Fourth. Holiness in the power of it is necessary to the true peace and repose of the soul. I do not say that our peace is bottomed on the righteousness of our nature or holiness of our lives, yet it is ever attended with these. ‘There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked.’ We may as soon make the sea always still, as an unholy heart truly quiet. From whence come the intestine wars in men’s bosoms, that set them at variance with themselves, but from their own lusts? these break the peace, and keep the man in a continual tempest. As the spirit of holiness comes into his heart, and the sceptre of Christ—which is ‘a sceptre of righteousness’—bears sway in the life; so the storm abates more and more, till it be quite down, which will not be while we are short of heaven. There only is perfect rest, because perfect holiness. Whence those frights and fears, which make them a magor missabib—a terror round about?—they wake and sleep with the scent of hell-fire about them continually. O, it is their unholy course and unrighteous ways that walk in their thoughts, as John’s ghost in Herod’s. This makes men discontented in every condition. They neither can relish the sweetness of their enjoyments, nor bear the bitter taste of their afflictions. I know there are ways to stupefy the conscience, and bind up for a time the senses of an unholy heart, that it shall not feel its own misery; but the virtue of this opium is soon spent, and then the wretch is upon the rack again, and his horror returns upon him with a greater paroxysm.
An example whereof I have heard. A notorious drunkard, who used, when told of his ungodly life, to shake off, as easily as Paul did the viper from his hand, all the threatenings of the word that his friends would have fastened on his conscience—bearing himself upon a presumptuous hope of the mercy of God in Christ: it pleased God to lay him, some while after, on his back by sickness; which, for a time, scared his old companions—brethren with him in iniquity—from visiting him; but hearing he was cheery and pleasant in his sickness, they ventured again to see him; doing so, they found him very confident of the mercy of God (whereby their hands were much strengthened in their old ways); but before he died, this tune was changed to purpose; his vain hopes vanished, his guilty conscience awakened, and the poor wretch, roasted in the scorching flames of his former ungodly practices, and now ready to die, cries out despairingly, ‘O sirs! I had prepared a plaster, and thought all was well, but now it will stick no longer.’ His guilty conscience rubbed it off as fast as he clapped it on. And truly, friends, you will find that the blood of Christ himself will not cleave to a soul that is in league with any way of sin and unrighteousness.
God will pluck such from the horns of his altar, that flee to it, but not from their unrighteousness, and will slay them in the sight of the sanctuary they so boldly trust to. You know the message Solomon sent to Adonijah, ‘If thou showest thyself a worthy man, not a hair of thy head shall fall; but if wickedness shall be found in thee, thou shalt surely die.’ In vain do men think to shroud themselves under Christ’s wing from the hue and cry of their accusing conscience, while wickedness finds a sanctuary in them. Christ never was intended by God to secure men in their unrighteousness, but to save them from it.
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