towards our absolution. Nay, if we proceed farther to the greatest expressions of humiliation, (parts of which I reckon fasting, praying for pardon, judging and condemning of ourselves by instances of a present indignation against a crime ;) yet unless this proceed so far as to a total deletion of the sin, to the extirpation of every vicious habit, God is not glorified by our repentance, nor we secured in our eternal interest. Our sin must be brought to judgment, and, like Antinous in Homer, layed in the midst as the sacrifice and the cause of all the mischief. Αλλ' ὁ μεν ηδη κείται ός αιτιος εστιν άπαντων. * This is the murderer, this is the Achan, this is he that troubles Israel: let the sin be confessed and carried with the pomps and solemnities of sorrow to its funeral, and so let the murderer be slain. But if after all the forms of confession and sorrow, fasting and humiliation, and pretence of doing the will of God, we spare Agag and the fattest of the cattle, our delicious sins, and still leave an unlawful king, and a tyrant-sin to reign in our mortal bodies, we may pretend what we will towards repentance, but we are no better penitents than Ahab; no nearer to the obtaining of our hopes than Esau was to his birthright, for whose repentance there was no place left, though he sought it carefully with tears. 3. Well, let us suppose our penitent advanced thus far, as that he decrees against all sin, and in his hearty purposes resolves to decline it, as in a severe sentence he hath condemned it as his betrayer and his murderer; yet we must be curious (for now only the repentance properly begins) that it be not only like the springings of the thorny_or the high-way ground, soon up and soon down: For some men, when a sad * Hom: Od: xxii. 38. The cause and author of those guilty deeds POPE. ness or an unhandsome accident surprises them, then they resolve against their sin, but, like the goats in Aristotle, they give their milk no longer than they are stung; as soon as the thorns are removed, these men return to their first hardness, and resolve then to act their first temptation. Others there are who never resolve against a sin, but either when they have no temptation to it, or when their appetites are newly satisfied with it; like those who immediately after a full dinner resolve to fast at supper, and they keep it till their appetite returns, and then their resolution unties like the cords of vanity, or the gossamer against the violence of the northern wind. Thus a lustful person fills all the capacity of his lust; and when he is wearied, and the sin goes off with unquietness and regret, and the appetite falls down like a horseleech, when it is ready to burst with putrefaction and an unwholesome plethory, then he resolves to be a good man, and could almost vow to be a hermit; and hates his lust, as Amnon hated his sister Thamar, when he had newly acted his unworthy rape: but the next spring-tide that comes, every wave of the temptation, makes an inroad upon the resolution, and gets ground, and prevails against it, more than his resolution prevailed against his sin. How many drunken persons, how many swearers resolve daily and hourly against their sin, and yet act them not once the less for all their infinite heap of shamefully retreating purposes? That resolution that begins upon just grounds of sorrow and severe judgment, upon fear and love, that is made in the midst of a temptation, that is inquisitive into all the means and instruments of the cure, that prays perpetually against a sin, that watches continually against a surprise, and never sinks into it by deliberation, that fights earnestly, and carries on the war prudently, and prevails by a never-ceasing diligence against the temptation; that only is a pious and well begun repentance. They that have their fits of a quartan, well and ill for ever, and think themselves in perfect health when the ague is retired, till its period returns, are dangerously mistaken. Those intervals of imperfect and fallacious resolution are nothing but states of death: and if a man should depart this world in one of those godly fits, (as he thinks them,) he is no nearer to obtain his blessed hope, than a man in the stone cholick is to health when his pain is eased for the present, his disease still remaining, and threatening an unwelcome return. That resolution only is the beginning of a holy repentance which goes forth into act, and whose acts enlarge into habits, and whose habits are productive of the fruits of a holy life. From hence we are to take our estimate, whence our resolutions of piety must commence. He that resolves not to live well till the time comes that he must die, is ridiculous in his great design, as he is impertinent in his intermedial purposes, and vain in his hope. Can a dying man to any real effect resolve to be chaste? (for virtue must be an act of