Evil and sad is their condition who can not be contented
here nor blest hereafter, whose life is their misery and their
conscience is their enemy, whose grave is their prison and death their
undoing, and the sentence of doomsday the beginning of an intolerable
condition.
The third sort of accusers are the devils, and they will do it with
malicious and evil purposes. The prince of the devils hath Diabolus
for one of his chiefest appellatives. The accuser of the brethren
he is by his profest malice and employment; and therefore God, who
delights that His mercy should triumph and His goodness prevail over
all the malice of men and devils, hath appointed one whose office is
to reprove the accuser and to resist the enemy, and to be a defender
of their cause who belong to God. The Holy Spirit is a defender; the
evil spirit is the accuser; and they that in this life belong to one
or the other, shall in the same proportion be treated at the day of
judgment. The devil shall accuse the brethren, that is, the saints
and servants of God, and shall tell concerning their follies and
infirmities, the sins of their youth and weakness of their age, the
imperfect grace and the long schedule of omissions of duty, their
scruples and their fears, their diffidences and pusillanimity, and all
those things which themselves by strict examination find themselves
guilty of and have confest all their shame and the matter of their
sorrows, their evil intentions and their little plots, their carnal
confidences and too fond adherences of the things of this world, their
indulgence and easiness of government, their wilder joys and freer
meals, their loss of time and their too forward and apt compliances,
their trifling arrests and little peevishnesses, the mixtures of the
world with the thing of the Spirit, and all the incidences of
humanity he will bring forth and aggravate them by circumstances of
ingratitude, and the breach of promise, and the evacuating all their
holy purposes, and breaking their resolutions, and rifling their vows,
and all these things, being drawn into an entire representment, and
the bills clogged by numbers, will make the best man in the world seem
foul and unhandsome, and stained with the characters of death and evil
dishonor.
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