“The modish doctrine of Christian imperfection and death-purgatory is so contrived that carnal men will always prefer the purgatory of the Calvinists to that of the Papists. For the Papists prescribe I know not how many cups of divine wrath and dire vengeance, which are to be drunk by the souls of believers who die _half_-purged, or _three parts_ cleansed. These _half-damned_, or a _quarter-damned_ creatures must go through a severe discipline, and fiery salvation in the very suburbs of hell, before they can be perfectly purified. But our opponents have found out a way to deliver _half-hearted_ believers out of all fear in this respect. Such believers need not _utterly abolish the body of sin_ in this world. The inbred man of sin not only _may_, but he _shall_ live as long as we do. You will possibly ask: ‘What is to become of this sinful guest? Shall he take us to hell, or shall we take him to heaven? If he cannot die in this world, will Christ destroy him in the next?’ No: here Christ is almost left out of the question. Our indwelling adversary is not to be destroyed by the brightness of the Redeemer’s spiritual appearing, but by the gloom of the appearance of death. The king of terrors comes to the assistance of Jesus’s sanctifying grace, and instantaneously delivers the carnal believer from indwelling pride, unbelief, covetousness, peevishness, uncharitableness, love of the world, and inordinate affection. The dying sinner’s breath does the capital work of the Spirit of holiness. By the most astonishing of all miracles, the faint, infectious, last gasp of a sinful believer blows away, in the twinkling of an eye, the great mountain of inward corruption, which all the means of grace, all the faith, prayers, and sacraments of twenty, perhaps of forty years, were never able to remove. If this doctrine is true, how greatly was St. Paul mistaken when he said, ‘_The sting of death is sin_.’ Should he not have said, _Death is the cure of sin_, instead of saying, ‘_Sin is the sting_ of death’? And should not his praises flow thus,—‘_Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through death_; our great and only deliverer from our greatest and fiercest enemy, _indwelling sin_’?”