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obedience to those in authority. And God forbid that I should scorn or slight the more perfect vows and more courageous endeavours of others. Whatever is become of my own innocency, GOD forbid that I should ever be a stumbling-block to any of these little ones. And let me at least try to be a doorkeeper in this holy house of my GoD, the house of penitential fasting and mourning, which will shortly be opened for me. Let me do something in the way of self-denial, more than I have done hitherto. And God make me all along most careful neither to despise those who fast more than myself, nor to judge them who fast less."

May God give us all, though unworthy, a portion with His saints in their watchings and fastings, in their holy sighs and tears, that we may at some great distance, through the merits of their LORD and ours, partake of their everlasting joy!

VOL. VIII.

D

SERMON CCXLIII.

NECESSITY OF CONFESSION.

SEXAGESIMA.

GENESIS iii. 8, 9.

"And they heard the voice of the LORD GOD walking in the garden in the cool of the day and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD GOD amongst the trees of the garden. And the LORD GOD called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?"

As the account of Eve's temptation and fall truly represents the course of corruption and sin, the way in which the devil daily and hourly beguiles and ruins Christian souls in the Church of GOD, now His earthly paradise; so the behaviour of our first parents afterwards may be understood but too easily by most of us; it answers so exactly to the feelings and conduct of those who have unhappily forfeited their baptismal innocency, and have permitted the Evil One to seduce them into wilful sin. Their first feeling was an indistinct sense of shame, a desire to hide themselves from one another and from all the world. Their eyes, both of them, were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig-leaves together, and made themselves aprons. Until then they had been like little children, not knowing shame, because they knew not sin; but from that day forward they and their posterity had to carry both sin and shame about with them wherever they went.

That was the first miserable effect of their transgression. The second and most miserable was, that it separated between them and their God. When He next vouchsafed to come near to them with His gracious presence, instead of hastening, like

dutiful children, to meet HIM, they shrank away, and tried to get as far from HIM as they could. "They heard the voice of the LORD GOD walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD GOD amongst the trees of the garden. And the LORD GOD called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou ?” I wish this place were harder than it is to understand. Would to God the lives and hearts of too many of us did not furnish too plain an account of its most sad and miserable meaning! For it is not only that we feel in ourselves the corruption which caused Adam so to behave, but so far as we have wilfully sinned, we are, or have been, doing the very same thing which Adam then did.

How can it possibly be otherwise, as long as sin, and shame, and belief in GoD go together? For shame makes the sinner shrink and draw back, and not endure to have his thoughts and doings watched or seen by any eye whatever. And belief in God tells him that there is an all-seeing eye about his path, and about his bed, and spying out all his ways;-to which the darkness and light are both alike; and an all-hearing ear which knows altogether every word on his tongue. As often then as he sins wilfully, if he think of GoD at all, he must secretly wish there were no God to see him; and he will be tempted to do all that he can to make himself forget GOD, and so in a manner hide himself for a time from His presence; as some large birds are said to run for shelter where there are thick bushes, and hide their heads in one of them, and so appear to fancy that no one can see them at all.

Thus any one sin, wilfully indulged, leads to profaneness and unbelief, and tends to blot the very thought of GOD out of our hearts. But if people cannot quite come to this, (as indeed the ALMIGHTY is very gracious, and takes possession of our minds beforehand, and fills the world with tokens of HIMSELF, and seems as if He would not permit us quite to forget HIM, do what we will,) then the Evil One teaches us a more subtle way of hiding from HIM, as he taught Adam in paradise; for we are not to doubt, that after that first sin the tempter, though out of sight, was at hand to lead our first parents into further mischief; he encouraged them in their natural feeling, to hide themselves

from God among the trees. We that have been brought up in GOD's Church are so far like them in paradise, that we know in our hearts that GoD is near us,-so near, that none of our secrets are hidden from HIM; as no doubt our first father, when he hid himself from God, yet knew that he could not really hide himself; but he got among the trees, as the lost ones will call on the rocks and mountains to cover them in the last day, because it was something like hiding himself.

Much in the same way are backsliding Christians led to invent or accept notions of GOD and His judgment, as though He in His mercy permitted them to be hidden and covered, when in truth they cannot be so. If they have strong feelings of repentance, however late, if they earnestly put their trust in JESUS CHRIST, GOD, they imagine, will cast all their sins, even their wilful and deadly sins, whereby they have broken their baptismal vows, GoD will cast them all behind His back; and the hope of this encourages them to go on, as if even now what they are doing were out of God's sight. This is hypocrisy, so far like that of the Pharisees, that it has great reason to dread the woe pronounced on them. It is behaving towards GoD as if we could hide ourselves from HIM.

And the same temper naturally leads us to be more or less false towards men also, trying to seem better than we are; delighting to be praised, though we know how little we deserve it; talking, and looking, and moving about, as if we had some remarkably good purpose in our minds, while perhaps inwardly we allow the Evil One to have his way in our hearts in respect of some secret corruption-malice, or covetousness, or pride, or lust.

Among particular sins, it would seem that two in particular dispose the heart towards this kind of falseness-that is to say, first, sensuality, or undue indulgence of the lusts of the flesh; and next dishonesty, what tempts men to cheating and stealing. Both these, at least in their first beginnings, are, in an especial sense, "works of darkness;" as they are described in the book of Job, "The eye of the adulterer waiteth for the twilight, saying, No eye shall see me; and disguiseth his face." That is the nature of sins of wantonness. And in the next verse he says

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houses which they had marked for themselves in the day-time; they know not the light: for the morning is to them even as the shadow of death; if one know them, they are in the terrors of the shadow of death." The unclean person, and the thiefthese are the kinds of sinners who shrink from being seen, more earnestly, perhaps, than most others, and to whom, therefore, the thought of God's presence is most especially oppressive and irksome.

How many hearts will bear witness to this hereafter, in the day when their secrets shall be laid open; and when, according to our Judge's positive saying, "there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, nor hid that shall not be known!" Then shall it be seen how bitter and acute was the feeling, when young people, christianly brought up, first permitted themselves to wander in secret from the pure and undefiled commands of God; to indulge any sinful desire, the lust of the flesh or the lust of the eyes, or to take what did not belong to them.

How ashamed and angry with themselves did they feel! how uneasy, in a kind of imagination, that other persons might know or suspect their fall! how busy, too often, in mean and miserable contrivances, false and lying words and deeds, to hide from man what they knew in their hearts that GoD all the while was looking at! And thus, too often, their consciences were hardened, and they went on with less and less scruple to repeat the same sins or commit worse. But if they had permitted their natural shame to work a good work in them, if they had confessed, and humbled and chastened themselves before GOD, and had remembered their sin, not to hide, and excuse, and repeat it, but to punish themselves secretly for it, denying themselves praise and pleasure; this would have stopped the evil in the bud, would have secured to them the continued gracious aid of the most HOLY SPIRIT, to resist the devil when he should next approach. He would have given them tears of true penitence, to wash out the stain before it was ingrained in their garments; and they might hope to feel more and more, that God was calling to them, though severely, yet in mercy: as to fallen and erring children, yet as to children, and that, as such, they might still venture near HIM.

Such was probably our first father's mind when the LORD

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