Of Evening prayer. Of the nature and necessity of examination. How we are to be particular in the confession of all our fins. Hrw •uie are to fill our minds with a just horror and dread- of all sin.
I Proceed now to lay before you such considerations, as may fill your mind with a just dread and horror of all sin, and help you to confess your own in the most passionate contrition, and sorrow of heart.
Consider first, how odious all sin is to God, what a mighty baseness it is, and how abominable it render
sinners in the sight of God. That it is sin alone that makes the great difference betwixt an angel, and the devil; and that every sinner is, so far as he sins, a friend of the devil's, and carrying on his work against God. That sin is a greater blemish and desilement of the soul, than any silth or disease is a desilement of the body. And to be content to live in sin, is a much greater baseness, than to desire to wallow in the mire, or love any bodily impurity.
Consider how you must abhor a creature that delighted in nothing but silth and nastiness, that hated every thing that was decent and clean; and let this teach you to apprehend, how odious that foul that delights in nothing but the impurity of sin, must appear unto God.
For all sins, whether of sensuality, pride, ot falseness, or any other irregular passion, are nothing else but the silth, and impure diseases of the rational foul. And all righteousness is nothing else but the purity, the decency, the beauty and perfection of that spirit, which is made in the image of God.
Again ; Learn what horror you ought to have for the guilt of sin, from the greatness of that at tenement which has been made for it.
God made the world by the breath of his mouth, by a word speaking; but the redemption of the world has been a work of longer labour.
How easily God can create beings, we leam from the sirst chapter of Genefis; but how difsicult it is for insinite mercy to forgive sins, we learn from that costly attonement, those bloody sacrifices, those pains and penances, those fichtesses and deaths, which all must be undergone, before the guilty sinner is sit to appear in the presence of God.
Ponder these great truths: That the Son of God was forc'd to become man, to be partaker of all Qur insirmities; to undergo a poor, painsul, miserable, and contemptible lise ; to be persecuted, hated, and at last nail'd to a Cross, that by such sufserings he might render der God propitious to that nature in which he suffer'd.
That all the bloody facrisices and attonements of the Jewish law, were to represent the necessity os this great sacrifice, and the great displeasure God bore to sinners.
That the world is still under the curse of fin, and certain math of God's diipleasure at it; such as samines, plagues, tempests, fickness, diseases and death.
Consider that all the sons of Adam are to go through a painful, sickly lise, denying and mortifying their natural appetites, and crucifying the lusts, of the flesh, jn order to have a share in the attonement of our Saviour's death.
That