_Secondly_, If you would have this covenant to be a perpetual covenant, labour to see old scores crossed; do not only mourn for thy covenant-unfaithfulness; but labour to get thy pardon written and sealed to thee in the blood of the covenant. There is virtue enough in the blood of the covenant, to expiate the guilt of thy sins against the covenant. "I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean; from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you." Their sins of idolatry, were sins especially against their covenant; idolatry being the violation of the marriage-knot, between God and a people; yet even from them doth God promise to cleanse them, upon their repentance and conversion. The blood of the covenant, compared to water for the cleansing virtue thereof, should cleanse them from their covenant defilements. "The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin." "Thou hast played the harlot with many lovers; yet, return again to me, saith the Lord." It is a mighty encouragement to renew our covenants with God, that He is so ready to pardon the breach of old; and the sense of this pardon is a mighty engagement and strengthening, to keep our new covenants. Oh! for God to say to a poor soul, "be of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven thee." "And I have blotted out thy sins as a cloud, and thy transgressions as a thick cloud." All thy unkindnesses and unfaithfulnesses, thy treacherous dealings against the covenant, shall be forgotten; they shall do thee no harm. This will mightily strengthen the hands, and fortify the heart, and even make it impenetrable and impregnable against all the solicitations and importunities of old temptations: see a notable instance of this, "I will heal their backslidings, I will love them freely; for mine anger is turned away from him." "I will be as the dew to Israel." "His branches shall spread." "They that dwell under His shadow shall return." What follows these gracious promises? Why, Ephraim shall say, "What have I to do any more with idols?" He that before was so inseparably joined to idols, that he could not be divorced from them; "Ephraim is joined to idols." All the blows that God gave him, tho' God should have beaten him to pieces, as he himself afterward confessed, could not beat him off from his idols; insomuch, that God at length gave him over, as an hopeless child. "Ephraim is joined to idols, let him lone." Yet, no sooner doth this Ephraim hear of a pardon, and of the love of God to him, but the bonds between him and his idols are dissolved, and away he thrusts them with indignation. Ephraim shall say, "What have I to do with idols?" Or as the prophet Isaiah expresseth it, "Ye shall defile the covering of the graven images of silver, and the ornament of thy molten images of gold; thou shalt cast them away as a menstruous cloth, thou shalt say unto it, get thee hence." And thus it is with a people, or a person, when once "God sheds abroad His Spirit in their hearts,"