apse; _They mount up to
heaven, and they go down again to the depth_![339] My sickness brought
me to thee in repentance, and my relapse hath cast me farther from thee.
_The end of that man shall be worse than the beginning_,[340] says thy
Word, thy Son; my beginning was sickness, punishment for sin: but _a
worse thing may follow_,[341] says he also, if I sin again; not only
death, which is an end worse than sickness, which was the beginning, but
hell, which is a beginning worse than that end. Thy great servant
denied thy Son,[342] and he denied him again, but all before repentance;
here was no relapse. O, if thou hadst ever readmitted Adam into
Paradise, how abstinently would he have walked by that tree! And would
not the angels that fell have fixed themselves upon thee, if thou hadst
once readmitted them to thy sight? They never relapsed; if I do, must
not my case be as desperate? Not so desperate; for _as thy majesty, so
is thy mercy_,[343] both infinite; and thou, who hast commanded me to
pardon my brother seventy-seven times, hast limited thyself to no
number. If death were ill in itself, thou wouldst never have raised any
dead man to life again, because that man must necessarily die again. If
thy mercy in pardoning did so far aggravate a relapse, as that there
were no more mercy after it, our case were the worse for that former
mercy; for who is not under even a necessity of sinning whilst he is
here, if we place this necessity in our own infirmity, and not in thy
decree? But I speak not this, O my God, as preparing a way to my relapse
out of presumption, but to preclude all accesses of desperation, though
out of infirmity I should relapse.

XXIII. PRAYER.

O eternal and most gracious God, who, though thou beest ever infinite,
yet enlargest thyself by the number of our prayers, and takest our often
petitions to thee to be an addition to thy glory and thy greatness, as
ever upon all occasions, so now, O my God, I come to thy majesty with
two prayers, two supplications. I have meditated upon the jealousy which
thou hast of thine own honour, and considered that nothing comes nearer
a violating of that honour, nearer to the nature of a scorn to thee,
than to sue out thy pardon, and receive the seals of reconciliation to
thee, and then return to that sin for which I needed and had thy pardon
before. I know that this comes too near to a making thy holy ordinances,
thy word, thy sacraments, thy seals, thy grace, instru