But to my former task.  The last main torture and trouble of a distressed mind, is not so much this doubt of election, and that the promises of grace are smothered and extinct in them, nay quite blotted out, as they suppose, but withal God’s heavy wrath, a most intolerable pain and grief of heart seizeth on them:  to their thinking they are already damned, they suffer the pains of hell, and more than possibly can be expressed, they smell brimstone, talk familiarly with devils, hear and see chimeras, prodigious, uncouth shapes, bears, owls, antiques, black dogs, fiends, hideous outcries, fearful noises, shrieks, lamentable complaints, they are possessed, [6808]and through impatience they roar and howl, curse, blaspheme, deny God, call his power in question, abjure religion, and are still ready to offer violence unto themselves, by hanging, drowning, &c.  Never any miserable wretch from the beginning of the world was in such a woeful case.  To such persons I oppose God’s mercy and his justice; Judicia Dei occulta, non injusta:  his secret counsel and just judgment, by which he spares some, and sore afflicts others again in this life; his judgment is to be adored, trembled at, not to be searched or inquired after by mortal men:  he hath reasons reserved to himself, which our frailty cannot apprehend.  He may punish all if he will, and that justly for sin; in that he doth it in some, is to make a way for his mercy that they repent and be saved, to heal them, to try them, exercise their patience, and make them call upon him, to confess their sins and pray unto him, as David did, Psalm cxix. 137.  “Righteous art thou, O Lord, and just are thy judgments.”  As the poor publican, Luke xviii. 13.  “Lord have mercy upon me a miserable sinner.”  To put confidence and have an assured hope in him, as Job had, xiii. 15.  “Though he kill me I will trust In him:”  Ure, seca, occide O Domine, (saith Austin) modo serves animam, kill, cut in pieces, burn my body (O Lord) to save my soul.  A small sickness; one lash of affliction, a little misery, many times will more humiliate a man, sooner convert, bring him home to know himself, than all those paraenetical discourses, the whole theory of philosophy, law, physic, and divinity, or a world of instances and examples.  So that this, which they take to be such an insupportable plague, is an evident sign of God’s mercy and justice, of His love and goodness:  periissent nisi periissent, had they not thus been undone, they had finally been undone.  Many a carnal man is lulled asleep in perverse security, foolish presumption, is stupefied in his sins, and hath no feeling at all of them:  “I have sinned” (he saith) “and what evil shall come unto me,” Eccles. v. 4, and “Tush, how shall God know it?” and so in a reprobate sense goes down to hell.  But here, Cynthius aurem vellit, God pulls them by the ear, by affliction, he will bring them to heaven and happiness; “Blessed are they that mourn, for