Chapter IX (2)

_Third_, When either of the two former ways will not serve the turn—that is, when he meets with such against whom he hath nothing of notorious wickedness to object, or such as have a better discerning of Scripture than so to be imposed upon—he labours _to make a charge against them, from the number of their miscarriages_. Here he takes up all the filth he can, and lays it upon one heap at their door. It is indeed an easy thing for Satan to set the sins of a child of God in order before him, and to bring to mind innumerable evils, especially to one that is already awakened with a true discovery of the corruption of nature and the vileness of sin. In which case the more a man considers, the more he will discover; and sins thus set in battle array, though they be not more than ordinary heinous, yet being many, have a very dismal appearance. Satan’s design in this is to bring men under the affrightments which seem most proper to be raised from a perverse aspect of the third rank of scriptures, which a little before I pointed at. For the word of God, speaking of the final estate of men, doth not only discover the hopeless condition of some as to eternal life from some particular acts of sin, but also the sad estate of others from the manner, degrees, and frequency of sinning. The heathens, because they improved not the knowledge of God, which they had from the works of creation, neither making those inferences in matters relating to his worship, which those discoveries did direct them unto, nor behaving themselves in full compliance to those rules of virtuous conversation which they might have drawn from these principles, and unto which in point of gratitude they were obliged: Rom. i. 21, ‘They glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; therefore God gave them to a reprobate mind.’ And generally, concerning all others, the Scripture teacheth us that a return to a profane fleshly life, after some reformation, hath a greater hazard in it than ordinary, as appears by the parable in Mat. xii. 45, ‘Seven more wicked spirits re-enter;’ where one that was cast out is received again; and ‘the last state of that man is worse than the first.’ So also 2 Pet. ii. 20. To this purpose is that of Solomon concerning the danger of continuance in sin, after many reproofs: Prov. xxix. 1, ‘He that being often reproved hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy.’ These, and many such like scriptures, Satan hath in readiness, which he plies home upon the consciences of those that are troubled with the sense of sin; telling them that their hearts and ways being continually evil, notwithstanding all the courses that God hath taken to reclaim them; that they having so long neglected so great salvation, or that after having seemed to entertain it, became more sinful than before—which they will easily believe, because they are now more sensible of sin, and more observant of their miscarriages than formerly—there can be no question but they are given up to vile affections; and like the ground that bears nothing but ‘briars and thorns, they are rejected, and nigh unto cursing, whose end is to be burned,’ [Heb. vi. 8.] The wound that is made with this weapon is not so easily healed as some others already mentioned; because though Satan do unduly wrest these passages to such failures in the children of God as have little or no affinity with them, for they only speak of falling into open profaneness with contumacy, yet they that have deep convictions, accompanied with great fears, do usually think that there are none worse than they are. And though they will grant that some others have more flagitious lives, yet they think they have hearts so desperately wicked, that they must needs be under as great hazards as those whose lives seem to be worse.

[4.] There is but one argument more that carries any probability of proof for everlasting condemnation, and that is from _a hard and impenitent heart_. How Satan will manage himself to make a child of God believe that he hath such a heart, is our last observation relating to his sophistry. And it is this: he unjustly aggravates the discomposures of the spirits of those that are troubled for sin, and from thence draws his arguments of irrecoverable damnation, pleading that their hearts are seared, hardened, uncapable of repentance, and consequently of heaven. That final impenitency will conclude damnation is certain; and that some have been given up to such a judicial hardness long before death, that they could not repent, may not only be evidenced from the threatening of God to that purpose, Mat. xiii. 15, ‘Make the heart of this people fat,’ &c., but also from the sad instances of Pharaoh, of whom it is said, that ‘God hardened his heart;’ and the Jews who were blinded, Rom. xi. 8, ‘God hath given them the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear.’ But still the art lieth in this, How to make a child of God believe that it is so with him. For this purpose he must take him at some advantage, he cannot terrify him with this argument at all times. While he is acting repentance with an undisturbed settled frame of heart, it is not possible to make him believe he doth not, or cannot repent; for this were to force him contrary to sense and experience. But he must take him at some season which may, with some probability, admit of his plea, and nothing is more proper for that design than a troubled heart; so that he hath in this case two things to do:

_First_, He disquiets the soul into as great a height of confusion as he can. That, _second_, when he hath melted it into heaviness, and torn it into pieces, he may work upon its distractions.

