its life in the soul, despite the wound that is given to it in the first
coerces them outwardly. But, -
(2.) Beyond bare vows and promises, with some watchfulness to observe them in a rational use of ordinary means, men may go to extraordinary lengths to put sin to death. This is the foundation of all that has a show of wisdom and religion in the Papacy: their hours of prayer, fastings; their cloistering themselves; their pilgrimages, penances, and self-torturing discipline, - spring all from this root. I shall not speak of the innumerable evils that have attended these selfinvented ways of putting sin to death, and how all of them have been turned into occasions of sin; nor of the horrible hypocrisy of most of their observers; nor of that superstition which gives life to them all, riveted in the natures of some and their constitutions, fixed on others by prejudice, and taken up by others for secular advantages. I suppose the best that can be made of it is that it is a self-invented design of men ignorant of the righteousness of God, to check the power of indwelling sin. It is almost incredible what horrible sufferings this has carried men to; surely, their blind zeal and superstition will rise at the judgement to condemn the negligence of those to whom the Lord has granted the saving light of the gospel. But what is the end of these things? The apostle gives us an account, Romans 9:31, 32. They do not attain the righteousness they aim at; they do not conform to the law: sin is not put to death, or the power of it weakened; but what it loses in carnal pleasures, it gains in blindness, superstition, selfrighteousness, and soul-pride, contempt of the gospel and the righteousness of it, and reigns no less than in the worst sinners in the world.
2. The strength and power of this law of sin may be farther seen from its life in the soul, despite the wound that is given to it in the first conversion of the soul to God; and in the continual opposition to it by grace.
The humility, self-abasement, watchfulness, diligence, and application to the Lord Christ for relief, which befit those who find the power of this law of sin in themselves by experience, have been mentioned
through the whole book.
"To the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen."