death; a sinful conception, before any inanimation? If hereditary diseases from thy parents, gouts and epilepsies, were in thee, before the diseases of thine own purchase, the effects of thy licentiousness and thy riot; and that from the first minute that thou begannest to live, thou begannest to die too. Are not the judgments of God speedily enough executed upon thy soul and body together, every day, when as soon as thou committest a sin, thou are presently left to thine impenitence, to thine insensibleness, and obduration? Nay, the judgment is more speedy than so for that very sin itself, was a punishment of thy former sins.

But though God may begin speedily, yet he intermits again, he slacks his pace; and therefore the execution is not speedy. As it is said of Pharaoh often, Because the plagues ceased, (though they had been laid upon him) Ingratum est cor Pharaonis, Pharaoh's heart was hardened. But first we see, by that punishment which is laid upon Eli, that with God it is all one, to begin, and consummate his judgment: (When I begin, I will make an end 20.) And when Herod took a delight in that flattery and acclamation of the people, It is the voice of God, and not of man; the angel of the Lord smote him immediately", and the worms took possession of him, though (if we take Josephus' relation for truth) he died not in five days after. Howsoever, if we consider the judgments of God in his purpose and decree, there they are eternal: and for the execution thereof, though the wicked sinner dissemble his sense of his torments, and, as Tertullian says of a persecutor, Herminianus, who being tormented at his death, in his violent sickness, cried out, Nemo sciat, ne gaudeant Christiani; Let no man know of my misery, lest the Christians rejoice thereat: so these sinners suppress these judgments of God, from our knowledge, because they would not have that God, that inflicts them, glorified therein, by us: yet they know, their damnation hath never slept, nor let them sleep quietly: and, in God's purpose, the judgment hath been eternal, and they have been damned as long as the devil; and that is an execution speedy enough. But because this appears not so evidently, but that they may disguise it to the world, and (with much ado) to

their own consciences; therefore their hearts are fully set in them, to do evil. And so we pass to our third part.

This is that perverseness, which the heathen philosopher Epictetus apprehends, and reprehends; That whereas everything is presented to us, cum duabus ansis, with two handles, we take it still, by the wrong handle. This is tortuositas serpentis, the wryness, the knottiness, the entangling of the serpent. This is that which the apostle takes such direct knowledge of 22, Despisest thou the riches of God's bountifulness, and longsuffering, not knowing that it leads thee to repentance? St. Chrysostom's comparison of such a sinner to a vulture, that delights only in dead carcases, that is, in company dead in their sins, holds best, as himself notes, in this particular, that the vulture perhorrescit fragrantiam unguenti, he loths, and is ill-affected with any sweet savour: for so doth this sinner find death, in that sovereign balm of the patience of God, and he dies of God's mercy: Et quid infelicius illis, qui bono odore moriuntur? says St. Augustine: In what worse state can any man be, than to take harm of a good air? But, as the same father adds, Numquid quia mori voluisti, malum fecisti odorem? This indisposition in that particular man, does not make this air, an ill air; and yet this abuse of the patience of God, comes to be an infectious poison, and such a poison, as strikes the heart; and so general, as to strike the heart of the children of men; and so strongly, as that their hearts should be fully set in them, to do evil.

First then, what is this setting of the heart upon evil; and then, what is this fulness, that leaves no room for a cure? When a man receives figures and images of sin, into his fancy and imagination, and leads them on to his understanding and discourse, to his will, to his consent, to his heart, by a delightful dwelling upon the meditation of that sin; yet this is not a setting of the heart upon doing evil. To be surprised by a temptation, to be overthrown by it, to be held down by it for a time, is not it. It is not when the devil looks in at the window to the heart, by presenting occasions of temptations, to the eye; nor when he comes in at the door, to our heart, at the ear, either in lascivious discourses, or satirical and libellous defamations of other men :

22 Rom. ii. 4.

it is not, when the devil is put to his circuit, to seek whom he may devour, and how he may corrupt the king by his council, that is, the soul by the senses: but it is, when by a habitual custom in sin, the sin arises merely and immediately from myself: it is, when the heart hath usurped upon the devil, and upon the world too, and is able and apt to sin of itself, if there were no devil, and if there were no outward objects of temptation when our own heart is become spontanea insania, et voluntarius dæmon 23, such a wilful madness, and such a voluntary and natural devil to itself, as that we should be ambitious, though we were in an hospital; and licentious, though we were in a wilderness; and voluptuous, though in a famine: so that such a man's heart, is as a land of such giants, where the children are born as great, as the men of other nations grow to be; for those sins, which in other men have their birth, and their growth, after their birth, they begin at a concupiscence, and proceed to a consent, and grow up to actions, and swell up to habits; in this man, sin begins at a stature and proportion above all this; he begins at a delight in the sin, and comes instantly to a defence of it, and to an obduration and impenitibleness in it: this is the evil of the heart, by the misuse of God's grace, to divest and lose all tenderness and remorse in sin.

