equal force to batter down the confidence of all
the saints, and the certainty of all the promises. What is it that
troubles you, but that you are sinners, and such sinners, so vile and
loathsome? From whence you do conclude, not only that you have no present
assurance of his love, but that he cannot love such a one as you are. Now,
I say, if this hold good, in reference to you, take heed that you condemn
not yourselves in that which you approve,--that is, that you do not dispute
against the interest of all the saints, who were such as you are, and the
tenth of those fundamental positions of the gospel. "God so loved the
world," &c. And so you do not only wrong yourselves, but all others, and
not only so, but you offer the greatest indignity to him that out of love
sent his Son, and to him who, out of love, came and laid down his life. O
consider how you indignify(172) and set at nought that great manifestation
of God's love, "God manifested in the flesh," how you despise his love
pledge to sinners, a greater than which he could not give you, because as
great as himself! O that you could see the consequence of your anxious and
perplexing doubts,--that they do not only an injury to your own souls, but
that they are of a more bloody nature! If they held good, they would cut
off the life and salvation of all believers, and, which is worse, they
would, by an unavoidable consequence, conclude an antichristian point,
that Christ is not come in the flesh. I beseech you, unbowel your evils,
that you may abhor them.

This may strengthen our faith, and minister much consolation, in another
consideration too, that which is laid down, Heb. ii. 17, and iv. 15, that
he was partaker of our nature and in all things like unto his brethren,
that so he might be a merciful High Priest, able to succour us and touched
with the feeling of our infirmities. What strong consolation may be sucked
out of these breasts! When it was impossible that man could rise up to
God, because of his infinite highness and holiness, behold, God hath come
down to man, in his lowness and baseness. He hath sent down this ladder
from heaven to the earth, that poor wretched sinners may ascend upon it.
It is come down as low as our infirm, weak, and frail nature, that we may
have easy coming up to it, and going up upon it to heaven. Therefore his
flesh is called a "new and living way," because a poor sinner may be
assured of welcome and acceptation with one of his own