from my station like a devil.  That man honoreth God, edifieth the saints, convinceth the world and condemneth them, and is become ’heir of the righteousness which is by faith.’  But I have dishonored God, stumbled and grieved saints, made the world blaspheme, and, for aught I know, been the cause of the damnation of many.  “These are the things, I say, together with many more of the same kind, that come to him; yea, they will come with him, yea, and will stare him in the face, will tell him of his baseness and laugh him to scorn, all the way that he is coming to God by Christ-I know what I say-and this makes his coming to God by Christ hard and difficult to him.  Shame covereth his face all the way he comes.  He doth not know what to do; the God that he is returning to is the God that he has slighted, the God before whom he has preferred the vilest lusts; and he knows God knows it, and has before Him all his ways.

The man that has been a backslider, and is returning to God, can tell strange stories, and yet such as are very true.  No man was in the whale’s belly, and came out again alive, but backsliding and returning Jonah; consequently no man could tell how he was there, what he felt there, what he saw there, and what workings of heart he had when he was there, so well as he.

The returning again of the backslider gives a second testimony to the truth of man’s state being by nature miserable, of the vanity of this world, of the severity of the law, certainty of death, and terribleness of judgment to come.  His first coming to God by Christ told them so, but his second coming tells them so with a double confirmation of the truth.  “It is so,” saith his first coming; “Oh, it is so!” saith his second.

The backsliding of a Christian comes through the overmuch persuading of Satan and lust, that the man was mistaken, and that there was no such horror in the things from which he fled, nor so much good in the things to which he hasted.  “Turn again, fool,” says the devil, “turn again to thy former course.  I wonder what frenzy it was that drove thee to thy heels, and that made thee leave so much good behind thee, as other men find in the lusts of the flesh and the good of the world.  As for the law, and death, and an imagination of the day of judgment, they are but mere scarecrows, set up by polite heads to keep the ignorant in subjection.”  “Well,” says the backslider, “I will go back again and see;” so, fool as he is, he goes back, and has all things ready to entertain him:  his conscience sleeps, the world smiles, flesh is sweet, carnal company compliments him, and all that can be got is presented to this backslider to accommodate him.  But behold, he doth again begin to see his own nakedness, and he perceives that the law is whetting his axe:  as for the world, he perceives it is a bubble; he also smells the smell of brimstone, for God hath scattered it upon his tabernacle and it begins to burn within him.  “Oh,” saith he, “I am deluded; Oh, I am ensnared.  My first sight of things was true.  I see it so again.”  Now he begins to be for flying again to his first refuge:  “O God,” saith he, “I am undone; I have turned from thy truth to lies; I believed them such at first, and find them such at last:  have mercy upon me, O God.”