[3.] All this while they are under an expressible359 sense of divine wrath. Heman speaks his apprehensions of it under the similitude of the most hideous and dismal comfortless imprisonment: Ps. lxxxviii. 6, ‘Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps.’ David, in Ps. cxvi. 3, compares it to the ‘sorrows of death,’ and—the highest that human thoughts can reach—‘the pains of hell.’ ‘The sorrows of death compassed me, and the pains of hell gat hold upon me; I found trouble and sorrow.’ Well might they thus judge, all things considered; for sin, that then lies heavy upon them, is a great weight, ‘a burden,’ saith David, ‘greater than I can bear,’ especially when it is pressed on by a heavy hand: ‘Thy hand presseth me sore.’ Sin makes the greatest wound, considering the conscience, which is wounded by it, is the tenderest part, and of exquisite sense. Hence the grief of it is compared to the pain of a running, fretting ulcer, that distempers the whole body: ‘My wounds stink and are corrupted; my sore ran in the night, and ceased not.’ Or to the pain of broken and shattered bones: Ps. xxxviii. 3, ‘There is no soundness in my flesh, because of thine anger; neither is there any rest in my bones, because of my sin.’ The instrument also that makes the wound is sharp, and cuts deep: ‘It is sharper than a two-edged sword,’ [Heb. iv. 12;] but when the weapon is poisoned,—and Satan hath a way to do that,—then it burns, making painful, malignant inflammations. The wrath of God, expressed to the conscience, brings the greatest terror: ‘Who knows the power of thine anger?’ Ps. xc. 11. It is impossible for the most trembling conscience, or most jealous fears, to go to the utmost bounds of it; neither can we apprehend any torture greater. The rack, tortures, fire, gibbets, &c., are all nothing to it. Hence it is that those who were afraid of suffering for truth, when by this means they were brought under these distresses, could then be willing to suffer any torment on the body; yea, and heartily wish to suffer much more, so that these tortures might be ended. Thus it was with Bainham martyr,360 who, in the public congregation, bewailed his abjuration of the truth; and prayed all his hearers ‘rather to die by and by, than do as he had done.’ But that of Spira seems almost beyond belief. Thus speaks he to Vergerius, ‘If I could conceive but the least spark of hope of a better estate hereafter, I would not refuse to endure the most heavy weight of the wrath of that great God, yea, for twenty thousand years, so that I might at length attain to the end of that misery.’ What dreadful agonies were these that put him to these wishes! But it is less wonder, if you observe what apprehensions he had of his present trouble, he judged it worse than hell itself. And if you would have a lively exposition of David’s expression, ‘The pains of hell,’ &c., you may fetch it from this instance: ‘My present estate,’ saith he, ‘I now account worse than if my soul, separated from my body, were with Judas and the rest of the damned; and therefore I desire rather to be there than thus to live in the body.’ So that if you imagine a man crushed under the greatest weight, wounded in the most tender parts, and those wounds provoked by the sharpest corrosives, his bones all disjointed and broken, pined also with hunger and thirst, and in that case put under the highest tortures; yet you have but a very shadow of divine wrath. Add to all these, according to Spira’s wish, twenty thousand years of hell itself, yet all is nothing to that which a distressed mind supposeth; while the word eternity presents the soul with the total sum of utmost misery all at once. Oh, unexpressible burden of a distressed mind! who can understand it truly, but he that feels it? How terribly is the mind of man shaken with terrors, as the wilderness by a mighty wind! which not only produceth violent motions, but also hideous noise, murmur, and howling.

[4.] This burden upon the mind forceth the tongue to vent its sorrow in the saddest accent of most doleful outcries. Their whole language is lamentation; but when the pangs of their agonies come upon them, for their distresses have their fits, then they speak in the bitterness of their souls. Oh, said Bainham, I would not for all the world’s good feel such a hell in my conscience again. One, formerly mentioned, in these distresses cries out, ‘Woe, woe, woe, a woeful, a wretched, a forsaken woman!’361 It would surely have made a man’s hair to stand upright for dread to have heard Spira roaring out that terrible sentence, ‘How dreadful is it to fall into the hands of the living God!’ [Heb. x. 31.] Or to have heard his reply to him that told of his being at Venice: ‘O cursed day!’ saith he, ‘O cursed day! Oh that I had never gone thither, would God I had then died!’ &c. The like outcries had David often: Ps. xxi. 1, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?’ And Heman, Ps. lxxxviii. 14, ‘Lord, why castest thou off my soul, why hidest thou thy face from me?’ It is true David’s and Heman’s words have a better complexion than those others last mentioned; but their disquiet of heart seems, at some times, to have urged their expressions with impetuous violence; as those passages seem to say, Ps. xxxviii. 8, ‘I have roared by reason of the disquietness of my heart;’ Ps. xxxii. 3, ‘My bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long;’ Job iii. 24, ‘My roarings are poured out like water,’ If their lamentations were turned into roarings, and those roarings were like the breaking in of a flood, and that flood of so long continuance that it dried up the marrow of the bones, we may safely imagine that they were not so much at leisure to order their words, but that their tongues might speak in that dialect which is proper to astonishment and distress.

