the world, besides yourself, were privy to the place where you lay this key ; if you should hud it takeu away, and the cabinet opened and rifled, you would soon conclude whose doing it was. Thus, when you find your heart disclosed, and the secret thoughts therein laid open unto you in the word, you may easily conclude, that God is in it ; the key that doth this is of his making, who is the only one besides yourself that is privy to the counsels of your heart, that seeth all the secret traverses of your inward man ; who but he can send a spy so directly to your hiding-place, where you have laid up your treasures of dark- ness out of the world's sight ? There are two secrets tliat the word discloseth. First, What a man's own heart knoweth, and no creatin-e besides. Thus Christ told the woman of Samaria, what her neighbo\u-s covdd not charge her with ; from which she concluded him to be a prophet, — a man of God. And may we not conclude the Scripture to be the word of God, that doth the same ? Se- condly, Those things which a man's own heart is not privy to : God is said to be ' greater than our hearts, and knoweth all things,' 1 John iii. 20. He knows more by us, than we by omselves : and doth not the word dive to the bottom of the heart, and fetch up that filth thence, which the eye of the conscience never had the sight of before, nor ever coidd, without the help of the word ? Rom. vii. 7 : 'I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet.' And if the word find that out which escapeth the scrutiny of a man's own heart, doth it not prove a Deity to be in it.' So argueth the apostle, 1 Cor. xiv. 25, speaking of the power the word preached hath to lay open the heart, 'Thus are the secrets,' saith he, 'of his heart made manifest: and so falling down on his face, will worship God, and report that God is in you of a truth.'
CHAPTER IX.
THE PROPERTY OF THE .WORD TO AWAKEN AND TERRIFY THE CONSCIENCE.
The second effect the Scripture hath on the spirits of men, by which its divine pedigree may be proved, is, the power it exerciseth on the conscience to con- vince and terrify it. Conscience is a castle that no batteries, but what God raiseth against it, can shake ; no power can command it to stoop, but that which heaven and earth obey. He that disarms the strong man, must be stronger than he ; he that masters the conscience, must be greater than it, and so God only is. Now the word being able to shake this power of the soul, which dis- daineth to stoop to any but God, must needs be from him ; and that the word exerts such a power upon the conscience, who will doubt ? Do we not see it daily chastising the proudest sinners, even to make them cry and whine under its convictions, like a child under the rod? Yea, doth it not slay them outright, that they fall down dispirited at one thunder-clap of the law let off by God upon them ? ' When sin revived, I died,' saith Paul. He who before was a man as well provided in his own opinion for his spiritual estate as Job was for his out- ward, when he had his flocks and herds, sons and daughters, health and pros- perity, as yet untouched by the hand of God ; but when the law came to charge sin home upon him, it stripped his conscience as naked as Job afterward was in his outward condition. The man's eyes are o])encd now to see how naked and void of all holiness he is ; yea, his fair skin, of pharisaical strictness, with the beauty of which he was formerly so far in love, as if he had been another Absalom, without mole or wart, he now judgeth it to be but odious deformity, and him:|elf a most loathsome creatm-e, by reason of those plague-sores and ulcers that he sees running on him. Yea, such power the word had upon him, that it laid him trembling over the bottomless pit, in a despair of Inniself, and his own righteousness. Hath any creature an arm like this of the word? Or can any book penned by the wit of man command the heart to tremble at the rehearsal thei-eof, as this can do? Even a Felix on the bench, when a poor prisoner preacheth this word at the bar to him, is put into a shaking fit. Who but a God coidd make those monsters of men, that had paddled in the blood of Christ, and who scorned his doctrine so as to account the professors of it fools and idiots, yet come afl'rightcd in their own thoughts, at a secret prick given them in Peter's sermon, and cry out in the open assembly, ' Men and bre- thren, what shall we do to be saved ?' Doth not this carry as visible a print of a Deity as when Moses clave the rock with a little rod in his hand ?
gij-g AND THE SAVORD OF THE SPIRIT.