There are many things that fall out in the case of great anxiety of mind, that are capable of improvement for the accomplishment of this design. As, 1. _Distracting troubles bring the heart under the stupidity of amazement._ Their thoughts are so broken and disjointed, that they cannot unite them to a composed, settled resolution in anything; they can scarce join them together to make out so much as might spell out their distinct desires or endeavours; they scarce know what they are doing, or what they would do. 2. _They also poison the thoughts with harsh apprehensions against God._ Great distresses make the thoughts sometimes recoil against the holy Lord with unseemly questionings of his goodness and compassion; and this puts men into a bad sullen humour of untowardness, from whence, through Satan’s improvement, arise the greatest plunges of despair. 3. Most usually in this case _the greatest endeavours are fruitless and dissatisfactory_. Satan, though he be no friend to duty, doth unseasonably urge them to repent and pray; but it is because they cannot do either with any satisfaction, and then their failures are matter of argument against them. For if they resolve to put themselves upon a more severe course of repentance, and accordingly begin to think of their sins, to number them, or to aggravate them, they are usually affrighted from the undertaking by the heinous appearance of them. They cannot, they dare not think of them; the remotest glimpse of them is terrible to an affrighted conscience; the raising of them up again in the memory, like the rising of a ghost from the grave, is far more astonishing than the first prospect of them after commission. So true is that of Luther, ‘If a man could see sin perfectly, it would be a perfect hell.’ If they set themselves to beg their pardon by earnest prayer, they are so distracted and confused in prayer, that their prayers please them not; they come off from the duty more wounded than when they began. Or if in any measure they overcome these difficulties, so that they do pray and confess their iniquities, then they urge and force a sorrow or compunction upon themselves, but still to a greater dissatisfaction. For it may be—and this usually happens in greater distresses—they cannot weep, nor force a tear, or if they do, still they judge their sorrow is not deep enough, nor any way suitable to the greatness of their sin. 4. To all these Satan sometimes makes a further addition of trouble, _by injecting blasphemous thoughts_. Here he sets the stock, with an intention to graft upon it afterward. When all these things are thus in readiness, then comes he to set fire to the train, and thus he endeavours to blow up the mine. Is not thy heart hardened to everlasting destruction? How canst thou deny this? Art thou not grown stupid, and senseless of all the hazards that are before thee? Here he insists upon the amazement and confusion of their spirit; and it is very natural for those that are drunk with the terrors of the Almighty, to think themselves stupid, because of the distraction of their thoughts. I have known several that have pleaded that very argument to that purpose. Satan goes on: What greater evidence can there be of a hardened heart than impenitency? Thou canst not mourn enough. Thou hast not a tear for thy sins, though thou couldst weep enough formerly upon every petty occasion; nay, thou canst not so much as pray for pardon. Is not this not only a heart that doth not, but that cannot repent? Besides, saith he, thou knowest the secret thoughts that thy heart is privy to; do they not boil up in thy breast against God? Art thou not ready to tax him for dealing thus with thee? What is this untowardness, but desperate obdurateness? And if with all these there be blasphemous injections, then he tells him it is a clear case that he is judicially hardened; in that he acts the part of the damned in hell already. By all, or some of these deceits, the devil doth often prevail so far with men, that they conclude their heart to be so obstinate, so stupid, that it is impossible that it should be ever mollified or brought into a penitential frame, and consequently that there is no hope of their salvation.

(3.) There is but one thing more, besides the occasions which he takes, and the arguments which he makes use of, relating to Satan’s method for the procurement of spiritual distresses, and that is his endeavour to strengthen these arguments by the _increase of fears in their hearts_.

