidable infirmities, and past evils, and present imperfections, and short interruptions, against which we watch, and pray, and strive, being put upon the accounts of the cross, and paid for by the holy Jesus. This is the state and condition of repentance: its parts and actions must be valued, according to the following rules.

Acts and Parts of Repentance.

1. He that repents truly, is greatly sorrowful for his past sins not with a superficial sigh or tear, but a pungent afflictive sorrow; such a sorrow as hates the sin so much, that the man would choose to die rather than act it any more. This sorrow is called in Scripture "a weeping sorely; a weeping with bitterness of heart; a weeping day and night; a sorrow of heart; a breaking of the spirit; mourning like a dove, and chattering like a swallow :"* and we may read the degree and manner of it by the lamentations and sad accents of the prophet Jeremy, when he wept for the sins of the nation: by the heart-breaking of David, when he mourned for his murder and adultery: and the bitter weeping of St. Peter, after the shameful denying of his master. The expression of his sorrow differs according to the temper of the body, the sex, the age, and circumstance of action, and the motive of sorrow, and by many accidental tendernesses, or masculine hardnesses; and the repentance is not to be estimated by the tears, but by the grief; and the grief is to be valued, not by the sensitive trouble, but by the cordial hatred of the sin, and ready actual dereliction of it, and a resolution, and real resisting its consequent temptations. Some people can shed tears for nothing, some for any thing; but the proper and true effects of a godly sorrow are, fear of the Divine judgments, apprehension of God's displeasure, watchings and strivings against sin, patiently enduring the cross of sorrow (which God sends as their punishment,) in accusation of ourselves, in perpetually begging pardon, in mean and base opinions of ourselves, and in all the natural productions from these, according to our temper and constitution. For if we be apt to weep in other accidents, it is ill, if we weep not also in the sorrows of repentance: not that weeping is of itself a duty, but that the sorrow, if it be as great, will be still expressed in as great a manner.

2. Our sorrow for sins must retain the proportion of our sins; though not the equality: we have no particular measures of sins; we know not, which is greater of sacrilege or superstition, idolatry or covetousness, rebellion or witchcraft and therefore God ties us not to nice measures of

* Jer. xiii. 17. Joel ii. 13. Ezek. xxvii. 31. James iv. 9.

sorrow, but only, that we keep the general rules of proportion; that is, that a great sin have a great grief, a smaller crime being to be washed off with a lesser shower.

3. Our sorrow for sins is then best accounted of for its degree when it, together with all the penal and afflictive duties of repentance, shall have equalled or exceeded the pleasure we had in commission of the sin.

4. True repentance is a punishing duty, and acts its sorrow; and judges and condemns the sin by voluntary submitting to such sadnesses as God sends on us, or (to prevent the judgment of God) by judging ourselves, and punishing our bodies and our spirits by such instruments of piety, as are troublesome to the body: such as are fasting, watching, long prayers, troublesome postures in our prayers, expensive alms, and all outward acts of humiliation.

For

he that must judge himself, must condemn himself, if he be guilty; and, if he be condemned, he must be punished; and, if he be so judged, it will help to prevent the judg ment of the Lord, St. Paul instructing us in this particular.* But I before intimated, that the punishing actions of repentance are only actions of sorrow, and therefore are to make up the proportions of it. For our grief may be so full of trouble, as to outweigh all the burdens of fasts and bodily afflictions, and then the other are the less necessary; and, when they are used, the benefit of them is to obtain of God a remission or a lessening of such temporal judgments, which God hath decreed against the sins, as it was in the case of Ahab but the sinner is not, by any thing of this reconciled to the eternal favour of God; for as yet, this is but the introduction to repentance.

5. Every true penitent is obliged to confess his sins, and to humble himself before God for ever. Confession of sins hath a special promise. "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins :"+ meaning, that God hath bound himself to forgive us, if we duly confess our sins, and do all that for which confession was appointed; that is, be ashamed of them, and own them no more. For confession of our sins to God can signify nothing of itself, in its direct nature; he sees us, when we act them, and keeps a record of them; and we forget them, unless he reminds us of them by his grace. So "that to confess them to God does not punish us, or make * 1 Cor. xi. 31.

