We may guess at the severity of the Judge by the lesser strokes of
that judgment which He is pleased to send upon sinners in this world,
to make them afraid of the horrible pains of doomsday--I mean the
torments of an unquiet conscience, the amazement and confusions
of some sins and some persons. For I have sometimes seen persons
surprised in a base action, and taken in the circumstances of crafty
theft and secret injustices, before their excuse was ready. They
have changed their color, their speech hath faltered, their tongue
stammered, their eyes did wander and fix nowhere, till shame made
them sink into their hollow eye-pits to retreat from the images and
circumstances of discovery; their wits are lost, their reason useless,
the whole order of their soul is decomposed, and they neither see, nor
feel, nor think, as they used to do, but they are broken into disorder
by a stroke of damnation and a lesser stripe of hell; but then if you
come to observe a guilty and a base murderer, a condemned traitor,
and see him harassed first by an evil conscience, and then pulled in
pieces by the hangman's hooks, or broken upon sorrows and the wheel,
we may then guess (as well as we can in this life) what the pains
of that day shall be to accurst souls.
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