“Supposing you never allowed yourself to dishonour the name of God by customary swearing, or grossly to violate His Sabbaths, or commonly to neglect the solemnities of His public worship; supposing, again, that you have not injured your neighbours in their lives, their chastity, their character, or their property, either by violence or by fraud; or that you never scandalously debased your rational nature by that vile intemperance which sinks a man below the worst kind of brutes; supposing all this, can you pretend that you have not in smaller instances violated the rules of piety, of temperance, and of chastity? Does not your own heart prove you guilty of pride, of passion, of sensuality, of an excessive fondness for the world and its enjoyments; of murmuring, or at least secretly repining, against God under the strokes of an afflictive Providence; of misspending a great deal of your time; of abusing the gifts of God’s bounty to vain, and, in some instances, to pernicious purposes; of mocking Him when you have pretended to engage in His worship, drawing near to Him with your lips while your heart has been far from Him? Does not your conscience condemn you of some one breach of the law at least? and by one breach of it, does not the Holy Ghost bear witness (James ii. 10) that you are become guilty of all, and are as incapable of being justified before God by any obedience of your own, as if you had committed ten thousand offences? But, in reality, there are ten thousand and more to be charged to your account. When you come to reflect on all your sins of negligence, as well as on your voluntary transgressions; on all the instances in which you have failed to do good when it was in your power to do it; on all the instances in which acts of devotion have been omitted, especially in secret; and on all those cases in which you have shown a stupid disregard to the honour of God, and to the temporal and eternal happiness of your fellow-creatures; when all these, I say, are reviewed, the number will swell beyond all possibility of account, and force you to cry out, ‘I am rebellious, most rebellious; mine iniquities are more than the hairs of my head!’ They will appear in such a light before you that your own heart will charge you with countless multitudes; and how much more then that God, ‘who is greater than your heart, and knoweth all things’?” Footnote 77: