_Direct._ V. Keep up a believing foresight of the state which death will send you to. And then if you have the use of reason, hell at least will hold your hands, and make you afraid of venturing upon death. What repentance are you like to have, when you die in the very act of sin? and when an unmortified lust or love of the world, doth hurry you to the halter by sinful discontent? and what hope of pardon without repentance? How exceeding likely therefore is it, that whenever you put yourselves out of your present pain and trouble you send your souls to endless torments! And will it ease you to pass from poverty or crosses into hell? Or will you damn your souls, because another wrongeth you? Oh the madness of a sinner! Who will you think hath wronged you most, when you feel hell-fire? Are you weary of your lives, and will you go to hell for ease? Alas, how quickly would you be glad to be here again, in a painfuller condition than that which you were so weary of! yea, and to endure it a thousand years! Suppose you saw hell before your eyes, would you leap into it? Is not time of repentance a mercy to be valued? Yea, a little reprieve from endless misery is better than nothing. What need you make haste to come to hell? Will it not be soon enough, if you stay thence as long as you can? And why will you throw away your hopes, and put yourselves past all possibility of recovery, before God put you so himself? _Direct._ VI. Understand the wonders of mercy revealed, and bestowed on mankind in Jesus Christ; and understand the tenor of the covenant of grace. The ignorance of this is it that keepeth a bitter taste upon your spirits; and maketh you cry out, Forsaken and undone; when such miracles of mercy are wrought for your salvation. And the ignorance of this is it that maketh you foolishly cry out, There is no hope; the day of grace is past; it is too late; God will never show me mercy! When his word assureth all that will believe it, that "whoever confesseth and forsaketh his sins, shall have mercy," Prov. xxviii. 13. "And if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive," 1 John i. 9. "And that whoever will, may freely drink of the waters of life," Rev. xxii. 17. "And that whoever believeth in him, shall not perish, but have everlasting life," John iii. 16. I have no other hope of my salvation, but that gospel which promiseth pardon and salvation unto all, that at any time repent and turn to God by faith in Christ: and I dare lay my salvation on the truth of this, that Christ never rejected any sinner, how great soever, that at any time in this life was truly willing to come to him, and to God by him. "He that cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out," John vi. 37. But the malicious devil would fain make God seem odious to the soul, and representeth love itself as our enemy, that we might not love him! Despair is such a part of hell, that if he could bring us to it, he would think he had