s idolatry; as their murmuring induced idolatry, and they
relapsed often into both, I have found in myself, O my God (O my God,
thou hast found it in me, and thy finding it hast showed it to me) such
a transmigration of sin, as makes me afraid of relapsing too. The soul
of sin (for we have made sin immortal, and it must have a soul), the
soul of sin is disobedience to thee; and when one sin hath been dead in
me, that soul hath passed into another sin. Our youth dies, and the sins
of our youth with it; some sins die a violent death, and some a natural;
poverty, penury, imprisonment, banishment, kill some sins in us, and
some die of age; many ways we become unable to do that sin, but still
the soul lives and passes into another sin; and that that was
licentiousness grows ambition, and that comes to indevotion and
spiritual coldness: we have three lives in our state of sin, and where
the sins of youth expire, those of our middle years enter, and those of
our age after them. This transmigration of sin found in myself, makes me
afraid, O my God, of a relapse; but the occasion of my fear is more
pregnant than so, for I have had, I have multiplied relapses already.
Why, O my God, is a relapse so odious to thee? Not so much their
murmuring and their idolatry, as their relapsing into those sins, seems
to affect thee in thy disobedient people. _They limited the holy One of
Israel_,[331] as thou complainest of them: that was a murmuring; but
before thou chargest them with the fault itself, in the same place thou
chargest them with the iterating, the redoubling of that fault before
the fault was named; _How oft did they provoke me in the wilderness, and
grieve me in the desert?_ That which brings thee to that exasperation
against them, as to say, that thou wouldst break thine own oath rather
than leave them unpunished (_They shall not see the land which I sware
unto their fathers_) was because _they had tempted thee ten times_,[332]
infinitely; upon that thou threatenest with that vehemency, _If you do
in any wise go back, know for a certainty God will no more drive out any
of these nations from before you; but they shall be snares and traps
unto you, and scourges in your sides, and thorns in your eyes, till ye
perish_.[333] No tongue but thine own, O my God, can express thine
indignation against a nation relapsing to idolatry. Idolatry in any
nation is deadly, but when the disease is complicated with a relapse (a
knowledge and a pro