sion, where, in spite of all your self-indulgence, you find it so difficult to prove that the will has not accompanied the gratification, and that you have not overstepped that critical and dangerous line which distinguishes actual guilt from involuntary error: you, in whom almost every action is suspicious; who every moment may be demanding at your own heart, a Have I not gone too far }" who, in your own conscience, feel movements and regrets which you will never quiet: you, who, in spite of so many just subjects of dread, believe the state of your conscience to be perfectly known to you; that the decisions of your own self-love, with regard to your infidelities, are the decisions of the Almighty; and that the Lord, whom you serve with so much coldness and negligence, does not yield you up to your own blindness, and punish your crimes, by making you mistake them: you can possibly believe that you still preserve your righteousness, and the grace of sanctification, and can quiet yourselves upon your visible and habitual guilt, by a pretended invisible exercise of righteousness, of which you can produce neither mark nor proof?
O man! how little art thou acquainted with the illusions of the human heart, and the terrible judgments of God upon those souls which resemble thee! Thou sayest to thyself, I am rich, I am loaded with the good things of this world; (with this our Saviour formerly reproached a cold and unbelieving soul;) and thou perceivest not, continued he, (for blindness and presumption are the distinguishing character of coldness,) that in my sight, thou art poor, miserable, blind, and lost to every thing. It is the destiny, therefore, of a lukewarm and unfaithful soul, to live in error and illusion; to believe himself just and acceptable to God, while, alas! before him, he is lost, without knowing it, to both grace and righteousness.
And one reflection, which I beg you to make here, is, that the confidence of such souls is so much the more illusive and ill-founded, as there exists not a soul less capable of judging of his own heart than the lukewarm and unfaithful one. For the avowed sinner cannot conceal his crimes from himself; and he is sensible that he must assuredly be dead to the Lord. The just man, although ignorant whether he merits the love or hatred of his Master, enjoys, nevertheless, a conscience free from reproach. But the cold and unfaithful soul is involved in a state of continual and inexplicable mystery to itself; for this lukewarmness in the ways of God, enfeebling in us the lights of faith, and strengthening our passions, increases our darkness. Every infidelity is like an additional cloud, overspreading the mind and heart, which darkens to our sight the truths of salvation. In this manner the heart is gradually enveloped, the conscience becomes embarrassed, the lights of the mind are weakened; you are no longer that spiritual Christian, capable of a proper judgment. Insensibly you adopt maxims in secret, which, as you think, diminish your guilt; the blindness increases in the same proportion as the lukewarmness.
The more you admit of this relaxation, in a more altered light do
