A Christian Directory, Part 1: Christian Ethics

by Richard Baxter

Direct. VI. Take notice of the doleful effects of hard-heartedness in the world. This fills the world with wickedness and confusion, with wars and bloodshed; and leaveth it under that lamentable desertion and delusion, which we behold in the far greatest part of the earth. How many kingdoms are left in the blindness of heathenism and Mahometanism, for hardening their hearts against the Lord! How many christian nations are given up to the most gross deceits of popery, and princes and people are enemies to reformation, because they hardened their hearts against the light of truth! What vice so odious, even beastly filthiness, and bitterest hatred, and persecution of the ways of God, which men of all degrees and ranks do not securely wallow in through the hardness of their hearts! This is the thing that grieves the godly, that wearieth good magistrates, and breaks the hearts of faithful ministers: when they have done their best, they are fain, as Christ himself before them, to grieve for the hardness of men's hearts. Alas! we live among the dead; our towns and countries are in a sadder case than Egypt, when every house had a dead man. Even in our churches, it were well if the dead were only under ground, and most of our seats had not a dead man, that sitteth as if he heard, and kneeleth as if he prayed, when nothing ever pierced to the quick. We have studied the most quickening words, we have preached with tears in the most earnest manner, and yet we cannot make them feel! as if we cried like Baal's worshippers, O Baal, hear us! or, like the Irish to their dead, Why wouldst thou die, and leave thy house, and lands, and friends? So we talk to them about the death of their souls, and their wilful misery, who never feel the weight of any thing we say: we are left to ring them a peal of lamentation, and weep over them as the dead that are not moved by our tears: we cast the seed into stony ground, Matt. xiii. 5, 20; it stops in the surface, and it is not in our power to open their hearts, and get within them. I confess that we are much to blame ourselves, that ever we did speak to such miserable souls, without more importunate earnestness and tears; (and it is because the stone of the heart is much uncured in ourselves; for which God now justly layeth so many of us by;) but yet, we must say, our importunity is such, as leaveth them without excuse. We speak to them of the greatest matters in all the world; we speak it to them in the name of God; we show them his own word for it; and plead with them the arguments which he hath put into our mouths; and yet we speak as to posts and stones, to men past feeling. What a pitiful sight was it to see Christ stand weeping over Jerusalem, for the hardness of their hearts, and the nearness and greatness of their misery! while they themselves were so far from weeping for it, that they raged against the life of him that so much pitied them! We bless God that it is not thus with all. He hath encouraged some of us with the heart-yielding, obedient attention of many great congregations: but, among the best, alas! how many of these hardened sinners are mixed! and, in many places, how do they abound! Hence it is that such odious abominations are committed; such filthiness, and lying, and perjury, and acts of malicious enmity against the servants of the Lord; and that so many are haters of God and godliness. If Satan had not first hardened their hearts, he could never have brought them to such odious crimes, as now with impudency are committed in the land. As Lot's daughters were fain to make their father drunk, that he might commit the sin of incest; so the devil doth first deprive men both of reason and feeling, that he might bring them to such heinous wickedness as this, and make them laugh at their own destruction, and abhor those most that fain would save them. And they are not only past feeling, but so hate any quickening ministry, or truth, or means which would recover their feeling, that they seem to go to hell as some condemned malefactors to the gallows, that make themselves drunk before they go, as if it were all they had to care for to keep themselves hoodwinked, from knowing or feeling whither they go, till they are there.

See what a picture of a hardened people God giveth to Ezekiel, chap. iii. 7, "But the house of Israel will not hearken to thee; for they will not hearken to me: for all the house of Israel are impudent and hard-hearted." Observe but what a case it is that they are so insensible of, and then you will see what a hard-hearted sinner, past feeling, is.

1. They are the servants of sin, Rom. vi. 16; in the power of it, corrupted by it; and yet they feel it not.

2. They have the guilt of many thousand sins upon them, all is unpardoned that ever they committed; and yet they feel it not.

3. They have the threatenings and curses of God in force against them in his word; even words so terrible, as you would think might affright them out of their sins or their wits; and they take on them to believe this word of God; and yet they feel not.

4. They are in the power of the devil; ruled and deceived by him, and taken captive by him at his will, Acts xxvi. 18; 2 Tim. ii. 26.

5. They may be certain that if they die in this condition they shall be damned, and they are uncertain whether they shall live another day; they are never sure to be one hour longer out of hell; and yet they feel not.

6. They know that they must die, and that it is a great change, and of the greatest endless consequence, that death will make with them; and they know that this is sure and near, and are past doubt of it; and yet they feel it not.[146]

7. They must shortly appear before the Lord, and be judged for all that they have done in the body, and be doomed to their endless state; and yet they feel not.

8. They know that life is short, and that they have but a little time to prepare for all this terrible change, and that it must go with them for ever, as they now prepare; and yet they feel not.