USE OR APPLICATION- A Reproof To Three Sorts Of Persons 4/5

3. Sort.  This reproves those that think to heal their consciences with other than gospel balm; who leave the waters of living comfort, that flow from this fountain opened in the gospel by Christ, to draw their peace and comfort out of cisterns of their own hewing, and they are two—a carnal cistern, and a legal cistern.

           (1.) Some think to draw their peace out of a car­nal cistern.  There is not more variety of plasters and foolish medicines used for the cure of the ague of the body, than there is of carnal receipts used by self-deceiving sinners to rid themselves of the shaking ague which the fear of God's wrath brings upon their guilty consciences.  Some, if they be but a little awakened by the word, and they feel their hearts chill within them, from a few serious thoughts of their wretched undone condition, fall to the physic of Fe­lix; who, as soon as his conscience began to be sick at Paul’s sermon, had enough of the preacher, and made all the haste he could to get that unpleasing noise out of his head: ‘Felix trembled, and answered, Go thy way,’ Acts 24:25.  Thus many turn their back off God, run as far as they can from those ordinances, that company, or anything else that is likely to grate upon their consciences, and revive the thoughts of their de­plored state, which all their care is to forget.  Such a one I have heard of, that would not be present at any funeral; could not bear the sight of his own gray hairs, and therefore used a black-lead comb to discolour them; lest, by these, the thoughts of death, which he so abhorred, should crowd in upon him.  A poor cow­ardly shift, God knows! yet all that this wretch had, and all that many more have, betwixt them and a hell above ground in their consciences.  Others, their light is so strong, and glares on them so constantly, that this will not do, but wherever they go, though they hear not a sermon in a month, look not on a Bible in a year, and keep far enough from such company as would awake their consciences, yet they are haunted with their own guilt.  And therefore they do not only go ‘from the presence of the Lord,’ as Cain did, Gen. 4:16; but as he also made diversion of those musing thoughts which gathered to his guilty conscience, by employing them another way in ‘building a city,’ ver. 17, so do they labour to give their consciences the slip in a crowd of worldly businesses.  This is the great leviathan that swallows up all the thoughts of heaven and hell in many men’s hearts.  They are so taken up with that project and this, that conscience finds them not at leisure to exchange a few words with them of a long time together.  Conscience is as much hunched at and spited among sinners, as Joseph was among the patriarchs.  That which conscience tells them, likes them no better than Joseph’s dream did his brethren; and this makes many play the merchants with their consciences, as they did with him—which they do by bribing it with the profits of the world.  But this physic is found too weak also; and therefore Saul’s harp, and Nabal’s feast, is thought on by others. With these they hope to drown their cares, and lay their raving consciences asleep, like some ruffian that is under an arrest for debt, and hath no way, but now to prison he must go, except he can make the sergeant drunk in whose hand he is; which he doth, and so makes an escape.  Thus many besot their conscience with the brutish pleasures of sin; and when they have laid it as fast asleep in senseless stupidity as one that is dead drunk, then they may sin without control till it wakes again.  This is the height of that peace which any carnal recipe can help the sinner unto—to give a sleeping potion, that shall bind up the senses of con­science for a while, in which time the wretch may forget his misery, as the condemned man doth when he is asleep; but as soon as it awakes, the horror of his condition is sure again to affright him worse than before.  God keeps you all from such a cure for your troubles of conscience, which is a thousand times worse than the disease itself.  Better to have a dog that will, by his barking, tell us a thief is in our yard, than one that will still, and let us be robbed before we have any notice of our danger.