+ 1 John i. 9.

us ashamed; but confession to him, if it proceeds from shame and sorrow, and is an act of humility and self-condemnation," and is a laying open our wounds for cure, then it is a duty God delights in. In all which circumstances, because we may very much be helped, if we take in the assistance of a spiritual guide; therefore the church of God, in all ages, hath commended, and, in most ages, enjoined, that we confess our sins, and discover the state and condition of our souls, to such a person, whom we or our superiors judge fit to help us in such needs. For SO "if we confess our sins one to another," as St. James advises, we shall obtain the prayers of the holy man, whom God and the church have appointed solemnly to pray for us and when he knows our needs, he can best minister comfort or reproof, oil or caustics; he can more opportunely recommend your particular state to God; he can determine your cases of conscience, and judge better for you, than you do for yourself; and the shame of opening such ulcers may restrain your forwardness to contract them and all these circumstances of advantage will do very much towards the forgiveness. And this course was taken by the new converts in the days of the apostles; "For many that believed, came and confessed and showed their deeds."* And it were well, if this duty were practised prudently and innocently in order to public discipline, or private comfort and instruction: but that it be done to God is a duty, not directly for itself, but for its adjuncts, and the duties that go with it, or before it, or after it: which duties, because they are all to be helped and guided by our pastors and curates of souls, he is careful of his eternal interest, that will not lose the advantage of using a private guide and judge. "He that hideth his sins shall not prosper;" (Non dirigetur, saith the vulgar Latin, "he shall want a guide,") "but who confesseth and forsaketh them, shall have mercy."+ And to this purpose Climacus reports, that divers holy persons in that age did use to carry table-books with them, and in them described an account of all their determinate thoughts, purposes, words, and actions, in which they had suffered infirmity; that, by communicating the estate of their souls, they might be instructed and guided, and corrected or encouraged.

6. True repentance must reduce to act all its holy pur*Acts xix. 18.

+ Prov. xxviii. 13.

poses, and enter into and run through the state of holy living, which is contrary to that state of darkness, in which in times past we walked. For to resolve to do it, and yet not to do it, is to break our resolution and our faith, to mock God, to falsify and evacuate all the preceding acts of repentance, and to make our pardon hopeless, and our hope fruitless. He that resolves to live well, when a danger is upon him, or a violent fear, or when the appetites of lust are newly satisfied, or newly served, and yet when the temptation comes again, sins again, and then is sorrowful, and resolves once more against it, and yet falls when the temptation returns, is a vain man, but no true penitent, nor in the state of grace; and if he chance to die in one of these good moods, is very far from salvation; for if it be necessary that we resolve to live well, it is necessary we should do so. For resolution is an imperfect act, a term of relation, and signifies nothing but in order to the actions; it is as a faculty is to the act, as spring to the harvest, as eggs are to birds, as a relative to its correspondent, nothing without it. No man therefore can be in the state of grace and actual favour by resolutions and holy purposes, these are but the gate and portal towards pardon; a holy life is the only perfection of repentance, and the firm ground upon which we can cast the anchor of hope in the mercies of God, through Jesus Christ.

7. No man is to reckon his pardon immediately upon his returns from sin to the beginnings of good life, but is to begin his hopes and degrees of confidence according as sin dies in him, and grace lives; as the habits of sin lessen, and righteousness grows; according as sin returns, but seldom, in smaller instances and without choice, and by sur. prise without deliberation, and is highly disrelished, and presently dashed against the rock Christ Jesus by a holy sorrow and renewed care and more strict watchfulness. For a holy life being the condition of the covenant on our part, as we return to God so God returns to us, and our state returns to the probabilities of pardon.

8. Every man is to work out his salvation with fear and trembling; and after the commission of sins his fears must multiply because every new sin and every great declining

15.

* Rom. vi. 3, 4, 7. viii. 10. xiii. 13, 14. xi. 22, 27. 1 Cor. vii. 19. 2 Cor. xiii. 5. Colos. i. 21-23.

16. 22. 1 Pet. i. 15.

Gal. v. 6. 21. vi: Heb. xii. 1. 14. 16. x.

2 Pet. i. 4. 9, 10. iii. 11. 1 John i. 6. iii. 8, 9. v. 16.