[4.] There is but one argument more that carries any probability of proof for everlasting condemnation, and that is from a hard and impenitent heart. How Satan will manage himself to make a child of God believe that he hath such a heart, is our last observation relating to his sophistry. And it is this: he unjustly aggravates the discomposures of the spirits of those that are troubled for sin, and from thence draws his arguments of irrecoverable damnation, pleading that their hearts are seared, hardened, uncapable of repentance, and consequently of heaven. That final impenitency will conclude damnation is certain; and that some have been given up to such a judicial hardness long before death, that they could not repent, may not only be evidenced from the threatening of God to that purpose, Mat. xiii. 15, ‘Make the heart of this people fat,’ &c., but also from the sad instances of Pharaoh, of whom it is said, that ‘God hardened his heart;’ and the Jews who were blinded, Rom. xi. 8, ‘God hath given them the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear.’ But still the art lieth in this, How to make a child of God believe that it is so with him. For this purpose he must take him at some advantage, he cannot terrify him with this argument at all times. While he is acting repentance with an undisturbed settled frame of heart, it is not possible to make him believe he doth not, or cannot repent; for this were to force him contrary to sense and experience. But he must take him at some season which may, with some probability, admit of his plea, and nothing is more proper for that design than a troubled heart; so that he hath in this case two things to do:
First, He disquiets the soul into as great a height of confusion as he can. That, second, when he hath melted it into heaviness, and torn it into pieces, he may work upon its distractions.
There are many things that fall out in the case of great anxiety of mind, that are capable of improvement for the accomplishment of this design. As, 1. Distracting troubles bring the heart under the stupidity of amazement. Their thoughts are so broken and disjointed, that they cannot unite them to a composed, settled resolution in anything; they can scarce join them together to make out so much as might spell out their distinct desires or endeavours; they scarce know what they are doing, or what they would do. 2. They also poison the thoughts with harsh apprehensions against God. Great distresses make the thoughts sometimes recoil against the holy Lord with unseemly questionings of his goodness and compassion; and this puts men into a bad sullen humour of untowardness, from whence, through Satan’s improvement, arise the greatest plunges of despair. 3. Most usually in this case the greatest endeavours are fruitless and dissatisfactory. Satan, though he be no friend to duty, doth unseasonably urge them to repent and pray; but it is because they cannot do either with any satisfaction, and then their failures are matter of argument against them. For if they resolve to put themselves upon a more severe course of repentance, and accordingly begin to think of their sins, to number them, or to aggravate them, they are usually affrighted from the undertaking by the heinous appearance of them. They cannot, they dare not think of them; the remotest glimpse of them is terrible to an affrighted conscience; the raising of them up again in the memory, like the rising of a ghost from the grave, is far more astonishing than the first prospect of them after commission. So true is that of Luther, ‘If a man could see sin perfectly, it would be a perfect hell.’ If they set themselves to beg their pardon by earnest prayer, they are so distracted and confused in prayer, that their prayers please them not; they come off from the duty more wounded than when they began. Or if in any measure they overcome these difficulties, so that they do pray and confess their iniquities, then they urge and force a sorrow or compunction upon themselves, but still to a greater dissatisfaction. For it may be—and this usually happens in greater distresses—they cannot weep, nor force a tear, or if they do, still they judge their sorrow is not deep enough, nor any way suitable to the greatness of their sin. 4. To all these Satan sometimes makes a further addition of trouble, by injecting blasphemous thoughts. Here he sets the stock, with an intention to graft upon it afterward. When all these things are thus in readiness, then comes he to set fire to the train, and thus he endeavours to blow up the mine. Is not thy heart hardened to everlasting destruction? How canst thou deny this? Art thou not grown stupid, and senseless of all the hazards that are before thee? Here he insists upon the amazement and confusion of their spirit; and it is very natural for those that are drunk with the terrors of the Almighty, to think themselves stupid, because of the distraction of their thoughts. I have known several that have pleaded that very argument to that purpose. Satan goes on: What greater evidence can there be of a hardened heart than impenitency? Thou canst not mourn enough. Thou hast not a tear for thy sins, though thou couldst weep enough formerly upon every petty occasion; nay, thou canst not so much as pray for pardon. Is not this not only a heart that doth not, but that cannot repent? Besides, saith he, thou knowest the secret thoughts that thy heart is privy to; do they not boil up in thy breast against God? Art thou not ready to tax him for dealing thus with thee? What is this untowardness, but desperate obdurateness? And if with all these there be blasphemous injections, then he tells him it is a clear case that he is judicially hardened; in that he acts the part of the damned in hell already. By all, or some of these deceits, the devil doth often prevail so far with men, that they conclude their heart to be so obstinate, so stupid, that it is impossible that it should be ever mollified or brought into a penitential frame, and consequently that there is no hope of their salvation.
(3.) There is but one thing more, besides the occasions which he takes, and the arguments which he makes use of, relating to Satan’s method for the procurement of spiritual distresses, and that is his endeavour to strengthen these arguments by the increase of fears in their hearts.
What Satan can do in raising up misgiving, tormenting fears, hath been said; and how serviceable this is to his design, I shall shew in a few particulars, having only first noted this in the general, that as his design in these distresses is raised to express his utmost height of malice against men—in pushing them forward to the greatest mischief, by excluding them totally from the lowest degree of the hope of happiness, and by persuading them of the inevitable certainty of their eternal misery—so he doth endeavour, by the strongest impressions of fear, to terrify them to the utmost degree of affrightful amazement, and consequently the effects of that fear are most powerful; for,
[1.] By this means the spirits of men are formed and moulded into a frame most suitable for the belief and entertainment of the most dismal impressions that Satan can put upon them. For strong fears, like fire, do assimilate everything to their own nature, making them naturally incline to receive the blackest, the most disadvantageous interpretations of all things against themselves, so that they have no capacity to put any other sense upon what lies in their way, but the very worst. Hence are they possessed with no other thoughts but that they are remediless wretches, desperate miscreants, utterly forsaken of God. They are brought into such a woeful partiality against their own peace, that they cannot judge aright of any accusation, plea, or argument that Satan brings for a proof of their unhappiness; but being filled with strong prejudices of hell, they think every sophism a strong argument, every supposition a truth, and every accusation conclusive of no less than their eternal damnation; insomuch that their fears do more to discomfit them than all Satan’s forces. ‘A dreadful sound being in their ears,’ [Job xv. 21,] their strength fails them at the appearance of any opposition; as when fear comes upon an army they throw away their weapons, and, by an easy victory, give their backs sometimes to an inconsiderable enemy.
[2.] Men thus possessed with fear do not only receive into their own bowels every weapon which Satan directs on purpose to the wounding and slaying of their hopes, but by a strange kind of belief they imagine everything to be the sword of an enemy. All they hear or meet with turns into poison to them, for they think everything is against them—promises as well as threatenings, mercies as well as judgments, and that by all these, one as well as another, God, as with a flaming sword turning every way, doth hinder their access to the tree of life. Bilney the martyr, as Latimer in his sermons reports of him, after his denial of the truth, was under such horrors of conscience, that his friends were forced to stay with him night and day. No comforts would serve. If any comfortable place of Scripture was offered to him, it was as if a man should cut him through with a sword. Nothing did him good; he thought that all scriptures made against him, and sounded to his condemnation. Neither is it so rare a thing for fears to form the imagination into such misshapen apprehensions, as that we should think such instances to be only singular and unusual; but it is a common effect of terror, which few or none escape that are under spiritual distresses. The blackness of their thoughts make the whole Scripture seem black to them. The unfit medium through which they look doth discolour every object. So that the book of life, as Mrs Kath. Bretterge in the like case expressed herself concerning the Bible, seems to be nothing else but a book of death to them.[358]
[3.] From hence it follows that no counsel or advice can take place with them. Excessive fears do remove their souls so far from peace, that they will not believe there is any hope for them, though it be told them. The most compassionate, serious admonitions of friends, the strongest arguments against despair, the clearest discoveries of the hopes that are before them, &c., effect but little. While they are spoken, it may be, they seem to relieve them a little; but the comfort abides not with them, it is soon gone. Though they cannot answer the arguments brought for them, yet they cannot believe them; as if their souls were now deprived of all power to believe anything for their good: suitable to that expression of Spira, in answer to his friends that laboured to comfort him, ‘I would believe comfort, but cannot; I can believe nothing but what is contrary to my comfort,’ Nay, when they are told that many others have been under the like dreadful apprehensions of everlasting misery who have at last been comforted—and by manifold experience we find that it is the greatest ease to distressed souls to hear, especially to speak with some that have been in the like case, for this will oft administer some hope that they also may be at last comforted, when the most comfortable promises of the Scripture are a terror to them;—yet this doth [not] effect the least ease for them sometimes, because some are so wholly possessed with unalterable prejudice against themselves, that they think none are or ever were like them. They compare themselves to Judas and Cain, and think their iniquity to be aggravated by many circumstances far beyond the pitch of them. Thus Spira judged of himself: ‘I tell you,’ saith he, ‘my case is mine own, it is singular, none like it.’
[4.] Though fears make the soul unactive to anything of comfort, because they wholly destroy its inclination and alter its bias to hope, yet, on the contrary, they make it very nimble and active to pursue the conclusions of misery which they have helped to frame, for the spring of all the faculties of the soul are bent that way. Hence it is that those who are possessed with these agonies will eagerly plead against themselves, and with an admirable subtlety will frame arguments against their peace, coin distinctions, and make strange evasions to escape the force of any consolation that may be offered to them. Their understandings are, as it were, whetted by their fears to an unimaginable quickness. Who would not wonder to hear the replies that some will give to the arguings of their friends that labour to comfort them! What strange answers Spira gave to those that pleaded with him! How easily he seemed to turn off the example of Peter denying Christ, and those scriptures that speak of God’s love to mankind, &c., may be seen at large in his narrative.
[5.] Fears by a strange kind of witchcraft do not only make them believe that they shall be unhappy, but also will at last persuade them that they feel and see their misery already. How astonishingly doth Spira speak to this purpose: ‘I find he daily more and more hardens me; I feel it.’ Answerable to this, I remember, was the case of one who was long imprisoned in deep distresses. He told me that he verily believed that scripture of Isa. lxvi. 23, 24 was fulfilled upon him, ‘From one sabbath to another shall all flesh come to worship before me, and they shall go forth and look upon the carcases of the men that have transgressed against me; for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched, and they shall be an abhorring to all flesh.’ To his own feeling he had the torments of conscience, and the sense of divine wrath was as a burning fire within him, and to his apprehension every look from others was a gazing upon him as a monster of misery, ‘abhorred of all flesh.’