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           (2.) Some draw their peace of conscience from a legal cistern.  All the comfort they have is from their own righteousness.  This good work, and that good duty, they bless themselves in, when any qualm comes over their hearts.  The cordial drink which they use to revive and comfort themselves with, is drawn, not from the satisfaction which Christ by his death hath given to God for them poor sinners, but from the righteousness of their own lives; not from Christ’s in­tercession in heaven for them, but [from] their own good prayers on earth for themselves.  In a word, when any spark of disquiet kindles in their consciences—as it were strange, if, where so much com­bustible matter is, there should not at one time or other some smothering fire begin in such a one’s bosom—then, not Christ’s blood, but their own tears, are cast to quench it.  Well, whosever thou art that goest this way to work to obtain peace of con­science, I accuse thee as an enemy to Jesus Christ and his gos­pel.  If any herb could be found growing in thy garden to heal the wounds of thy conscience, why did the Lord Christ commend for such a rarity the balm which he came from heaven on purpose to compound with his own blood? why doth he call sinners from all besides himself as comforters of no value, and bid us come to him, as ever we would find rest for our souls? Matt. 11:28.  No; know, poor creature, and believe it —while the knowing of it may do thee good—either Christ was an impostor, and the gospel a fable, which I hope thou art not such an infidel, worse than the devil himself, to believe; or else thou takest not the right method of healing thy conscience wounded for sin, and laying a sure bottom for solid peace in thy bosom.  Prayers and tears—repentance I mean—good works and duties, these are not to be neglected; nay, thou canst never have peace without them in thy con­science; yet these do not, cannot, procure this peace for thee, because they cannot thy peace with God. And peace of conscience is nothing but the echo of pardoning mercy, which, sounding in the conscience, brings the soul into a sweet rest with the pleasant music it makes.  And the echo is but the same voice repeated; so that, if prayers and tears, good duties and good works, cannot procure our peace of pardon, then not our peace of comfort.  I pray remember I said, ‘You can never have inward peace without these; and yet not have it by these.’  A wound would hardly ever cure, if not wrapped up from the open air, and also kept clean; yet not these, but the balm cures it. Cease therefore, not from praying and the exercise of any other holy exercise of grace or duty, but from ex­pecting thy peace and comfort to grow from their root, or else thou shuttest thyself out from having any benefit of that true peace which the gospel offers. The one resists the other; like those two famous rivers in Germany, whose streams, when they meet, will not mingle together.  Gospel peace will not mingle and incorporate, as I may so say, with any other.  Thou must drink it pure and unmixed, or have none at all.  ‘We,’ saith holy Paul for himself, and all other sincere believers, ‘are the circumcision, which worship God in the spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh,’ Php. 3:3.  As if he had said, ‘We are not short of any in holy duties and services, nay, we exceed them, for we worship God in the Spirit; but this is not the tap from whence we draw our joy and comfort; we rejoice (fiduciarily) in Christ Jesus, not in the flesh,’ where, that which he called worshipping God in the Spirit, now, in opposition to Christ and rejoicing in him, he calls flesh.

           They are to be proved from hence, who do indeed use the balm of the gospel for the healing of conscience-wounds; but who use it very unevangeli­cally.  The matter they bottom their peace and com­fort on, is right and good—Christ and the mercy of God through him in the promise to poor sinners. What can be said better?  But they do not observe gospel rule and order in the applying it.  They snatch the promise presumptuously, force and ravish it, rather than seek to have Christ’s consent—like Saul, who was in such haste that he could not stay till Samuel came to sacrifice for him, but boldly falls to work before he comes, flat against order given him. Thus many are so hot upon having comfort, that they will not stay for the Spirit of God to come and sprin­kle their consciences with the blood of Christ in gospel order; but profanely do it themselves, by ap­plying the comfort of those promises which indeed at present does not belong to them.  O sirs, can this do well in the end?  Should he consult well for his health, that will not stay for the doctor’s direction, but runs into the apothecary’s shop, and on his own head takes his physic, without the counsel of the physician how to prepare it, or himself for the taking of it?  This every profane wretch doth, that lives in sin, and yet sprinkles himself with the blood of Christ, and blesseth himself in the pardoning mercy of God.  But let such know that, as the blood of the paschal lamb was not struck on the Egyptians’ doors, but the Israelites’; so neither is the blood of Christ to be sprinkled on the obstinate sinner, but on the sin­cere penitent.  Nay, further, as that blood was not to be spilt on the threshold of an Israelite’s door, where it might be trampled on, but on the side posts; so neither is the blood of Christ to be applied to the be­liever himself while he lies in any sin unrepented of, for his present comfort.  This were indeed to throw it under his foot to be trod upon.  David confesseth his sin with shame, before Nathan comforts him with the news of a pardon.

