BOOK III: The necessity of regeneration demonstrated by this argument, that all that God and Christ
the lusts of men,' be thy 'no longer to live'? Tell me how many years hast thou lived in sin? What is thirty or forty years? May not that suffice to an enemy that will destroy thee? In a word, I have told you a long story of God's design in suffering the bulk of his elect to go on to years of discretion, ere he converts them; and that his design therein is glory to himself. But it is meet for me withal to tell you, yea, indeed end in telling you it, that as God's design is to shew love in it, so wisdom also. And therefore ordinarily his design, is so to convert, after such a time of sinning, as providently to have such a time in thy years remaining, as to have a glory out of thee in thy fruitfulness and obedience. There are but few instances of late repentance. All the epistles of the apostles speak of men that had formerly been in such a condition of sin, but they were yet written to them, whilst alive, and now turned, and as remaining surviving subjects of exhortations to all holiness, and left to give demonstration thereof. My brethren, God is so wise, as he will compass and grasp both ends. As he will leave a time in which you may have experience of such an estate, so he will ordinarily so convert, or not at all, as there may be a time to shew forth the contrary graces for his glory, which is made the end of conversion 1
Peter 2:9. And of the two, you may well give God leave to project the latter for the longer time, for a little of the other sufficeth. I observe it in this epistle to Titus, that this grace and love (which Paul says appeared to us who were sometime disobedient, in this third chapter), is in chap. 2:12 said so to appear, as that men may afterwards give demonstration of their living soberly, righteously, and godly, according to that grace, even in this present world; for otherwise, whilst they are in the world, God would lose his design.
BOOK III