What Satan can do in raising up misgiving, tormenting fears, hath been said; and how serviceable this is to his design, I shall shew in a few particulars, having only first noted this in the general, that as his design in these distresses is raised to express his utmost height of malice against men—in pushing them forward to the greatest mischief, by excluding them totally from the lowest degree of the hope of happiness, and by persuading them of the inevitable certainty of their eternal misery—so he doth endeavour, by the strongest impressions of fear, to terrify them to the utmost degree of affrightful amazement, and consequently the effects of that fear are most powerful; for,

[1.] By this means _the spirits of men are formed and moulded into a frame most suitable for the belief and entertainment of the most dismal impressions that Satan can put upon them_. For strong fears, like fire, do assimilate everything to their own nature, making them naturally incline to receive the blackest, the most disadvantageous interpretations of all things against themselves, so that they have no capacity to put any other sense upon what lies in their way, but the very worst. Hence are they possessed with no other thoughts but that they are remediless wretches, desperate miscreants, utterly forsaken of God. They are brought into such a woeful partiality against their own peace, that they cannot judge aright of any accusation, plea, or argument that Satan brings for a proof of their unhappiness; but being filled with strong prejudices of hell, they think every sophism a strong argument, every supposition a truth, and every accusation conclusive of no less than their eternal damnation; insomuch that their fears do more to discomfit them than all Satan’s forces. ‘A dreadful sound being in their ears,’ [Job xv. 21,] their strength fails them at the appearance of any opposition; as when fear comes upon an army they throw away their weapons, and, by an easy victory, give their backs sometimes to an inconsiderable enemy.

[2.] Men thus possessed with fear do not only receive into their own bowels every weapon which Satan directs on purpose to the wounding and slaying of their hopes, but by a strange kind of belief _they imagine everything to be the sword of an enemy_. All they hear or meet with turns into poison to them, for they think everything is against them—promises as well as threatenings, mercies as well as judgments, and that by all these, one as well as another, God, as with a flaming sword turning every way, doth hinder their access to the tree of life. Bilney the martyr, as Latimer in his sermons reports of him, after his denial of the truth, was under such horrors of conscience, that his friends were forced to stay with him night and day. No comforts would serve. If any comfortable place of Scripture was offered to him, it was as if a man should cut him through with a sword. Nothing did him good; he thought that all scriptures made against him, and sounded to his condemnation. Neither is it so rare a thing for fears to form the imagination into such misshapen apprehensions, as that we should think such instances to be only singular and unusual; but it is a common effect of terror, which few or none escape that are under spiritual distresses. The blackness of their thoughts make the whole Scripture seem black to them. The unfit medium through which they look doth discolour every object. So that the book of life, as Mrs Kath. Bretterge in the like case expressed herself concerning the Bible, seems to be nothing else but a book of death to them.[358]

[3.] From hence it follows _that no counsel or advice can take place with them_. Excessive fears do remove their souls so far from peace, that they will not believe there is any hope for them, though it be told them. The most compassionate, serious admonitions of friends, the strongest arguments against despair, the clearest discoveries of the hopes that are before them, &c., effect but little. While they are spoken, it may be, they seem to relieve them a little; but the comfort abides not with them, it is soon gone. Though they cannot answer the arguments brought for them, yet they cannot believe them; as if their souls were now deprived of all power to believe anything for their good: suitable to that expression of Spira, in answer to his friends that laboured to comfort him, ‘I would believe comfort, but cannot; I can believe nothing but what is contrary to my comfort,’ Nay, when they are told that many others have been under the like dreadful apprehensions of everlasting misery who have at last been comforted—and by manifold experience we find that it is the greatest ease to distressed souls to hear, especially to speak with some that have been in the like case, for this will oft administer some hope that they also may be at last comforted, when the most comfortable promises of the Scripture are a terror to them;—yet this doth [not] effect the least ease for them sometimes, because some are so wholly possessed with unalterable prejudice against themselves, that they think none are or ever were like them. They compare themselves to Judas and Cain, and think their iniquity to be aggravated by many circumstances far beyond the pitch of them. Thus Spira judged of himself: ‘I tell you,’ saith he, ‘my case is mine own, it is singular, none like it.’