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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.

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  Every true believer hath peace of conscience in promisso—in the promise.  And that we count as good as ready money in the purse, which we have sure bond for, Ps. 29:11.  ‘The Lord will bless his people with peace.’  He is resolved on it, and then who shall hinder it?  It is worth your reading the whole psalm, to see what weight the Lord gives to this sweet promise, for the encouragement of our faith in expecting the performance thereof; nothing more hard to enter into the heart of a poor creature—when all is in an uproar in his bosom, and his conscience threatening nothing but fire and sword, wrath and vengeance, from God for his sins—than thoughts or hopes of peace and comfort.  Now, the psalm is spent is show­ing what great things God can do, and that with no more trouble to himself than a word speaking.  ‘The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is full of majesty,’ ver. 4.  ‘It breaketh the cedars; it divi­deth the flames; it shaketh the wilderness; it maketh the hinds to calve.’  This God that doth all this, promiseth to bless his people with peace, outward and inward.  For without this inward peace, though he might give them peace, yet could he never bless them with peace as he here undertakes.  A sad peace, were it not, to have quiet streets, but cutting of throats in our houses? yet infinitely more sad is it to have peace both in our streets and houses, but war and blood in our guilty consciences.  What peace can a poor creature taste or relish, while the sword of God’s wrath lies at the throat of conscience—not peace with God himself?  Therefore Christ purchased peace of pardon, to obtain peace of conscience for his pardoned ones; and accordingly hath bequeathed it in the promise to them.  ‘Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you,’ John 14:27.  There, you see, he is both the testator to leave and the executor of his own will—to give out with his own hands what his love hath left believers; so that there is no fear, but his will shall be performed to the full, seeing himself lives to see it done.

           Every believer hath this inward peace in semine—in the seed.  ‘Light is sown for the righteous, and gladness for the upright in heart,’ Ps. 97:11. Where sown, but in the furrows of the believer’s own bosom, when principles of grace and holiness were cast into it by the Spirit of God?  Hence it is called ‘the peaceable fruit of righteousness,’ Heb. 12:11.  It shoots as naturally from holiness as any fruit in its kind doth from the seed proper to it.  It is indeed most true, that this seed runs and ripens into this fruit sooner in some than it doth in others.  This spiritual harvest comes not alike soon to all, no more than the other that is outward doth.  But here is the comfort, whoever hath a seedtime of grace pass over his soul, shall have his harvest-time also of joy.  This law God hath bound himself to, as strongly as for the other; which are 'not to cease while the earth remaineth,’ Gen. 8:22; yea, more strongly, for that was to the world in gen­eral, not to every particular country, town or field in these, which may want a harvest, and yet God keep his word; but God cannot perform his promise, if any one particular saint should everlastingly go without his reaping time.  ‘He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him,’ Ps. 126:6. And therefore you who think so basely of the gospel and the professors of it, because at present their peace and comfort is not come, know it is on the way to them, and comes to stay everlastingly with them; whereas your peace is going from you every moment, and is sure to leave you without any hope of returning to you again.  Look not how the Christian begins, but ends.  The Spirit of God by his convictions comes into the soul with some terrors, but it closeth with peace and joy.  As we say of March, ‘It enters like a lion, but goes out like a lamb.’  ‘Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright: for the end of that man is peace,’ Ps. 37:37

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  (3.) As for those which do walk close to the rule of the gospel—I mean by a sincere endeavour—and thou seest no such peace and comfort, as we speak of, that they have, I answer,

