n so say I, many pretended Christians say in their heart,
"we have no sin." How prove ye that? I seek nothing else to prove it, than
your own ordinary clearings and excusings of yourselves. Ye confess ye are
sinners, and break all the commands, yet come to particulars, and I know
not one of twenty that will cordially or seriously take with almost any
sin. Yea, what you have granted in a general, you retract and deny it in
all the particulars, which declares both that even that which you seem to
know, you are altogether strangers to the real truth of it, and that you
are over blinded with a fond love of yourselves. I know not to what
purposes your general acknowledgments are, but to be a mask or shadow to
deceive you, to be a blind to hide you from yourselves, since the most
part of you, whensoever challenged of any particular sin, or inclination
to it, justify yourselves, and whenever ye are put to a particular
confession of your sins, you have all rapt up in such a bundle of
confusion, that you never know one sin by another. Certainly, ye deceive
yourselves, and the truth is not in you.

Let me add, moreover, another instance. Do you not so live, and walk in
sin so securely, so impenitently, as if you had no sin, no fear of God's
wrath? Do not the most part contentedly and peaceably live in so much
ignorance of the gospel, as if they had no need of Christ, and so, by
consequence, as if they had no sin? For if you did believe in the heart,
and indeed consider that your hearts are sinks of iniquity and impurity,
would you not think it necessary to apply to the Physician? And would you
not then labour to know the Physician, and the gospel, which is the report
of him? Certainly, inasmuch as you take no pains for the knowledge of a
Saviour, you declare that you know not your sin, for if ye know the one,
ye could not but search to know the other. What is the voice of most men's
walking? Doth it not proclaim this, that they think there is no sin in
them? For if there be sin in you, is there not a curse upon you, and wrath
before you? And if you did really see the one, would you not see the
other? And did you see it, would it not drive you to more serious
thoughts? Would it not affright you? Would it not cause you often to
retire into yourselves, and from the world? And, above all, how precious
would the tidings of a Saviour be, that now are common and contemptible?
Would you not every day wash in that blood? Would the current o