3. Tell me, O my soul, dost thou bemoan thyself, or grieve so tenderly for sin and for grieving the Holy Spirit of God, as thou wast wont to do? When formerly I had fallen by the hand of a temptation, how was I wont to lie in tears at the Lord's feet, bemoaning myself! How did I hasten to my closet, and there cry, like Ezra, "O my God, I am ashamed, and blush to look up unto thee!" How did I sigh and weep before him, and, like Ephraim, smite upon my thigh, saying, "What have I done!" Ah, my soul, how didst thou work and strive, to recover thyself again! Hast thou forgotten how thou wouldst sometimes look up and sigh bitterly! O what a God have I provoked! What love and goodness have I abused! What a good Spirit have I grieved! Ah, my soul, thou wouldst have abhorred thyself, thou couldst never have borne it, had thine heart been as stupid and as relentless then as now. If ever a poor soul had reason to dissolve itself into tears for its sad relapses, I have.

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But yet mourn not, O my soul, as one without hope. Remember, "there is hope in Israel concerning this thing." As low as thy condition is, it is not desperate; it is not a disease that scorns a remedy. Many a man who has been stretched out for dead, has revived again, and lived many a comfortable day in the world; many a tree that has cast both leaf and fruit, by the skill of a prudent husbandman, has recovered again, and been made both florishing and fruitful. Is it not easier, thinkest thou, to recover a languishing man to health, than a dead man to life? And yet this God did for me. any thing too hard for the Lord? "Though my soul draw nigh to the pit, and my life to the destroyers, yet he can send me a messenger, one among a thou sand, that shall declare to me my uprightness; then shall he deliver me from going down into the pit, my flesh shall be fresher than a child's, and I shall return to the days of my youth," Job xxxiii. 22. Though my freshness and much of my fruit too be gone, and I am a withering tree; yet as long as the root of the matter is in me, there is more hope of such a poor, cayed withered tree, than of the hypocrite that wants

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such a root in all his glory and bravery. His sun shall set, and never rise again; but I live in expectation of a sweet morning after this dark night.

Rouse up, therefore, O my soul. Stir up that little which remains. Hast thou not seen lively flames proceed from glimmering and dying sparks? Get amongst the most lively and quickening Christians; as iron sharpeneth iron," so will these set an edge upon thy dull affections. But, above all, cry mightily to the Lord for his quickening grace. He will not despise thy cry. The moans of a distressed child work upon the bowels of a tender father. And be sure to keep within thy view the great things of eternity, which are ready to be revealed; live in the believing and serious contemplation of them, and be dead if thou canst. It is true, thou hast reason enough from thy condition, to be for ever humbled, but no reason at all from thy God to be in the least discouraged.

CHAPTER VI.

On the incurableness of some bad Ground.

Observation.-ALTHOUGH the industry and skill of the husbandman can make some ground that was useless and bad, good for tillage and pasture, and improve that which was barren, and by his cost and pains make one acre worth ten; yet such is the nature of some rocky or miry ground, where the water stands and there is no way to cleanse it, that it can never be made fruitful. The husbandman is fain to let it alone, as an incurable piece of waste or worthless ground; and though the sun and clouds shed their influences on it, as well as upon better land, yet that does not at all mend it. Nay, the more showers it receives, the worse it proves. Nothing thrives there but worthless flags and rushes.

Application.-Many also there are, under the gospel, who are given over by God to judicial blindness, hardDiv. No. XVI.

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ness of heart, and perpetual barrenness; so that how excellent soever the means are which they enjoy, and how efficacious soever to the conversion, edification, and salvation of others, yet they never do their souls good. Every thing wheresoever the river comes shall live, but the miry places thereof, and the marshes thereof shall never be healed, but be given to salt;" given up to an obstinate and everlasting barrenness, Ezek. xlvii. 9, 11. This river is the most fruitful doctrine of Christ; yet these waters do not heal the miry, marshy places, that is, men that live unfruitfully under ordinances. O this is a sad case! and yet it is a very common one. Many persons are thus given over as incorrigible and hopeless. "Let him that is filthy be filthy still," Rev. xxii. 11. "Reprobate silver shall men call them, for the Lord hath rejected them," Jer. vi. 29.

"Let no

Christ executes, by the gospel, that curse upon many souls which he denounced against the fig-tree; fruit grow on thee henceforth for ever;" and immediately the fig-tree withered away. To be given up to such a condition, is a fearful judgment indeed, the sum of all miseries and judgments, a fatal stroke at the root itself. It is a wo to have a bad heart, but it is the depth of wo to have a heart that never shall be made better. To be barren under the gospel, is a sore judgment, but to have this pertinacious barrenness, is to be "twice dead and plucked up by the root."

