in, and, it may be, is ashamed and censured
among men, and therefore he confesseth it; but while he confesseth it
without sense or feeling, he declares that he takes it not up as sin, hath
not found the vileness and loathsomeness of the nature of it nor beheld it
as it is a violation of the most high Lord's laws, and a provocation of
his glorious holiness. Did a soul view it thus, as it is represented in
God's sight, as it dishonours that glorious Majesty, and hath manifest
rebellion in it against him, and as it defiles and pollutes our spirits;
he could not, I say, thus look upon it, but he would find some inward soul
abhorrence and displeasance at it, and himself too. How monstrous would it
make him in his own sight? It could not but affect the heart, and humble
it in secret before God; whereas your forced and strained confessions made
in public, they are merely taken on then, and proceed from no inward
principle. There is no shadow of any soul humiliation, in secret, but as
some use to put on sackcloth when they come to make that profession, and
put it off when they go out, so you put on a habit of confession in
public, and put it off you when you go out of the congregation. To be
mourning before the Lord, in your secret retirements,--that you are
strangers to. But I wonder how you should thus mock God, that you will not
be as serious and real in confessing as in sinning. Will you sin with the
whole man, and confess only with the mouth? Will ye not sin with delight,
and not confess it with a true sorrow that indeed affects the heart? Now,
do you honour God by confessing, when the manner of it declares, that you
feel not the bitterness of sin, and conceive not the holiness and
righteousness of God, whom you have to do withal? Even so, when you
confess sin, which you do not forsake, you in so far declare that you know
not sin, what it is you confess, and so, that you have mocked him who will
not be mocked; for, what a mockery is it, to confess those faults which we
have no solid effectual purpose to reform, to vomit up your sins by
confession, that we may with more desire and lust lick up the vomit again,
and to pretend to wash, for nothing else, but to return to the puddle, and
defile again! My brethren, out of the same fountain comes not bitter water
and sweet; James iii. 11. Since that which ordinarily proceeds from you is
bitter, unsavoury to God and man, carnal, earthly, and sensual, your ways
are a displayed banner