against God's will, then lay your account, all your
professions and acknowledgments are of the same nature,--they are but a
little more sugared over, and their inward nature is not changed, is as
unacceptable to God, as your sins are.

I would give you some characters out of the text, to discover unto you the
vanity and emptiness of your ordinary confessions. The confession of sin
must be particular, universal, perpetual, or constant;--particular, I say,
for there are many thousands who confess that they are sinners, and yet do
not at all confess their sins; for, to confess sins is to confess their
own real actual guiltiness, that which they indeed have committed or are
inclined to do. So the true and sincere confession of a repenting people
is expressed, 1 Kings viii. 38, "What prayer or supplication soever be
made by any man, which shall know the plague of his own heart, and spread
forth his hands, then hear thou in heaven, and forgive every man whose
heart thou knowest." Now consider whether or not you be thus acquainted
with your own hearts and ways, as to know your particular plague and
predominant sin. Are you not rather wholly strangers to yourselves,
especially the plague of your hearts? There are few that keep so much as a
record or register of their actions done against God's law, or their
neglect of his will; and therefore, when you are particularly posed about
your sins, or the challenge of sin, you can speak nothing to that, but
that you never knew one sin by another; that is, indeed, you never
observed your sins, you never knew any sin, but contented yourself with
the tradition you received that you were sinners. But if any man be used
to reflect upon his own ways,--yet generally, the most part of men are
altogether strangers to their hearts,--if they know any evil of themselves
it is at most but something done or undone, some commission or omission,
but nothing of the inward fountain of sin is discovered. I beseech you,
then, do not deceive yourselves with this general acknowledgment that you
are sinners, while in the meantime your real particular sins are hid from
you, and you cannot choose but hide in a generality from God. Certainly,
you are far from forgiveness, and that blessedness of which David speaks,
(Psal. xxxii.) for this belongs to the man "that hideth not his sins, in
whose heart there is no guile." And this is the plainness and sincerity of
the heart, rightly to discern its own plagues, and un