EXHORTATION To Them That Want This Helmet of Hope 1/3

   First Consideration.  How deplored a thing it is to be in a hopeless state.  The apostle makes him to be ‘without God’ that is ‘without hope’—‘having no hope, and being without God in the world,’ Eph. 2:12.  God, to the soul, is what the soul is to the body. If that be so vile and noisome a thing, when it hath lost the soul that keeps it sweet; what is thy soul when nothing of God is in it?  ‘The heart of the wicked is little worth,’ saith Solomon.  And why? but because it hath not God to put a value on it.  If God, who is light, be not in thy understanding, thou art blind; and what is an eye whose sight is out fit for but to help thee break thy neck?  If God be not in thy conscience to pacify and comfort it, thou must needs be full of horror or void of sense; a raging devil or a stupid atheist.  If God be not in thy heart and affections to purify them, thou art but a shoal of fish, a sink of sin. If God be not in thee, the devil is in thee; for man’s heart is a house that cannot stand empty.  In a word, thou canst not well be without this hope neither in life nor death.  Not in life—what comfort canst thou take in all the enjoyments thou hast in this life with­out the hope of a better?  A sad legacy it is which shuts the rebellious child from all claim to the inher­itance.  Thou hast an estate, it may be, but it is all you must look for.  And is it not a dagger at the heart of thy joy to think thy portion is paid thee here, which will be spent by that time the saint comes to receive his?  Much less tolerable is it to be without this hope in a dying hour.  Who can without horror think of leaving this world, though full of sorrows, that hopes for no ease in the other?  The condemned malefactor, as ill as he likes his smokey hole in the prison, had rather be there, than accept of deliverance at the hangman's hand; he had rather live still in his stink­ing dungeon than exchange it for a gibbet.  And great­er reason hath the hopeless soul—if he understands himself—to wish he may spend his eternity on earth, though in the poorest hole or cave in it—and that under the most exquisite torment of stone or gout —than to be eased of that pain with hell’s torment. Hence is the sad confusion in the thoughts of guilty wretches when their souls are summoned out of their bodies.  This makes the very pangs of death stronger than they would be, if these dear friends had but a hopeful parting.  If the shriek and mournful outcry of some friends in the room of a dying man may so dis­turb him as to make his passage more terrible, how much more then must the horror of the sinner’s own conscience under the apprehensions of that hell whither it is going, amaze and affright him?  There is a great difference between a wife’s parting with her husband, when called from her to live at court under the shine of his prince’s favour, whose return after a while she expects with an accumulation of wealth and honour; and another whose husband is taken out of her arms to be dragged to prison and torment.