1. Till you are pardoned you are never blessed; there is an obstacle and impediment in the way hinders your blessedness. What though you flow in wealth, ease, and j)lenty ; yet as long as this black storm hangs over your head, and you know not how soon it will droj) upon you, you cannot be accounted ha])py men. Do you account him a happy man who is condemned to die, because he hath a plentiful allowance till his execution ? or him a happy man that makes a fair show abroad, and puts a good face upon his ruinous and breaking condition, but at home is pinched with want and misery, which is leady to come upon him like an armed man ? or him a happy man that revels it out in all manner of pleasure, but is to die at niglit? Then those that remain in the guilt of their sins may be happy. But now, on the other side, a pardoned sinner is blessed whatever befalls him. If he be afflicted, the sting of his affliction is gone, that is sin ; it he be prosperous, the curse of his blessings is taken away; the wrath of God is appeased, and so every condition is made tolerable or comfortable to him.
2. Nothing less than a pardon will serve the turn. Not forbearance on God's side, nor forgetfulness on ours.
[1.] It is not a forbearance of the punishment on God's part, but a dissolving the obligation to the punishment. God may be angry with us when he doth not actually strike us : as the psalmist says, Ps. vii. 11-13, ' God is angry with the wicked every day. If he turn not, he will whet his sword ; he hath bent his bow, and made it ready. He liath also prepared for him the instruments of death ; he ordainetli his arrows against the persecutors.' In the day of his patience he (loth for a while spare ; but God is ready to deal with them hand to hand, for he is sharpening his sword at a distance ; he is bending his bow : the arrow is u])on the string, and how soon God may let it fly we cannot tell ; therefore we are never safe till we turn to God, and enter into his peace. Wherever there is sin there is guilt, and wherever there is guilt there will be punishment. If we dance about the brink of hell, and go merrily to execution, it argues not our sin,l but stuijidity and folly.
[2.] On our part, our senseless forgetfulness will do us no good. Carnal men mind not the happiness of an immortal soul, and they are not troubled because they consider not their condition ; but they are not haj)})y that feel least trouble, but those that have least cause. A benumbed conscience cannot challenge this blessedness; they only put ofl' that which they cannot put away, which God hath neither for- given nor covered. They do but skin the wound till it fester and rankle into a dangerous sore. God is the wronged party, and supreme
^ Qu. ' the p.irdon of our sin ' ?— Ed.
Ps. XXXII. 1, 2.] THE SECOND SERMON. 191
judge, to whose sentence we must stand or fall. If he justifies, then who will condemn ? We may lay ourselves asleep, and sing peace to ourselves ; but it is not what we say, but what God saith : ' There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked.'
3. A pardon is surely a great blessing, if we consider, first, the evils we are freed from ; and, secondly, the good depending upon it.
[1.] The evils we are freed from. Guilt is the obligation to punish- ment, and pardon is the dissolving or loosing that obligation. Now, the punishment is exceeding great, no less than hell and damnation ; and hell is no vain scarecrow, nor is heaven a May-game. Eternity makes everything truly great. Look at the loss — an eternal separation from the comfortable presence of God : Mat. xxv, 41, ' Go, ye cursed,' &c. ; and Luke xiii. 27, ' Depart, ye workers of iniquity.' When God turned Adam out of paradise, his case was very sad, but God took care of him, made him coats of skins to clothe him, gave him a day of patience, afterwards promised the seed of the woman, who should recover the lapsed state of mankind, and so intimated hopes of a better paradise. That exile, therefore, is nothing comparable to this ; for now man is stript of all his comfort, sent into an endless state of misery, where there shall be no hope of ever changing his condition. Now, to be delivered from this that is so great an evil, what a blessed- ness is it ! For the i:)oena sensiis, the pain as well as the loss, our Lord sets it forth by two notions : Mark ix. 44, ' The worm that never dies, and the fire that shall never be quenched.' The scripture speaks of the soul with allusion to the state of the body after death. In the body worms breed usually, and many times they were burnt with lire. Accordingly, our state in the world to come is set forth by a worm and a fire. The worm implies the worm of conscience — a reflection upon our past folly and disobedience to God, and the remembrance of all the afi'ronts we have put upon Christ. Here men may run from the rebukes of conscience by many shifts, sports, distracting their minds with a clatter of business ; but then there is not a thought free, but the damned are always thinking of slighted means, abused comforts, wasted time, the offences done to a merciful God, and the curse wherein they have involved themselves by their own folly. The fire that shall never be quenched notes the wrath of God, or those un- known pains that shall be inflicted upon the body and soul ; which must needs be great, because God himself will take the sinful creature into his own hands to punish him, and will show forth the glory of his wrath and power upon him. When God punisheth us by a creature, the creature is not a vessel capacious enough to convey the power of his wrath ; as when a giant strikes with a straw, that cannot convey his strength. But when God falls upon us himself, ' It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.' How dreadful is that ! Is it not a blessedness to be freed from so great an evil ? Then a little mitigation, a drop to cool your tongue, would be accounted a great jnercy.