election, and chastity is the contesting against a proud and an imperious lust, active flesh, and insinuating temptation.) And what doth he resolve against, who can no more be tempted to the sin of unchastity than he can return back again to his youth and vigour? And it is considerable, that since all the purposes of a holy life which a dying man can make, cannot be reduced to act; by what law, or reason, or covenant, or revelation are we taught to distinguish the resolution of a dying man from the purposes of a living and vigorous person? Suppose a man in his youth and health, moved by consideration of the irregularity and deformity of sin, the danger of its productions, the wrath and displeasure of Almighty God, should resolve to leave the puddles of impurity, and walk in the paths of righteousness; can this resolution alone put him into the state of grace? Is he admitted to pardon and the favour of God, before he hath in some measure performed actually what he so reasonably hath resolved; by no means. For resolution and purpose is in its own nature and constitution an imperfect act, and therefore can signify nothing without its performance and consummation. It is as a faculty is to the act, as spring is to the harvest, as seed-time is to the autumn, as eggs are to birds, or as a relative to its correspondent: nothing without it. And can it be imagined that a resolution in our health and life shall be ineffectual without performance? and shall a resolution, barely such, do any good upon our, death-bed? Can such purposes prevail against a long impiety rather than against a young and a newly-begun state of sin? Will God at an easier rate pardon the sins of fifty or sixty years, than the sins of our youth only, or the iniquity of five years, or ten? Ifa holy life be not necessary to be lived, why shall it be necessary, to resolve to live it? But if a holy life be necessary, then it cannot be sufficient merely to resolve it, unless this resolution go forth in an actual and real service. Vain, therefore, is the hope of those persons who either go on in their sins, before their last sickness never thinking to return into the ways of God, from whence they have wandered all their life, never renewing their resolutions and vows of holy living or if they have, yet their purposes are for ever blasted with the next violent temptation. More prudent was the prayer of David, Oh spare me a little, that I may recover my strength before I go hence and be no more seen. And something like it, was the saying of the Emperour Charles the fifth, Inter vitae negotia et mortis diem oportet spatium intercedere. Whenever our holy purposes are renewed, unless God gives us time to act them, to mortify and subdue our lusts, to conquer and subdue the whole kingdom of sin, to rise from our grave, and be clothed with pes and flesh, and a new skin, to overcome our deadly sicknesses, and by little and little to return to health and strength; unless we have grace and time to do all this, our sins will lie down with us in our graves. For when a man hath contracted a long habit of sin, and it hath been growing upon him ten or twenty, forty or fifty years, whose acts he hath daily or hourly repeated, and they are grown to a second nature to him, and have so prevailed upon the ruins of his spirit, that the man is taken captive by the devil at his will, he is fast bound, as a slave tugging at the oar, that he has grown in love with his fetters, and longs to be doing the work of sin is it likely that after all his progress and growth in sin, (in the ways of which he runs fast without any impediment) is it (I say) likely, that a few days or weeks of sickness can recover him? [the special hindrances of that state I shall afterwards consider.] But, can a man be supposed so prompt to piety and holy living, a man mean) that hath lived wickedly a long time together, can he be of so ready and active a virtue upon the sudden, as to recover in a month or a week what he hath been undoing in twenty or thirty years? Is it so easy to build, that a weak and infirm person, bound hand and foot, shall be able to build more in three days than was a building above forty years? Christ did it in a figurative sense; but in this, it is not in the power of any man so suddenly to be recovered from so long a sickness. Necessary therefore it is, that all these instruments of our conversion, Confession of sins, praying for their pardon, and resolution to lead a new life, should begin before our feet stumble upon the dark mountains; lest we leave the work only resolved upon to be begun, which it is necessary we should in many degrees finish, if ever we mean to escape the eternal darkness. "For that we should actually abolish the whole of sin and death; that we should crucify the old man with his lusts, that we should lay aside every weight, and the sin that doth so easily |