[4.] Though fears make the soul unactive to anything of comfort, because they wholly destroy its inclination and alter its bias to hope, yet, on the contrary, _they make it very nimble and active to pursue the conclusions of misery which they have helped to frame_, for the spring of all the faculties of the soul are bent that way. Hence it is that those who are possessed with these agonies will eagerly plead against themselves, and with an admirable subtlety will frame arguments against their peace, coin distinctions, and make strange evasions to escape the force of any consolation that may be offered to them. Their understandings are, as it were, whetted by their fears to an unimaginable quickness. Who would not wonder to hear the replies that some will give to the arguings of their friends that labour to comfort them! What strange answers Spira gave to those that pleaded with him! How easily he seemed to turn off the example of Peter denying Christ, and those scriptures that speak of God’s love to mankind, &c., may be seen at large in his narrative.

[5.] Fears by a strange kind of witchcraft do not only make them believe that they shall be unhappy, but also will at last persuade them _that they feel and see their misery already_. How astonishingly doth Spira speak to this purpose: ‘I find he daily more and more hardens me; I feel it.’ Answerable to this, I remember, was the case of one who was long imprisoned in deep distresses. He told me that he verily believed that scripture of Isa. lxvi. 23, 24 was fulfilled upon him, ‘From one sabbath to another shall all flesh come to worship before me, and they shall go forth and look upon the carcases of the men that have transgressed against me; for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched, and they shall be an abhorring to all flesh.’ To his own feeling he had the torments of conscience, and the sense of divine wrath was as a burning fire within him, and to his apprehension every look from others was a gazing upon him as a monster of misery, ‘abhorred of all flesh.’

The nature of spiritual distresses, and Satan’s method in working them, being explained, the last thing promised is now to be opened. This is,

3. The burden and weight of these distresses, which how grievous, how intolerable it is, may be sufficiently seen in what hath been already said, and may be further evidenced in the particulars following:—

[1.] _Those that are wounded with these fiery darts do at first usually conceal their wound and smother their grief, being ashamed to declare it_, partly because some great transgression, it may be, hath kindled all this fire in their bosoms, and this they are unwilling to declare to others; partly because they suspect—though no one remarkable sin hath occasioned these troubles—that the discovery of their case will expose them to the wonder and censures of all that shall hear of them. By this means the fire burns with greater vehemency. Their sore runs continually, and having none to speak a word in season for the least relief, it becomes more painful and dangerous; as bodily distempers, concealed by a foolish modesty from the physician, increase the trouble and hazard of the patient. Here have they many strugglings within themselves, many attempts to overcome their fears, but all in vain. They sit alone and keep silence, they flee the company and society of men, they labour after solitary places where they may weep with freedom, if their tears be not yet dried up, or at least where they may pour out their complaints against themselves. They meditate nothing but their misery, they can fix their thoughts upon nothing else, they ‘chatter as a crane or swallow, they mourn as a dove,’ they are as ‘a pelican in the wilderness, as an owl in the desert,’ but still without ease. They are but as those that are ‘snared in dens and prison-houses,’ who the longer they lie there have the less patience to bear the present unhappiness, and the less hope to be delivered from it.

[2.] _When they are tired out with private conflicts, and have no rest or intermission of trouble, then at last they are forced to speak; and having once begun to open their troubles, they care not who knows it._ If there be any heinous sin at the bottom, their consciences are forced to confess it. Wickedness, that was once sweet in his mouth, ‘is turned in his bowels, it is the gall of asps within him,’ Job xx. 14, 15. Thus doth God make men to vomit up what they had swallowed down. Terrors chase away all shame, they can now freely speak against their sin with the highest aggravations. And if their consciences have not a heinous crime to accuse them of in particular, yet in the general they will judge and condemn themselves as the most stubborn, sinful, or hardened wretches, justly branded with indelible characters of the wrath of God. However, the distress becomes greater; if they truly accuse themselves of any particular sin, that vomit is not without a violence offered to nature which otherwise would cover its shame. It cannot be done without sickness, straining, and torture; and when it is done, they take it for granted that every one passeth the same judgment upon them which they do upon themselves; and the frequent speaking doth confirm their minds in their fearful expectations. For what men do accustom themselves to assert, that they do more confidently believe. If they only complain of themselves in the general, with any intentions of procurement of pity, as is usual for the distressed to do, yet while they cry out to others, ‘Is this nothing to you, all you that pass by? Is there any sorrow like to my sorrow?’ &c., [Lam. i. 12,] still they think their ‘stroke is heavier than their groaning,’ [Job xxiii. 2;] and their cry to others doth strongly fix this apprehension in themselves, that none can be more miserable than they. Thus are they brought to Job’s condition: chap. xvi. 6, ‘Though I speak, my grief is not assuaged; and though I forbear, what am I eased?’

