is hands. He would have all the drunkards
to become moderate drinkers, if not total abstainers; and all the
sensualists to become, if need be, ascetics; and all those who had sowed
out their wild oats to settle down as heads of houses, and members, if
not ministers and elders, in his set-up church. But we are too well
taught, surely; we have gone too long to another church than that which
Diabolus ever sets up, to be satisfied with his superficial doctrine and
his skin-deep discipline. We know, do we not, that we may do all that
his last card asks us to do, and yet be as far, ay, and far farther from
salvation than the heathen are who never heard the name. A hundred
Scriptures tell us that; and our hearts know too much of their own plague
and corruption ever now to be satisfied short of a full regeneration and
a complete sanctification. 'Create in me a clean heart and renew a right
spirit within me. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. And the
very God of peace sanctify you wholly. And I pray God your whole spirit
and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord
Jesus Christ.' The last card has many Scriptures cunningly copied upon
it; but not these. Its pulpit orators handle many Scripture texts, but
never these.

7. Yes, the devil comes in even here with that so late, so subtle, and
so contradicting card of his. Where is it in this world that he does not
come in with some of his cards? And he comes in here as a very angel of
evangelical light. He puts on the gown of Geneva here, and he ascends
Emmanuel's own maintained pulpit here, and from that pulpit he preaches,
and where he so preaches he preaches nothing else but the very highest
articles of the Reformed faith. Carnal-security was strong on assurance,
no other man in Mansoul was so strong; and the devil will let us
preachers be as strong and as often on election, and justification, and
indefectible grace, and the perseverance of the saints as we and our
people like, if we but keep in season and out of season on these
transcendent subjects and keep off morals and manners, walk and
conversation, conduct and character. In Hooker's and Travers' day,
Thomas Fuller tells us, the Temple pulpit preached pure Canterbury in the
morning and pure Geneva in the afternoon. And you will get the highest
Calvinism off the last card in one pulpit, and the strictest and most
urgent morality off the same card in another; but never, if the de