65. But that you may see the whole strength of this objection, I will shew you without any disguise or reserve, how I encourage the chief of sinners: my usual language to them runs thus:
O ye that deny the Lord that bought you, yet hear the word of the Lord. You seek rest, but find none. Even in laughter your heart is in heaviness. How long spend ye your labour for that which is not bread, and your strength for that which satisfieth not? You know, your soul is not satisfied. It is still an aking void. Sometimes you find (in spite of your principles) a sense [♦]of guilt, an awakened conscience. That grisly phantom, religion, (so you describe her) will now and then haunt you still. Righteousness looking down from heaven, is indeed to us no unpleasing sight. But how does it appear to you?
Horribili super aspectu mortalibus astans?
How often are you in fear of the very things you deny? How often in racking suspense? “What if there be an hereafter? A judgment to come? An unhappy eternity?” Do you not start at the thoughts? Can you be content to be always thus? Shall it be said of you also,
“Here lies a dicer, long in doubt
If death could kill the soul, or not?
Here ends his doubtfulness; at last
Convinc’d.——But, O the die is cast!”
Or, are you already convinced, there is no hereafter? What a poor state then are you in now? Taking a few more dull turns upon earth, and then dropping into nothing! What kind of spirit must you be of, if you can sustain yourself under the thought! Under the expectation of being in a few moments swept away by the stream of time, and then for ever
“swallow’d up, and lost