exhortation could be more proper than this?  “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”  What could be more awfully monitory and enforcing of it than that He works only of mere good will and pleasured How should I tremble to think, if I should be negligent, or undutiful, He may give out the next moment, may let the work fall, and me perish?  And there is more especial cause for such an apprehension upon the concurrence of such things as these: 

1.  If the workings of God’s Spirit upon the soul of a man have been more than ordinarily strong and urgent, and do not now cease:  if there have been more powerful convictions, deeper humiliations, more awakened fears, more formed purposes of a new life, more fervent desires that are now vanished, and the sinner returns to his dead and dull temper.

2.  If there be no disposition to reflect and consider the difference, no sense of his loss, but he apprehends such workings of spirit in him unnecessary troubles to him, and thinks it well he is delivered and eased of them.

3.  If in the time when he was under such workings of the Spirit he had made known his case to his minister, or any godly friend, whose company he now shuns, as not willing to be put in mind, or hear any more of such matters.

4.  If, hereupon he hath more indulged sensual inclination, taken more liberty, gone against the check of his own conscience, broken former good resolutions, involved himself in the guilt of any grosser sins.

5.  If conscience, so baffled, be now silent, lets him alone, grows more sluggish and weaker, which it must as his lusts grow stronger.

6.  If the same lively, powerful ministry which before affected him much, now moves him not.

7.  If especially he is grown into a dislike of such preaching—­if serious godliness, and what tends to it, are become distasteful to him—­if discourses of God, and of Christ, of death and judgment, and of a holy life, are reckoned superflous and needless, are unsavory and disrelished—­if he have learned to put disgraceful names upon things of this import, and the persons that most value them live accordingly—­if he hath taken the seat of the scorner, and makes it his business to deride what he had once a reverence for, or took some complacency in.

8.  If, upon all this, God withdraw such a ministry, so that he is now warned, admonished, exhorted and striven with, as formerly, no more.  Oh, the fearful danger of that man’s case!  Hath he no cause to fear lest the things of his peace should be forever hid from his eyes?  Surely he hath much cause of fear, but mot of despair.  Fear in this case would be his great duty, and might yet prove the means of saving him—­despair would be his very heinous and destroying sin.  If yet he would be stirred up to consider his case, whence he is fallen, and whither he is falling, and set himself to serious seekings of God, cast down himself before Him, abase