some die of age; many ways we become unable to do that sin, but still the soul lives and passes into another sin; and that that was licentiousness grows ambition, and that comes to indevotion and spiritual coldness: we have three lives in our state of sin, and where the sins of youth expire, those of our middle years enter, and those of our age after them. This transmigration of sin found in myself, makes me afraid, O my God, of a relapse; but the occasion of my fear is more pregnant than so, for I have had, I have multiplied relapses already. Why, O my God, is a relapse so odious to thee? Not so much their murmuring and their idolatry, as their relapsing into those sins, seems to affect thee in thy disobedient people. _They limited the holy One of Israel_,[331] as thou complainest of them: that was a murmuring; but before thou chargest them with the fault itself, in the same place thou chargest them with the iterating, the redoubling of that fault before the fault was named; _How oft did they provoke me in the wilderness, and grieve me in the desert?_ That which brings thee to that exasperation against them, as to say, that thou wouldst break thine own oath rather than leave them unpunished (_They shall not see the land which I sware unto their fathers_) was because _they had tempted thee ten times_,[332] infinitely; upon that thou threatenest with that vehemency, _If you do in any wise go back, know for a certainty God will no more drive out any of these nations from before you; but they shall be snares and traps unto you, and scourges in your sides, and thorns in your eyes, till ye perish_.[333] No tongue but thine own, O my God, can express thine indignation against a nation relapsing to idolatry. Idolatry in any nation is deadly, but when the disease is complicated with a relapse (a knowledge and a profession of a former recovery), it is desperate; and thine anger works, not only where the evidence is pregnant and without exception (so thou sayest when it is said, that certain men in a city have withdrawn others to idolatry, and that inquiry is made, and it is found true; the city, and the inhabitants, and the cattle are to be destroyed),[334] but where there is but a suspicion, a rumour, of such a relapse to idolatry, thine anger is awakened, and thine indignation stirred. In the government of thy servant Joshua, there was a voice, that Reuben and Gad, with those of Manasseh, had built a new altar.[335] Israel doth not send one to inquire, but the whole congregation gathered to go up to war against them,[336] and there went a prince of every tribe; and they object to them, not so much their present declination to idolatry, as their relapse: _Is the iniquity of Peor too little for us?_[337] an idolatry formerly committed, and punished with the slaughter of twenty-four thousand delinquents. At last Reuben and Gad satisfy them, that that altar was not built for idolatry, but built as a