[5.] Though the mind be the principal seat of these troubles, yet the body cannot be exempted from a co-partnership in these sorrows. Notwithstanding, this is so far from abating the trouble, that it increaseth it by a circulation. The pains of the body, contracted by the trouble of the mind, are communicated again to the fountain from whence they came, and reciprocally augment the disquiet of the mind. The body is weakened, their ‘strength poured out like water;’ they are ‘withered like grass,’ pined as ‘a skin,’ become as a ‘bottle in the smoke.’ Thus David frequently complains: Ps. xxii. 14, he describes himself as reduced to a skeleton, ‘I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels. My strength is dried up like a potsherd; my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; and thou hast brought me to the dust of death.’ Neither is this his peculiar case, but the common effect of spiritual distresses: Ps. xxxix. 11, ‘When thou with rebukes dost correct man for iniquity, thou makest his beauty to consume away like a moth.’

[6.] Being thus distressed for their souls, they cast off all care of their bodies, estates, families, and all their outward concerns whatsoever. And no wonder, for being persuaded that they have made shipwreck of their souls, they judge the rest are not worth the saving.

[7.] Giving all for lost, they usually cast about for some ease to their minds, by seeking after the lower degrees of misery, hearing or supposing that all are not tormented alike, they endeavour to persuade themselves of a cooler hell. This, if they could reach it, were but poor comfort, and little to their satisfaction; but, as poor as it is, it is usually denied to them, for while they judge themselves to be the greatest sinners, they cannot but adjudge themselves to the greatest torments; and these endeavours being frustrated, they return back to themselves, as now hopeless of the least case, worse than before. Now they fix themselves upon the deep contemplations of their misery. Oh, think they, how great had our happiness been if we had been made toads, serpents, worms, or anything but men; for then should we never have known this unhappiness; and this begets a thousand vain wishes. Oh that we had never been born! or that death could annihilate us! or that as soon as we had been born, we had died! as Job speaks: chap. iii. 11, 12, ‘Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?’ for then had we not contracted so much guilt. ‘Or that the mountains and hills could fall upon us, and cover us from the face of our judge,’ [Rev. vi. 16.]

[8.] When all their hopes are thus dashed, and, like a shipwrecked man on a plank, they are still knocked down with new waves, all their endeavours being still frustrated, they seem to themselves to be able to hold out no longer; then they give over all further inquiries, and the use of means, they refuse to pray, read, hear. They perceive, as Spira said, that they pray to their own condemnation, and that all is to no purpose. They are ‘weary of their groanings,’ Ps. vi. 6; their ‘eyes fail with looking up;’ their ‘knees are feeble;’ their hands hang down; and as Heman: Ps. lxxxviii. 4, 5, ‘They count themselves with those that go down to the pit, free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, whom God remembereth no more.’ Thus they lie down under their burden, and while they find it so hard to be borne, it is usual for them to come to the utmost point of desperateness, Satan suggesting and forwarding them. Sometimes they open their mouths with complaints against God, and blaspheme. And, as the last part of the tragedy, being weary of themselves, they seek to put an end to their present misery, by putting an end to their lives.

I have presented you with Satan’s stratagems against the peace of God’s children. The remedies against these and other subtleties of our grand enemy I shall not offer you, because many others have done that already, to whose writings I must refer you. Some principal directions I have pointed at in the way, and in the general, have done this for the help of the tempted, that I have endeavoured to shew them the methods of [the] tempter, which is no small help to preserve men from being thus imposed upon, and to recover out of his snare those that are. It is a great preservative from sickness, and no mean advantage to the cure, to have a discovery of the disease, and the causes of it. I shall conclude these discoveries with a caution or two.

[1.] Let none think worse of the serious practice of holy strictness in religion, because these spiritual distresses do sometimes befall those that are conscientiously careful in the ways of God, while the profane and negligent professors are strangers to such trials. These troubles are indeed very sad, but a senseless, careless state is far worse. These troubles often end very comfortably, whereas the other end—except God make them sensible by conviction of their sin and danger—in that real misery, the fears whereof occasion these sorrows to God’s children. And the danger of spiritual troubles is not so great as is that of a hardened heart; nay, God frequently makes use of them to prevent eternal ruin—for one that goes roaring to the pit, there are thousands that go laughing to hell.

[2.] Let none slight or scoff at these tremendous judgments. It is too common with men, either to ascribe spiritual troubles to melancholy, as if none were ever thus concerned, but such, as by too much seriousness in religion, are become mad—a fair pretence for carelessness—or to a whining dissimulation. To the former I have said something before, and as for the latter I shall only reply, in the words of Spira, to one that objected hypocrisy to him: ‘I am a castaway, a vessel of wrath; yet dare you call it dissembling and frenzy, and can mock at the formidable example of the heavy wrath of God that should teach you fear and terror. But it is natural to the flesh to speak, either out of malice or ignorance, perversely of the work of God,’

[3.] Let none be afraid of this Goliath, let no man’s heart faint because of him. A fear of caution and diligence to avoid his snares is a necessary duty—‘Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil,’ &c., [1 Pet. v. 8]—but a discouraging, distrustful fear is a dishonourable reflection upon God’s power and promises to help us, and upon the captain of our salvation, who goeth out before us. Let us hold on in the practice of holiness, and not be afraid. ‘The God of peace shall tread down Satan under our feet shortly,’ [Rom. xvi. 20.] Amen.