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     Answer First.  I answer, many sinners who seem so jocund in your eyes, have not such merry lives as you think for.  A book may be fairly bound and gild­ed, yet have but sad stories writ within it.  Sinners will not tell us all the secret rebukes that conscience from the word gives them.  If you will judge of Herod by the jollity of his feast, you may think he wanted no joy; but at another time we see that John’s ghost walked in his conscience.  And so doth the word haunt many a one, who to us appear to lay nothing to heart.  In the midst of their laughter their heart is sad. You see the lightning in their face, but hear not the thunder that rumbles in their conscience.

           Answer Second.  It is enough, that the word doth leave such an impression upon the conscience of any ‘though not of all’ to prove its divinity.  One affirma­tive testimony speaketh louder for the proof of a thing, than many negatives do to the contrary.  The word is not a physical instrument, but a moral, and works not by a virtue inherent in it, but [by a] power impressed on it by the Spirit of God that first indited it.  And this power he putteth forth according to his own good pleasure; so that the same word sets one man a trembling, and leaves another ‘in the same seat may be’ as little moved by it as the pillar he leaneth on.  Thus as two at a mill, so at a sermon, one is taken, and the other left; one is humbled, and another hardened; not from any impotency in the word, but [from the] freeness of God’s dispensing it. His message it shall do to him it is sent, and none else.  It is as a man strikes with a sword, back or edge, a strong or weak blow, that makes it cut or not, gives a slight wound or deep.  The word pierceth the con­science according to the force and divine power that is impressed on it.  The three children walked in the fire, and were not singed, others were consumed as soon as they came within the scent of it.  Shall we say, ‘That fire is not hot,’ because one was burned and the other not?  Some, their consciences do not so much as smell of the word, though the flames of the threatening fly about their ears, others are set all on fire with the terrors of it.

           Answer Third.  The senseless stupidity of some under the stroke of the word, is not to be imputed to its impotency, but to the just judgement of God, wherewith he plagueth them for sinning against the convictions thereof.  For commonly they are of that sort, whose consciences are so impenetrable ‘the with­ering curse of God having lighted upon them’ that there is no wonder their judgments are darkened and their consciences seared.  It was as great a mani­festation of Christ’s power ‘and his disciples judged it so’ when with two or three words the fig‑tree was blasted, as if he had caused it to spring and sprout when withered and dry.  The power of God is as great in hardening Pharaoh’s heart as in melting Josiah’s.

The conscience‑touching power of the word attests its divine origin 1/2

           Second Effect.  The second effect the Scrip­ture hath upon the spirits of men, by which its divine pedigree may be proved, is the power it exerciseth on the conscience to convince and terrify it.  Conscience is a castle that no batteries but what God raiseth against it can shake.  No power can command it to stoop but that which heaven and earth obey.  He that disarms the strong man must be stronger than he.  He that masters the conscience must be greater than it, and so God only is, I John 3:20 .  Now the word being able to shake and shatter this power of the soul, which disdaineth to stoop to any but God, must needs be from him.  And that the word exerts such a power upon the conscience who will doubt?  Do we not see it daily chastising the proudest sinners, even to make them cry and whine under its convictions, like a child under the rod?  Yea, doth it not slay them outright, that they fall down dispirited at one thunder-clap of the law let off by God upon them?  ‘When sin revived, I died,’ saith Paul.  He who before was a jolly man—as well provided in his own opinion for his spiritual estate, as Job was for his outward, when he had his flocks and herds, sons and daughters, health and prosperity, all as yet untouched by the hand of God—upon him, it stripped his conscience as naked as Job afterward was in his outward condition.  The man’s eyes are opened now to see how naked and void of all holiness he is.  Yea his fair skin of phar­isaical strictness, with the beauty of which he was formerly so far in love as if he had been another Absalom, without mole or wart, he now judgeth to be but odious deformity, and himself a most loathsome creature, by reason of those plague-sores and ulcers that he sees running on him.  Yea, such power the word hath upon him, that it laid him trembling over the bottomless pit, in a despair of himself and his own righteousness.

           Hath any creature an arm like this of the word? or can any book penned by the wit of man command the heart to tremble at the rehearsal thereof, as this can do?  Even a Felix on the bench, when a poor pris­oner preacheth this word at the bar to him, is put into a shaking fit.  Who but a God could make those monsters of men, that had paddled in the blood of Christ, and who had scorned his doctrine so as to count the professors of it fools and idiots, yet come affrighted in their own thoughts, at a secret prick given them in Peter’s sermon, and cry out in the open assembly, ‘Men and brethren, what shall we do to be saved?’  Doth not this carry as visible a print of Deity, as when Moses clave the rock with a little rod in his hand?

           Question.  But haply you will say, If there be such a conscience-shaking power in the word, how comes it to pass, that many notorious sinners sit so peaceably and sleep so soundly under it?  They read it at home, and hear it preached powerfully in the public, yet are so far from feeling any such earthquake in their consciences, that they remain senseless and stupid; yea, can laugh at the preacher for his pains, and shake off all the threatenings denounced, when sermon is done, as easily as the spaniel doth the water when he comes out of the river.