To show you the woful and miserable state of such men, let the following particulars be weighed

1. It is a stroke at the soul itself, an inward spiritual judgment; and by how much the more inward and spiritual any judgment is, by so much the more dreadful and lamentable is it. As soul mercies are the best mercies, so soul judgments are the saddest of all judgments. If it were but a stroke upon the body, the loss of an eye, an ear, a hand, a foot, though in itself it would be a considerable loss, yet it were nothing to this. Chrysostom, speaking of bodily members, says, "God has given men double members; two eyes, two hands, two ears, two feet, that the failing of one may be supplied by the help of the other; but he has given them only one soul;

if that perish, there is no other to supply its loss." "The soul," says the heathen Plato, "is the man; that which is seen, is not the man." The apostle calls the body a "vile body;" and so it is, compared with the soul; and Daniel calls it the sheath, which is but a contemptible thing to the sword in it. O it were far better that many bodies perish, than one soul; that every member were made the seat and subject of the most exquisite torture, than such a judgment should fall upon the soul.

2. It is the severest stroke God can inflict upon the soul in this life, to give it up to barrenness; because it cuts off all hopes, frustrates all means; nothing can be a blessing to him. If one should come from the dead, if angels should descend from heaven to preach to him, there is no hope of him. As there was none found in heaven or earth that could open the seals of that book, Rev. v. 5. so is there no opening by the hand of the most able and skilful ministry, those seals of hardness, blindness, and unbelief, thus impressed upon the spirit. Whom justice so locks up, mercy will never let out. This is that which makes up the Anathema Maranatha, 1 Cor. xvi. 22. which is the dreadfulest curse in all the book of God, accursed till the Lord come.

3. It is the most secret stroke to themselves that can be, and on this account so much the more desperate. Hence there is said to be poured out upon them the spi rit of slumber; "The Lord hath poured out upon you the spirit of deep sleep, and hath closed your eyes." Montanus renders it, "The Lord hath mingled upon you the spirit of deep sleep." And thus it is an allusion to a soporiferous medicine, made up of opium and such-like stupefying ingredients, which casts a man into such a deep sleep, that do what you will to him, he feels, he knows it not. "Make their eyes heavy, and their ears dull; lest they should see, and hear, and be converted," Isa. vi. 9. Men are not sensible at all of this judgment; they do not in the least suspect it, and that is their misery. Though they are cursed trees, which shall never bring any fruit to perfection, yet many times they bear abundance of other fair and pleasant fruits to the eye, excellent gifts, and rare endowments: and these deceive and undo

them; "We have prophesied in thy name." This makes the wound desperate, that there is no finding of it, no probe to search it.

4. It is a stroke that cuts off from the soul all the comforts and sweetness of religion. A man may pray, hear, and confer, but all those duties are dry stalks to him, which yield no meat, no solid substantial nutriment. Some common touches upon the affections he may sometimes find in duty; the melting voice or rhetoric of the preacher may perhaps strike his natural affections, as any other tragical story pathetically delivered may do; but as for any real communion with God in ordinances, any discoveries or views of the beauty of the Lord in them, that he cannot have, for these are the special effects and operations of the Spirit, and are always restrained. God has said to such," My Spirit shall no longer strive with them;" and then what sweetness is there in ordinances? What is the word, separated from the Spirit, but a dead letter? It is the Spirit that quickens. The gospel works not like a natural cause upon those who hear it; if so, the effect would always follow, unless miraculously stopt and hindered; but it works like a moral instituted cause, whose efficacy and success depend upon the arbitrary concurrence of the Spirit with it." The wind blows where it listeth, so is every one that is born of the Spirit," "Of his own will begat he us by the word of truth.' Ordinances are as the pool of Bethesda, which had its healing virtue only when the angel moved the waters; but the Spirit never moves savingly upon the waters of ordinances, for the healing of the souls of these men, how many years soever they lie by them. Though others feel a divine power in them, yet they shall not. Here is the wo that lies upon them, God is departed from the means, and none can help them.

It is such a stroke upon the spirit of a man, as is a fearful sign of his eternal reprobation. It is true, we cannot positively say of a man in this life, that he is a reprobate, one that God will never show mercy to; but yet there are some probable marks of it upon some men, and they are awful wherever they appear. This is one of the saddest: "If our gospel be hid, it is hid to those that are