ready sustained the most violent shocks of his power? If you had retreated at the first onset, when your sin was seated in its dominion, and you were yet but raising your forces and arming your resolution against it, it had been much more excusable; for then you had the sharpest part of your conflict to undergo, being to contend with a flushed and a victorious enemy, who, having as yet all his strength about him, could not fail to put your courage to a mighty trial: but now to retreat, when you are past the worst, and have gotten above half way through; when you have pulled down your lust from its throne and dominion, and so far subdued it to your religion and your reason, that you have henceforward no more to do but to pursue a victory, which though you got with a great deal of toil, you may finish with a great deal of ease and pleasure; now, I say, to retreat in such a prosperous juncture, and give up the blessed prize which you have been so long contending for, what desperate madness is it! If you had never begun this warfare, or yielded in the first conflict of it, what a deal of pains might you have saved! How many prayers and tears, strugglings and contentions with yourselves might you have escaped and avoided, and at last been in as good a condition, if not a better, than that wherein your apostasy will certainly leave you! And when a man hath been so long taking heaven by storm and violence, when he hath broken through so many oppositions to come at it, and in despite of all the darts of temptation from without, and of all the weights and pressures of inclination from within, he is gotten up, as it were, to the top of the scalingladder, has laid his hands on the battlements of hea

ven, and is ready to leap in and take possession of the joys of it, what a madness is it for him now to let go his hold, and tumble headlong down again into that abyss of sin and misery, out of which he had recovered himself with so much labour and difficulty! Especially considering,

IV. That by this our relapse we shall not only forfeit the fruit of our past labour, but also render our recovery more hazardous and difficult than ever. For what the apostle pronounces concerning apostates from Christianity is in a great measure appliable to those who, having engaged in the Christian warfare, fall off from it again to their old sinful courses; it is impossible, i. e. it is extremely difficult, for those that were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, and have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come; if they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance, Heb. vi. 4, 5, 6. For besides that, by falling from his first repentance, a man grieves and chases the Holy Spirit from him, without whose aid he can neither stand when he is up, nor recover when he is fallen; and having chased him away, he cannot well expect that he will be so ready to return and cooperate with him after he hath treated him so rudely by quenching his motions, unravelling his workmanship, and extinguishing all those heavenly effects which his grace had produced in his soul. For how can this blessed assistant of souls but take it in great disdain to be thus mocked and disappointed, when he had been so industriously labouring for a wretch's good, to lift him out of the mire wherein he was sunk and perishing; and when he

had succeeded so far in his labour as to help him quite out, and was washing and cleansing his polluted spirit, and dressing it for the embraces of the Father of spirits, to see this wretch turn back after all, and plunge himself headlong into the mire again, how can he but resent such an ungrateful disappointment of his labour with unspeakable grief and indignation? and if upon such resentment he should, as he justly may, wholly retire from him, and leave him for ever to wallow in his own heart's lust, his condition will not be only dangerous, but desperate. What the blessed Spirit will do in this case I cannot certainly determine, because he may do as he pleases, being totally released by the sinner's apostasy from all obligation of promise. But it makes my heart ache to think how much reason there is to fear that he will utterly forsake and abandon him, and not throw away any more of his grace upon a wretch on whom he hath already spent so much to no purpose. And if the heinous affront which the blessed Spirit receives by your apostasy should put him upon this resolution, you are damned aboveground, and everlastingly forsaken of all hopes of recovery. But, besides all this, (which one would think should be sufficient to startle any sober man from making such a desperate experiment,) by falling off from your repentance, you must needs be supposed to offer a mighty violence to your consciences; which, having been already awakened into a through sense of your past sins, must necessarily reflect upon your present apostasy with unspeakable horror and affrightment; which, if it doth not presently scare ye back again to repentance, will put ye upon more desperate courses than ever. For now if your con

science wont be quiet, you have no other remedy but to ruffle with it, and outbrave its horrors, by being more courageously wicked: and as those barbarous parents that sacrificed their children to Moloch were fain to make noises round the burning idol with drums and timbrels, to drown their dying shrieks and groans, lest they should move them to compassion; so when by your wilful relapses you have sacrificed your conscience to your lust, and it begins to shriek out from among those flames of guilt whereinto you have cast it, you have no other remedy, unless you repent immediately, but to make a Tophet round about it, and drown its outcries in excesses of riot; to put yourselves into a tumultuous hurry of wickedness and folly, that you may not hear those ill-boding shrieks within; and to sear over the wounds of your conscience with a thick custom of sinning, that they may neither bleed nor smart. So that, if once you turn recreant to your Christian warfare, you will be forced, in your own defence, to plunge yourselves deeper into sin than ever. For now you must sin, not only to gratify your lusts, but to stupify your conscience; and this last you can never do without being excessively wicked. You must now be puny sinners no longer, if ever you intend to sin quietly; but resolve to turn heroes in iniquity, and outsin your natural sense of good and evil. In order whereunto you must give your wounded spirit gash after gash, and follow the blow, till you have left it past feeling; you must heap on loads of guilt upon your conscience, till with the continued pressure you have rendered it callous and insensible; and when by this means you have sunk yourselves deeper into sin than ever, (as you will doubtless soon do,) how much

more difficult and hazardous must your recovery be! For now you will need much more assistance than ever you did in your first repentance, and have much less reason to expect it. So that though I dare not say your condition will be desperate, yet I must tell ye, it will be so fearfully dangerous, that unless God, out of a peculiar mercy to ye, awake ye by some extraordinary providence, and at the same time cooperate with ye by an extraordinary grace, you must certainly miscarry for ever.

V. Consider, that, by your deserting of the Christian warfare, you will not only render your future recovery more difficult, but you will also plunge yourselves, for the present, into a far more guilty and criminal condition than ever. For thus St. Peter determines in the case, 2 Pet. ii. 20, 21. If after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled therein, and overcome; the latter end is worse with them than the beginning. For it had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after they have known it, to turn from the holy commandment: that is, by relapsing into those sinful pollutions out of which they had been rescued by the belief and knowledge of Christianity, they have rendered themselves much more guilty than they were before, when they were infidels; so that if they had never been acquainted with the gospel, nor taken one step in the paths of its holy commandments, it had been much better for them, and God would have been much less angry and displeased with them. For by our apostasy into a wicked life, we do not only