           (a) They may have it, and thou not know it.  The saint's joy and peace is not such a light giggling joy as the world’s; res severa verum gaudium—true joy is a real thing.  The parlour, wherein the Spirit of Christ entertains the Christian, is an inner room, not next to the street, for every one that goes by to smell the feast.  ‘The stranger doth not intermeddle with his joy,’ Prov. 14:10.  Christ and the soul may be at supper within, and thou not so much as see one dish go in, or hear the music that sounds so sweetly in the Christian’s ears. Perhaps thou thinkest he wants peace, be­cause he doth not hang out a sign in his countenance of the joy and peace he hath within.  Alas, poor wretch! may not the saint have a peaceful conscience with a solemn, yea sad countenance, as well as thou and thy companions have a sorrowful heart, when there is nothing but fair weather in your faces?  ‘In laughter the heart is sorrowful,’ Prov. 14:13.  Sure he means the wicked man’s laughter.  It never looks more like rain with them than when it shines.  Their conscience lowers when their face laughs.  So, on the contrary, there is never more inward peace and com­fort to be found in a saint’s bosom, than sometimes when his face is blubbered with tears.  Shouldst thou come in and hear the Christian bemoaning himself, and complaining with sighs and sobs of his sins against God, thou wouldst go home, and cry out of this melancholy religion, and the sad condition this man was in.  And yet he whom thou so pitiest can de­sire thee to save it for thyself, and not spend it in vain for him; for he would not part with that very sorrow that scares thee so much, for all the joy which the world, with all its gallantry, when best set forth, could afford.  There is a mystery in this sorrow which thou canst not unriddle.  Know therefore that there is a sorrow and anguish of heart which ariseth from the guilt of sin and the fearful apprehensions of God’s wrath due to sin; and another that flows, not from fear of wrath arising from guilt, but from the sense of sin’s inbeing in the soul, provoking the Christian to do that which is dishonourable to that God who hath pardoned his sins to him; and this is the sorrow which sometimes makes the saints go for sad uncomfortable creatures, when all the same time their hearts are as full of comfort from the sense of God’s pardoning mercy as they can hold.  This sorrow is but like a summer shower, melted by the sense of God’s love, as that by the warm sun, and leaves the soul—as that doth a garden of sweet flowers—on which it falls, more fresh and odoriferous.

           (b) Though some precious souls, that have closed with Christ, and embraced the gospel, be not at present brought to rest in their own consciences, but continue for a while under some dissatisfactions and troubles in their own spirits; yet even then they have peace of conscience in a threefold respect.  In precio, in promisso, in semine—in what purchases it, in the promise, and in the germ.

           Every true believer hath peace of conscience in precio —in the price.  The gospel puts that price into his hand which will assuredly purchase it, and that is the blood of Christ.  We say, ‘That is gold which is worth gold’—which we may anywhere exchange for gold.  Such is the blood of Christ.  It is peace of con­science, because the soul that hath it, may exchange it for this.  God himself cannot deny the poor creature that prays on these terms, ‘Lord, give me peace of conscience, here is Christ's blood the price of it.’ That which could pay the debt, surely can procure the receipt.  Peace of conscience is but a discharge under God's hand that the debt due to divine justice is fully paid.  The blood of Christ hath done that the greater for the believer, it shall therefore do this the less.  If there were such a rare potion, that did infallibly procure health to every one that takes it, we might safely say, as soon as the sick man hath drunk it down, that he hath drunk his health; it is in him, though at present he doth not feel himself to have it, in time it will appear.

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Use first.  Is peace of conscience the blessing of the gospel?  This reproves three sorts of persons.