[3.] All this while they are under _an expressible[359] sense of divine wrath_. Heman speaks his apprehensions of it under the similitude of the most hideous and dismal comfortless imprisonment: Ps. lxxxviii. 6, ‘Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps.’ David, in Ps. cxvi. 3, compares it to the ‘sorrows of death,’ and—the highest that human thoughts can reach—‘the pains of hell.’ ‘The sorrows of death compassed me, and the pains of hell gat hold upon me; I found trouble and sorrow.’ Well might they thus judge, all things considered; for sin, that then lies heavy upon them, is a great weight, ‘a burden,’ saith David, ‘greater than I can bear,’ especially when it is pressed on by a heavy hand: ‘Thy hand presseth me sore.’ Sin makes the greatest wound, considering the conscience, which is wounded by it, is the tenderest part, and of exquisite sense. Hence the grief of it is compared to the pain of a running, fretting ulcer, that distempers the whole body: ‘My wounds stink and are corrupted; my sore ran in the night, and ceased not.’ Or to the pain of broken and shattered bones: Ps. xxxviii. 3, ‘There is no soundness in my flesh, because of thine anger; neither is there any rest in my bones, because of my sin.’ The instrument also that makes the wound is sharp, and cuts deep: ‘It is sharper than a two-edged sword,’ [Heb. iv. 12;] but when the weapon is poisoned,—and Satan hath a way to do that,—then it burns, making painful, malignant inflammations. The wrath of God, expressed to the conscience, brings the greatest terror: ‘Who knows the power of thine anger?’ Ps. xc. 11. It is impossible for the most trembling conscience, or most jealous fears, to go to the utmost bounds of it; neither can we apprehend any torture greater. The rack, tortures, fire, gibbets, &c., are all nothing to it. Hence it is that those who were afraid of suffering for truth, when by this means they were brought under these distresses, could then be willing to suffer any torment on the body; yea, and heartily wish to suffer much more, so that these tortures might be ended. Thus it was with Bainham martyr,[360] who, in the public congregation, bewailed his abjuration of the truth; and prayed all his hearers ‘rather to die by and by, than do as he had done.’ But that of Spira seems almost beyond belief. Thus speaks he to Vergerius, ‘If I could conceive but the least spark of hope of a better estate hereafter, I would not refuse to endure the most heavy weight of the wrath of that great God, yea, for twenty thousand years, so that I might at length attain to the end of that misery.’ What dreadful agonies were these that put him to these wishes! But it is less wonder, if you observe what apprehensions he had of his present trouble, he judged it worse than hell itself. And if you would have a lively exposition of David’s expression, ‘The pains of hell,’ &c., you may fetch it from this instance: ‘My present estate,’ saith he, ‘I now account worse than if my soul, separated from my body, were with Judas and the rest of the damned; and therefore I desire rather to be there than thus to live in the body.’ So that if you imagine a man crushed under the greatest weight, wounded in the most tender parts, and those wounds provoked by the sharpest corrosives, his bones all disjointed and broken, pined also with hunger and thirst, and in that case put under the highest tortures; yet you have but a very shadow of divine wrath. Add to all these, according to Spira’s wish, twenty thousand years of hell itself, yet all is nothing to that which a distressed mind supposeth; while the word _eternity_ presents the soul with the total sum of utmost misery all at once. Oh, unexpressible burden of a distressed mind! who can understand it truly, but he that feels it? How terribly is the mind of man shaken with terrors, as the wilderness by a mighty wind! which not only produceth violent motions, but also hideous noise, murmur, and howling.

