formed purposes of a new life, more fervent
desires that are now vanished, and the sinner returns to his dead and
dull temper.

2. If there be no disposition to reflect and consider the difference,
no sense of his loss, but he apprehends such workings of spirit in him
unnecessary troubles to him, and thinks it well he is delivered and
eased of them.

3. If in the time when he was under such workings of the Spirit he
had made known his case to his minister, or any godly friend, whose
company he now shuns, as not willing to be put in mind, or hear any
more of such matters.

4. If, hereupon he hath more indulged sensual inclination, taken more
liberty, gone against the check of his own conscience, broken former
good resolutions, involved himself in the guilt of any grosser sins.

5. If conscience, so baffled, be now silent, lets him alone, grows
more sluggish and weaker, which it must as his lusts grow stronger.

6. If the same lively, powerful ministry which before affected him
much, now moves him not.

7. If especially he is grown into a dislike of such preaching--if
serious godliness, and what tends to it, are become distasteful to
him--if discourses of God, and of Christ, of death and judgment, and
of a holy life, are reckoned superflous and needless, are unsavory and
disrelished--if he have learned to put disgraceful names upon
things of this import, and the persons that most value them live
accordingly--if he hath taken the seat of the scorner, and makes it
his business to deride what he had once a reverence for, or took some
complacency in.

8. If, upon all this, God withdraw such a ministry, so that he is now
warned, admonished, exhorted and striven with, as formerly, no more.
Oh, the fearful danger of that man's case! Hath he no cause to fear
lest the things of his peace should be forever hid from his eyes?
Surely he hath much cause of fear, but mot of despair. Fear in this
case would be his great duty, and might yet prove the means of saving
him--despair would be his very heinous and destroying sin. If yet he
would be stirred up to consider his case, whence he is fallen, and
whither he is falling, and set himself to serious seekings of God,
cast down himself before Him, abase himself, cry for mercy as for his
life, there is yet hope in his case. God may make here an instance
what He can obtain of Himself to do for a perishing wretch. But if
with any that have lived under the gospel, their day is quite ex