and glorious Trinity, O holy and whole college, and yet but one
physician, if you take this confession into a consultation, my case is
not desperate, my destruction is not decreed. If your consultation
determine in writing, if you refer me to that which is written, you
intend my recovery: for all the way, O my God (ever constant to thine
own ways), thou hast proceeded openly, intelligibly, manifestly by the
book. From thy first book, the book of life, never shut to thee, but
never thoroughly open to us; from thy second book, the book of nature,
where, though subobscurely and in shadows, thou hast expressed thine own
image; from thy third book, the Scriptures, where thou hadst written all
in the Old, and then lightedst us a candle to read it by, in the New,
Testament; to these thou hadst added the book of just and useful laws,
established by them to whom thou hast committed thy people; to those,
the manuals, the pocket, the bosom books of our own consciences; to
those thy particular books of all our particular sins; and to those, the
books with seven seals, which only _the Lamb which was slain, was found
worthy to open_;[134] which, I hope, it shall not disagree with the
meaning of thy blessed Spirit to interpret the promulgation of their
pardon and righteousness who are washed in the blood of that Lamb; and
if thou refer me to these books, to a new reading, a new trial by these
books, this fever may be but a burning in the hand and I may be saved,
though not by my book, mine own conscience, nor by thy other books, yet
by thy first, the book of life, thy decree for my election, and by thy
last, the book of the Lamb, and the shedding of his blood upon me. If I
be still under consultation, I am not condemned yet; if I be sent to
these books, I shall not be condemned at all; for though there be
something written in some of those books (particularly in the
Scriptures) which some men turn to poison, yet upon these consultations
(these confessions, these takings of our particular cases into thy
consideration) thou intendest all for physic; and even from those
sentences from which a too late repenter will suck desperation, he that
seeks thee early shall receive thy morning dew, thy seasonable mercy,
thy forward consolation.

IX. PRAYER.

O eternal and most gracious God, who art of so pure eyes as that thou
canst not look upon sin, and we of so unpure constitutions as that we
can present no object but sin, and therefore migh