[4.] This burden upon the mind _forceth the tongue to vent its sorrow in the saddest accent of most doleful outcries_. Their whole language is lamentation; but when the pangs of their agonies come upon them, for their distresses have their fits, then they speak in the bitterness of their souls. Oh, said Bainham, I would not for all the world’s good feel such a hell in my conscience again. One, formerly mentioned, in these distresses cries out, ‘Woe, woe, woe, a woeful, a wretched, a forsaken woman!’[361] It would surely have made a man’s hair to stand upright for dread to have heard Spira roaring out that terrible sentence, ‘How dreadful is it to fall into the hands of the living God!’ [Heb. x. 31.] Or to have heard his reply to him that told of his being at Venice: ‘O cursed day!’ saith he, ‘O cursed day! Oh that I had never gone thither, would God I had then died!’ &c. The like outcries had David often: Ps. xxi. 1, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?’ And Heman, Ps. lxxxviii. 14, ‘Lord, why castest thou off my soul, why hidest thou thy face from me?’ It is true David’s and Heman’s words have a better complexion than those others last mentioned; but their disquiet of heart seems, at some times, to have urged their expressions with impetuous violence; as those passages seem to say, Ps. xxxviii. 8, ‘I have roared by reason of the disquietness of my heart;’ Ps. xxxii. 3, ‘My bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long;’ Job iii. 24, ‘My roarings are poured out like water,’ If their lamentations were turned into roarings, and those roarings were like the breaking in of a flood, and that flood of so long continuance that it dried up the marrow of the bones, we may safely imagine that they were not so much at leisure to order their words, but that their tongues might speak in that dialect which is proper to astonishment and distress.

[5.] Though the mind be the principal seat of these troubles, _yet the body cannot be exempted from a co-partnership in these sorrows_. Notwithstanding, this is so far from abating the trouble, that it increaseth it by a circulation. The pains of the body, contracted by the trouble of the mind, are communicated again to the fountain from whence they came, and reciprocally augment the disquiet of the mind. The body is weakened, their ‘strength poured out like water;’ they are ‘withered like grass,’ pined as ‘a skin,’ become as a ‘bottle in the smoke.’ Thus David frequently complains: Ps. xxii. 14, he describes himself as reduced to a skeleton, ‘I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels. My strength is dried up like a potsherd; my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; and thou hast brought me to the dust of death.’ Neither is this his peculiar case, but the common effect of spiritual distresses: Ps. xxxix. 11, ‘When thou with rebukes dost correct man for iniquity, thou makest his beauty to consume away like a moth.’

[6.] Being thus distressed for their souls, they cast off _all care of their bodies, estates, families, and all their outward concerns whatsoever_. And no wonder, for being persuaded that they have made shipwreck of their souls, they judge the rest are not worth the saving.

[7.] Giving all for lost, they usually cast about for some ease to their minds, _by seeking after the lower degrees of misery, hearing or supposing that all are not tormented alike, they endeavour to persuade themselves of a cooler hell_. This, if they could reach it, were but poor comfort, and little to their satisfaction; but, as poor as it is, it is usually denied to them, for while they judge themselves to be the greatest sinners, they cannot but adjudge themselves to the greatest torments; and these endeavours being frustrated, they return back to themselves, as now hopeless of the least case, worse than before. Now they fix themselves upon the deep contemplations of their misery. Oh, think they, how great had our happiness been if we had been made toads, serpents, worms, or anything but men; for then should we never have known this unhappiness; and this begets a thousand vain wishes. Oh that we had never been born! or that death could annihilate us! or that as soon as we had been born, we had died! as Job speaks: chap. iii. 11, 12, ‘Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?’ for then had we not contracted so much guilt. ‘Or that the mountains and hills could fall upon us, and cover us from the face of our judge,’ [Rev. vi. 16.]

