pain, and
toil, and vexation, instead of promised pleasure and satisfaction? Sin
doth with all men, as the devil doth with some of his sworn vassals and
servants. They have a poor wretched life with him. They are wearied and
troubled, to satisfy all his unreasonable and imperious commands. He loads
them with base service, and they are still kept in expectation of some
great reward; but for the present, they have nothing but misery and
trouble. And at length he becomes the executioner, and perpetual tormentor
of them whom he made to serve him. Such a master is sin, and such wages
you may expect. Consider then, what your expectation is, before you go on,
or engage further,--death. We are under a law of bodily death, therefore we
are mortal. Our house is like a ruinous lodge, that drops through, and one
day or other it must fall. Sin hath brought in the seeds of corruption
into men's nature, which dissolve it, else it had been immortal. But there
is a worse death after this, a living death, in respect of which simple
death would be chosen rather. Men will rather live very miserably than
die. Nature hath an aversion to it,--"skin for skin, and all for life will
a man give." Death imports a destruction of being, which every thing
naturally seeks to preserve. But O what a dreadful life is it, worse than
death, when men will choose death rather than life! O how terrible will it
be to hear that word, "Hills and mountains, fall on us, and cover us!" Men
newly risen, their bodies and souls meet again after a long separation,
and this to be their mutual entertainment one to another,--the body to wish
it were still in the dust, and the soul to desire it might never be in the
body! Surely if we had so much grace as to believe this, and tremble at
it, before we be forced to act it, there were some hope. If we could
persuade ourselves once of this, that the ways of sin, all of them, how
pleasant, how profitable soever, whatsoever gain they bring in, whatsoever
satisfaction they give, that they are nothing else but "the ways of
death," and go down to the chambers of hell; that they will delude and
deceive us, and so in end destroy us;--if we might once believe this with
our heart, there were some hope that we would break off from them, and
choose the untrodden paths of godliness, which are pleasantness and peace.
However, this is the condition of all men, once to be under sin, and under
a sentence of death for sin. It is the unbelief of t