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when we come into his prefence, and to be afraid of his wrath, having made ourselves both odious to his holiness, and obnoxious to his juftice.

O our God! we are afhamed, and blush to lift up our faces before thee, our God; for our iniquities are increased over our head, and our trefpafs is grown up into the heavens c.

To us belong fhame and confufion of face, because we have finned against thee d.

Behold we are vile, what fhall we answer thee © ? We will lay our hand upon our mouth, and put our mouth in the duft, if so be there may be hope f, crying, with the convicted leper under the law, Unclean, unclean 8.

Thou putteft no truft in thy faints, and the heavens are not clean in thy fight: How much more abominable and filthy is man, who drinketh iniquity like waters h!

When our eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hofts, we have reason to cry out, Wo unto us, for we are undone i.

Dominion and fear are with thee, thou makeft peace in thy high places: there is not any number of thine armies, and upon whom doth not thy light arife? How then can man be juftified with God, or how can he be clean that is born of a woman k?

Thou, even thou art to be feared, and who may stand in thy fight when once thou art angry? Even thou, our God, art a confuming fire m, and who knows the power of thine anger "?

n?

If we justify ourselves, our own mouths fhall condemn us; if we fay we are perfect, that also shall prove

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us perverfe; for if thou contend with us, we are not able to answer thee for one of a thousand .

If we know nothing by ourselves, yet were we not thereby juftified, for he that judgeth us is the Lord P, who is greater than our hearts, and knows all things 9. But we ourselves know that we have finned, Father, against heaven, and before thee, and are no more worthy to be called thy children.

2. We must take hold of the great encouragement God bath given us, to humble ourselves before him with forrow and fhame, and to confefs our fins.

If thou, Lord, fhouldft mark iniquities, O Lord, who should stand! But there is forgivenefs with thee, that thou mayeft be feared; with thee there is mercy, yea, with our God there is plenteous redemption, and he fhall redeem Ifrael from all his iniquites .

V

Thy facrifices, O God, are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not defpife'; nay though thou art the high and lofty One that inhabitest eternity, whofe name is holy ; though the heaven be thy throne, and the earth thy footstool ", yet to this man wilt thou look that is poor and humble, of a broken and a contrite fpirit, and that trembleth at thy word, to revive the fpirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones.

Thou haft gracioufly affured us, though they that cover their fins fhall not profper, yet thofe that confefs and forfake them fhall find mercy *. And when a poor penitent faid, I will confefs my tranfgreffion unto the Lord, thou forgiveft the iniquity of his fin; and for this fhall every one that is godly, in like manner, pray unto thee in a time when thou mayeft be found.

We know that if we fay we have no fin, we deceive

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ourselves, and the truth is not in us; but thou haft faid that if we confefs our fins, thou art faithful and just to forgive us our fins, and to cleanfe us from all unrighteoufnefs 4.

3. We must therefore confefs and bewail our original cor ruption in the first place, that we were the children of apoftate and rebellious parents, and the nature of man is depraved and wretchedly degenerated from its primitive purity and rectitude, and our nature is fo.

Lord, thou madeft man upright, but they have fought out many inventions; and being in honour did not understand, and therefore abode not, but became like the beafts that perish b.

By one man fin entered into the world, and death by fin, and fo death passed upon all men, for that all have finned: By that one man's difobedience many were made finners, and we among the reft .

We are a feed of evil doers, our father was an Amorite, and our mother a Hittite, and we ourselves were called (and not mifcalled) tranfgreffors from the womb, and thou knoweft we would deal very treacherously f

The nature of man was planted a choice and noble vine, wholly a right feed, but it is become the degenerate plant of a frange vine ; producing the grapes of Sodom, and the clusters of Gomorrahh. How is the gold become dim, and the most fine gold changed i!

Behold we were fhapen in iniquity, and in fin did our mothers conceive us . For who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean! Not one '. We are by nature children of wrath, becaufe children of difobedience, even as others m.

All flesh hath corrupted their way, we were all

≈ 1 Johni. 8, a Eccl. vii. 19. b Pfalm xlix. 12, 20.

9.

e Rom. v. 12. 19.

f Ifa. xlvii. 8. g Jer. ii. iv. I. k Pfalm 1.5.

n Gen. ii. 12.

d Ifa. i. 4.

21.

e Ézek. xvi. 3. b Deut. xxxii. 32. Lam. m Eph. ii. 2, 3.

Job xiv. 4.

gone afide, we are altogether become filthy, there is none that doth good, no, not one °.

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4. We must lament our prefent corrupt difpofitions to that which is evil, and our indifpofedness to and impotency in "that which is good. We must look into our own hearts and confefs, with holy blushing,

(.) The blindness of our understandings, and their unaptnefs to admit the rays of the divine light.

By nature our understandings are darkened, being alienated from the life of God, through the ignorance · that is in us, becaufe of the blindness of our hearts P.

The things of the Spirit of God are foolishness to the natural man, neither can we know them, because they are fpiritually difcerned.

We are wife to do evil, but to do good we have no knowledge. We know not, neither do we understand, we walk on in darkness $.

God fpeaketh once, yea, twice, but we perceive it not; but hearing, we hear, and do not understand ˇ, and we fee men as trees walking

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(2.) The stubbornness of our wills, and their unaptness to fubmit to the rules of the divine law.

We have within us a carnal mind, which is enmity against God, and is not in fubjection to the law of God, neither indeed can be x.

Thou haft written to us the great things of thy law, but they have been accounted by us as a ftrange thing, and our corrupt hearts have been fometimes ready to fay, What is the Almighty that we fhould ferve him? And that we would certainly do whatfoever thing goes forth out of our own mouth a. For we have walked in the way of our own heart, and in the

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fight of our eyes, fulfilling the defires of the flesh, and of the mind b.

d

Our neck hath been an iron finew, and we have made our heart as an adamant ; we have refused to hearken, have pulled away the thoulder, and stopped our ears like the deaf adder, that will not hearken to the voice of the charmer, charm he never fo wifely e.

How have we hated inftruction, and our heart defpifed reproof, and have not obeyed the voice of our teachers, nor inclined our ear to them that inftructed us f!

(3.) The vanity of our thoughts, their negle of those things which they ought to be converfant with, and dwelling upon thofe things that are unworthy of them, and tend to corrupt our minds.

Every imagination of the thoughts of our heart is evil, only evil, and that continually, and it has been fo from our youth 5.

O how long have those vain thoughts lodged within ush thofe thoughts of foolifhnefs which are fini; From out of the heart proceed evil thoughts; which devife mischief upon the bed, and carry the heart with the fool's eyes into the ends of the earth ".

m

But God is not in all our thoughts, 'tis well if he be in any : Of the Rock that begat us, we have been unmindful, and have forgotten the God that formed us: We have forgotten him days without number, and our hearts have walked after vanity, and become vain. Their inward thought having been, that our houfes fhould continue for ever; this our way is our folly a

(4) The carnality of our affections, their being placed upon wrong objects, and carried beyond due bounds.

c Ifa. xlviii. 4. ƒProv. v. 12, 13. Prov. xxiv. 9. k Mat. 24. n Pfalm x. 4. Pfalm xlix. 11, 13.

b Eccl. xi. 19. e Pfalm lviii. 4, 5. b Jer. iv. 14. m Prov. xvii. Jer. ii. 32.

d Zech. vii. II, 12. g Gen. vi. 5, 8, 21. xv. 19. / Mic.

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o Deut. xxxii. 18°

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