[8.] When all their hopes are thus dashed, and, like a shipwrecked man on a plank, they are still knocked down with new waves, all their endeavours being still frustrated, they seem to themselves to be able to hold out no longer; then they _give over all further inquiries, and the use of means, they refuse to pray, read, hear_. They perceive, as Spira said, that they pray to their own condemnation, and that all is to no purpose. They are ‘weary of their groanings,’ Ps. vi. 6; their ‘eyes fail with looking up;’ their ‘knees are feeble;’ their hands hang down; and as Heman: Ps. lxxxviii. 4, 5, ‘They count themselves with those that go down to the pit, free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, whom God remembereth no more.’ Thus they lie down under their burden, and while they find it so hard to be borne, it is usual for them to come to the utmost point of desperateness, Satan suggesting and forwarding them. Sometimes they open their mouths with complaints against God, and blaspheme. And, as the last part of the tragedy, being weary of themselves, they seek to put an end to their present misery, by putting an end to their lives.

I have presented you with Satan’s stratagems against the peace of God’s children. The remedies against these and other subtleties of our grand enemy I shall not offer you, because many others have done that already, to whose writings I must refer you. Some principal directions I have pointed at in the way, and in the general, have done this for the help of the tempted, that I have endeavoured to shew them the methods of [the] tempter, which is no small help to preserve men from being thus imposed upon, and to recover out of his snare those that are. It is a great preservative from sickness, and no mean advantage to the cure, to have a discovery of the disease, and the causes of it. I shall conclude these discoveries with a caution or two.

[1.] _Let none think worse of the serious practice of holy strictness in religion, because these spiritual distresses do sometimes befall those that are conscientiously careful in the ways of God, while the profane and negligent professors are strangers to such trials._ These troubles are indeed very sad, but a senseless, careless state is far worse. These troubles often end very comfortably, whereas the other end—except God make them sensible by conviction of their sin and danger—in that real misery, the fears whereof occasion these sorrows to God’s children. And the danger of spiritual troubles is not so great as is that of a hardened heart; nay, God frequently makes use of them to prevent eternal ruin—for one that goes roaring to the pit, there are thousands that go laughing to hell.

[2.] _Let none slight or scoff at these tremendous judgments._ It is too common with men, either to ascribe spiritual troubles to melancholy, as if none were ever thus concerned, but such, as by too much seriousness in religion, are become mad—a fair pretence for carelessness—or to a whining dissimulation. To the former I have said something before, and as for the latter I shall only reply, in the words of Spira, to one that objected hypocrisy to him: ‘I am a castaway, a vessel of wrath; yet dare you call it dissembling and frenzy, and can mock at the formidable example of the heavy wrath of God that should teach you fear and terror. But it is natural to the flesh to speak, either out of malice or ignorance, perversely of the work of God,’

[3.] _Let none be afraid of this Goliath, let no man’s heart faint because of him._ A fear of caution and diligence to avoid his snares is a necessary duty—‘Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil,’ &c., [1 Pet. v. 8]—but a discouraging, distrustful fear is a dishonourable reflection upon God’s power and promises to help us, and upon the captain of our salvation, who goeth out before us. Let us hold on in the practice of holiness, and not be afraid. ‘The God of peace shall tread down Satan under our feet shortly,’ [Rom. xvi. 20.] Amen.

NOTE.

Agreeably to Note at beginning, there will be found below the more specific title page of Part III.—G.

_DÆMONOLOGIA SACRA_:

OR, A

TREATISE

OF

Satans Temptations.

The Third Part.

CONTAINING

An Account of the Combate betwixt Christ and Satan, in _Matth_. 4. Wherein the deep Subtilty of Satan, in managing those Temptations, is laid open, as the grand Instance of the Sum of his Policy in all his Assaults upon Men; Leading to a consideration of many Temptations in particular, and of special directions for Resistance.

By _R. G._

Heb. 4. 15.
—_He was Tempted in all points like as we are, yet without Sin._

_London_, Printed by _J. D._ for _Richard Randel_, and _Peter
Maplisden_, Booksellers in _New-Castle_ upon _Tine_, 1677.