Re: flood coming to alt.tv.muppets
Peter Pearson
escape and get into a better state. Those who before were secure and
senseless, are made sensible how much they were in the way to ruin, in
their former courses. Some are more suddenly seized with convictions-it
may be, by the news of others' conversion, or some thing they hear in
public, or in private conference-their consciences are smitten, as if
their hearts were pierced through with a dart. Others are awakened more
gradually, they begin at first to be something more thoughtful and
considerate, so as to come to a conclusion in their minds, that it is
their best and wisest way to delay no longer, but to improve the present
opportunity. They have accordingly set themselves seriously to meditate
on those things that have the most awakening tendency, on purpose to
obtain convictions; and so their awakenings have increased, till a sense
of their misery, by God's Holy Spirit setting in therewith, has had fast
hold of them. Others who before had been somewhat religious, and
concerned for their salvation, have been awakened in a new manner; and
made sensible
Peter Pearson
or tempt him, and domineer over him, either subduing him by their strength,
or fascinating him by their charms, a tyranny more awful and more imperious.
"Such is the state in which men now are. There remains to them some feeble
instinct of the happiness of their former state; and they are plunged in the
evils of their blindness and their lust, which have become their second
nature. "From this principle which I disclose to you, you can recognize the
cause of those contradictions which have astonished all men and have divided
them into parties holding so different views. Observe, now, all the feelings
of greatness and glory which the experience of so many woes cannot stifle,
and see if the cause of them must not be in another nature.
For Port-Royal to-morrow (Prosopopaea).--"It is in vain, O men, that you
seek within yourselves the remedy for your ills. All your light can only
reach the knowledge that not in yourselves will you find truth or good. The
philosophers have promised you that, and you have been unable to do it. They
neither know what is your true good, nor what is your true state. How could
they have given remedies for your ills, when they did not even know them?
Your chief maladies are pride, which takes you away from God, and lust,
which binds you to earth; and they have done nothing else but cherish one or
other of these diseases. If they gave you God as an end, it was only to
administer to your pride; they made you think that you are by nature like
Him and conformed to Him. And those who saw the absurdity of this claim put
you on another precipice, by making you understand that your nature was like
that of the brutes, and led you to seek your good in the lusts which are
shared by the animals. This is not the way to cure you of your
unrighteousness, which these wise men nev