4. And as it was a spiritual sin, so it was artificial. There was a great deal of art and cunning in it ; and in evil things, the more art, the worse. Art commends other things, but it makes sin the more sinful. Doll non sunt doll, ni astu colas. When men are witty to work mischief, and wise to do evil, then they are evil in grain. It is best to be a bungler at this occu- pation. Ingenuous men carry their hatred open ; but this plot was spun with so fine a thread as could not easily be discerned.
5. Again, they were very dihgent in it, for it was a curious web. And as in weaving, head and hand, eye and foot, aU go together, so here they mustered up all their wits. Judas is awake when Peter sleeps.
6. And which is worst of all, they were so well pleased with the brat of their own brain that they travailed of it. It increases guilt when men upon view and sight of their plot grow so far in love with it that they long to be delivered of it. The more the soul dwells upon any sinful plot, the more estrangement there is from God ; because the happiness of the soul consists in cleaving to God the fountain of all good. The more deliberation any man takes in sinning, the more his soul is pleased with wickedness. A heart long exercised in sin will admit of no impression of grace ; for the spirits are so absorbed with other designs that they are dry and dead to better things. Many thousands are in heU at this day for suifering their spirits to shove them too far into sin. Many suck out the delight of sin before they act it, as Esau pleased himself by thinking * the day of mouming for his father would come, wherein he might be revenged of his brother,' Gen. xxvii, 41.
7. Yet this sin was not only spiritual and imminent, but transient like- wise. It reached against the second table, and, therefore, against the principles of nature, and against society, out of which God gathers a church. There was false witness and murder in this sin. In this respect it is that
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the sins of the second table are greater than the sins of the first, because they are against more clear light. A natural conscience hath a clearer eye in these things. Here is light upon light ; for both grace and nature con- demn these sins. Yet for order in sinning, the rise of all sin against man, is our sinning against God fii'st, for none sin against men, but they sin against God in the first place, whereupon the breach of the first command- ment is the ground of the breach of all the rest ; for if God vv'ere set up in the heart in the first place, there parents would be honoured, and all kind of injury suppressed for conscience sake. The Scripture gives this as a cause of the notorious courses of wicked men, ' that God is not in all their thoughts,' Ps. X. 4. They forget there is a God of vengeance and a day of reckoning. The fool would needs enforce upon his heart, ' that there is no God,' Ps. xiv. 1, and what follows : * Corrupt they are, there is none doth good, they eat up my people as bread,' &c. They make no more bones of devouring men and their estates, than they make conscience of eating a piece of bread. What a wretched condition hath sin brought man imto, that thegi'eat God who * filleth heaven and earth,' Jer. xxiii. 24, should yet have no place in the heart which he hath especially made for himself ! "The sun is not so clear as this truth, that God is, for all things in the world are because God is. If he were not, nothing could be. It is from him that wicked men have that strength they have to commit sin, therefore sin pro- ceeds from atheism, especially these plotting sins ; for if God were more thought on, he would take off the soul from sinful contrivings, and fix it upon himself.
But by whom and against whom was this plotting ? by children of the church, not uncircumcised Philistines. Opposition is bitterest betwixt those that are nearest, as betwixt the flesh and the spirit in the same soul, between hypocrites and true-hearted Christians in the same womb of the church. Brethren they were, but false brethren ; children, but strange children. Children by the mother's side, all bred in the same church, but had not the same father. Children by the mother's side only, are commonly persecutors. Popish spirits count it presumption to know who is their father, which shews them to be bastard children. The greatest sins of all are committed within the church, because they are committed against the greatest light ; where- upon that great sin against the Holy Ghost (which, like Jonah his whale, devours all at once) is not committed out of the church at all. Oh ! be- loved, how should we reverence the blessed truth of God and gi'acious motions of his Spirit ! If it be sin to kill infants in the womb, what is it to kill the breed of the blessed Spirit in our hearts !