Now for the incurableness of this heart, it consists first in this, that there is a fulness, it is fully set to do evil: and such a full heart hath no room for a cure; as a full stomach hath no room for physic. The mathematician could have removed the whole world with his engine, if there had been any place to have set his engine in. Any man might be cured of any sin, if his heart were not full of it, and fully set upon it: which setting, is indeed, in a great part, an unsettledness, when the heart is in a perpetual motion, and in a miserable indifferency to all sins: it may be fully set upon sin, though it be not vehemently affected to any one sin. The reason which is assigned, why the heart of man, if it receive a wound, is incurable, is the palpitation, and the continual motion of the heart: for, if the heart could lie still, so that fit things might be applied to it, and work upon it, all wounds, in all parts of the heart, were not necessarily mortal: 23 Chrysostom.

so, if our hearts were not distracted, in so many forms, and so divers ways of sin, it might the better be cured of any one. St. Augustine had this apprehension, when he said, Audeo dicere utile esse cadere in aliquod manifestum peccatum, ut sibi displiceant: It is well for him, that is indifferent to all sins, if he fall into some such misery by some one sin, as brings him to a sense of that, and of the rest. St. Augustine, when he says this, says he speaks boldly in saying so, Audeo dicere: but we may be so much more bold, as to say further, That that man had been damned, if he had not sinned that sin: for the heart of the indifferent sinner baits at all that ever rises, at all forms and images of sin: When he sees a thief, he runs with him; and with the adulterer he hath his portion: and as soon as it contracts any spiritual disease, any sin, it is presently, not only in morbo acuto, but in morbo complicato; in a sharp disease, and in a manifold disease, a disease multiplied in itself. Therefore it is, as St. Gregory notes, that the prophet proposes it, as the hardest thing of all, for a sinner to return to his own heart, and to find out that, after it is strayed, and scattered upon so several sins. Redite prevaricatores ad cor25, says the prophet: and, says that father, Longe eis mittit, cum ad cor redire compellit; God knows whither he sends them, when he sends them to their own heart: for, since it is true which the same father said, Vix sancti inveniunt cor suum, The holiest man cannot at all times find his own heart, (his heart may be bent upon religion, and yet he cannot tell in which religion; and upon preaching, and yet he cannot tell which preacher; and upon prayer, and yet he shall find strayings and deviations in his prayer) much more hardly is the various and vagabond heart of such an indifferent sinner, to be found by any search. If he inquire for his heart, at that chamber where he remembers it was yesterday, in lascivious and lustful purposes, he shall hear that it went from thence to some riotous feasting, from thence to some blasphemous gaming, after, to some malicious consultation of entangling one, and supplanting another; and he shall never trace it so close, as to drive it home, that is, to the consideration of itself, and that God that made it; nay, scarce to make it consist in any one particular sin.

VOL. V.

24 Psalm L. 18.

25 Isaiah XLvi. 8.

2 H

:

That which St. Bernard feared in Eugenius, when he came to be pope, and so a distraction of many worldly businesses, may much more be feared in a distraction of many sins, Cave ne te trahant, quo non vis; Take heed lest these sins carry thee farther, than thou intendest thou intendest but pleasure, or profit; but the sin will carry thee farther: Quæris quo? says that father; Dost thou ask whither? Ad cor durum, To a senselessness, a remorselessness, a hardness of heart: Nec pergas quærere, (says he) quid illud sit; Never ask what that hardness of heart is: for, if thou know it not, thou hast it.

26

This then is the fulness, and so the incurableness of the heart, by that reason of perpetual motion; because it is in perpetual progress from sin to sin, he never considers his state. But there is another fulness intended here, that he is come to a full point, to a consideration of his sin, and to a station and settledness in it, out of a foundation of reason, as though it were, not only an excusable, but a wise proceeding, because God's judgments are not executed. But when man becomes to be thus fully set, God shall set him faster: Iniquitas tua in sacculo signata 2; His transgression shall be sealed up in a bag, and God shall sew up his iniquity: and Quid cor hominis nisi sacculus Dei 27? What is this bag of God, but the heart of that sinner? There, as a bag of a wretched miser's money, which shall never be opened, never told till his death, lies this bag of sin, this frozen heart of an impenitent sinner; and his sins shall never be opened, never told to his own conscience, till it be done to his final condemnation. God shall suffer him to settle, where he hath chosen to settle himself, in an insensibleness, an unintelligibleness, (to use Tertullian's word) of his own condition: and, Quid miserior misero non miserante seipsum? Who can be more miserable than that man, who does not commiserate his own misery? How far gone is he into a pitiful estate, that neither desires to be pitied by others, nor pities himself, nor discerns that his state needs pity! Invaluerat ira tua super me, et nesciebam, says blessed St. Augustine: Thy hand lay heavy upon me, and I found it not to be thy hand: because the maledictions of God are honeyed and candied over, with a little crust or sweetness of worldly ease, or reprieve, we do not apprehend 29 Augustine.

26 Job xiv. 17.

27 Gregory.

28