1. Sort.  The Papists, who interpretatively deny that peace of conscience is the blessing of the gospel, for they deny that any person can know in this life, unless by an extraordinary revelation, that he is a child of God, and one that shall be saved—which, if true, would stave all to pieces the vessel in which the Christian’s joy and inward peace is kept.  Whence comes the peace we have with our own consciences, but from the knowledge we have of our peace with God?  ‘Being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ: by whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God,’ Rom. 5:1.  If the poor soul be left at uncertainties here, and the gospel cannot resolve to it what its state is for hell or heaven, farewell to all inward peace.  The poor Christian may then say of himself, with a trembling heart, what St, John saith, in another case, of him that hateth his brother, ‘He walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth,’ I John 2:11.  Truly then the gospel might rather be called the gospel of fears and doubts, than the gospel of peace.  But is that the top of the blessing the gospel brings to saints, which was almost the bottom of the curse that the law de­nounced against sinners?—that ‘their life should hang in doubt before them; and they shall fear day and night, and should have no assurance of life,’ Deut. 28:66.  Bold men they are that dare so wretchedly dis­figure the sweet face of the gospel; making Christ in his precious promises speak as doubtfully to his saints, as the devil did in his oracles to his devotees. Because their hypocrisy makes them justly question their own salvation, and will not suffer them to apply the comfort of the promises to themselves, must they therefore seal up these wells of salvation from those that are sincere, and then lay the blame on the gospel which is due only to their own wickedness?  But there is a mystery of iniquity which hath at last been found to be at the root of this uncomfortable doctrine of theirs.  They are a little akin to Judas, who was a thief, and carried the bag.  These have a bag, too, into which they put more gold and silver, that this doctrine brings them in, than ever Judas had in his.  Though the doctrine of gospel-grace to poor sinners’ would bring more peace to others’ consciences —might it be seen in its naked glory among them —yet the superstitious fear which they keep ignorant souls in, brings more money to their purses; and this lies so near the heart of their religion, that gospel, Christ, heaven, and all, must bow unto it.
2. Sort.  Those are to be reproved, who frame very unlovely images in their own foolish imaginations of the gospel—as if there was nothing less than peace of conscience and inward comfort to be found in it—and all, because they see some that profess it, who cannot show that they have got any more peace and comfort since their acquaintance with the gospel than they had before, or than themselves have who are yet strangers to it; yea may be, discover more trouble of spirit.  Such I would desire to take these following particulars, by way of answer, into their seri­ous consideration.

           (1.) Consider all that are not true Christians that hang upon the gospel by profession.  And no blame can be laid on the gospel, though it doth not lavish out this treasure to every one that scrapes acquaintance with it.  The Spirit of God is too wise and faith­ful to set his seal to a blank.  The minister indeed of­fers peace to all that will accept it.  But where the peace of the gospel meets with a false heart, it will not stay there, ‘If the house be not worthy, let your peace return to you,’ Matt. 10:13.  As the dove returned to the ark again, when it found the earth under water, so doth the Spirit of God carry his comfort back with him to heaven from a soul that is yet in the suds of sin, soaking in his abominations.  Where can this heavenly dove find rest for the sole of her foot in such a soul?  And will he speak peace to that soul in which himself can find no rest?

           (2.) As for those that are sincere, true-hearted Christians, there are several considerations which will vindicate the gospel to answer its name, and to be a gospel of peace and consolation.

           (a) Some that are sincere Christians, do not so clearly understand the doctrine of the gospel as oth­ers; and the want of light, of joy, and comfort in their consciences comes from that want of light in their un­derstandings.  The ignorance of the workman doth not disparage the art.  Plus est in arte, quam in arti­fice—there is more in an art than the attainment of the artist.  There is a fulness of comfort in the principles of the gospel, but every Christian hath not at­tained to the ‘riches of the full assurance of under­standing, to the acknowledgment of the mystery of God, and of the Father, and of Christ,’ which the apostle directs the Colossians to, as a sovereign means whereby ‘their hearts might be comforted,’ Col. 2:2.

           (b) Some that do understand the doctrine of sal­vation by faith in Christ—the only foundation to build and rear up true comfort and peace of conscience on—yet may, by their negligence in their Christian course—not walking carefully by the rule of the gospel—deprive themselves at present of this sweet peace, which otherwise might flow into their bosoms from the promises of the gospel.  ‘As many as walk according to this rule, peace be on them,’ Gal. 6:16.  And if so, what blame can be laid on the gospel? Be the pen never so good, and the hand never so skil­ful, it will not write on wet paper; yet we do not fault the hand or pen, but the paper.  If the heart—though of a saint never so eminent —be under the defilement of a present lust, not repented of, no promise will speak peace to him; he is a disorderly walker, and the Spirit hath his rod to whip such.  No sweet­meats of joy and peace to entertain them withal in that night.