t of a Saviour, and the
report of God's love to the world in him. It is true, all men are in
bondage to sin and Satan, and shut up in the darkness of ignorance and
unbelief, and bound in the fetters of their own lusts, which are as the
chains that are put about malefactors before they go to prison. "He that
commits sin, is a servant of sin," John vii. 34. And to be a servant of
sin is slavery under the most cruel tyrant. All these things are, yet how
few souls do apprehend it seriously, or are weary of their prison! How few
groan to be delivered! Nay, the most part account it only liberty, to hate
true delivery as bondage. But some there are, whose eyes the Spirit of God
opens, and lets them see their bondage and slavery, and how they are
concluded under the most heavy and weighty sentence that ever was
pronounced,--the curse and wrath of the everliving God, that there is no
way to flee from it, or escape it, for any thing they can do or know. Now,
indeed, this serious discovery cannot choose but make the heart of a man
to tremble, as David, "My flesh trembleth for fear of thee, and I am
afraid of thy judgments," Psal. cxix. 120. Such a serious representation
will make the stoutest and proudest heart to fall down, and faint for fear
of that infinite intolerable weight of deserved wrath, and then the soul
is in a sensible bondage, that before was in a real, but insensible
bondage,--then it is environed about with bitter accusations, with dreadful
challenges,--then the law of God arrests and confines the soul within the
bounds of its own accusing conscience. And this is some previous
representation of that eternal imprisonment and banishment from the
presence of God. Albeit many of you are free from this fear, and enjoy a
kind of liberty to serve your own lusts, and are not sensible of any
thraldom of your spirits, yet certainly the Lord will sometime arrest you,
and bring you to this spiritual bondage, when he shall make the iniquities
of your heels encompass you about, and the curses of his law surround you.
When your conscience accuseth, and God condemneth, it may be too late, and
out of date.

Alas! then what will you do, who now put your conscience by,(215) and will
not hearken to it or be put in fear by any thing which can be represented
to you? We do not desire to put you in fear, where no fear is, but where
there is infinite cause of fear, and when it is possible that fear may
introduce faith, and be the forerunner