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O our God! we are ashamed, and blush to lift up our faces before thee our God, for our iniquities are encreased over our head, and our trefpafs is grown up into the heavens.

To us belong fhame and confufion of face, be cause we have finned against thee.

Behold, we are vile, what fhall we anfwer thee? We will lay our hand upon our mouth, and put our mouth in the duft, if fo be there may be hope, crying with the convicted leper under the law, Unclean, unclean.

Thou putteft no truft in thy faints; and the heavens are not clean in thy fight: how much more abomi. nable and filthy is man, who drinketh iniquity like water!

When our eyes have feen the king, the Lord of hofts, we have reafon to cry out, woe unto us, for we are undone.

Dominion and fear are with thee, thou makest peace in thy high places: there is not any number of thine armies, and upon whom doth not thy light arife? How then can man be juftified with God, or, how can he be clean that is born of a woman?

Thou, even thou, art to be feared, and who may ftand in thy fight when once thou art angry? even thou, our God, art a confuming fire; and who knows the power of thine anger?

If we justify ourselves, our own mouths fhall condemn us; if we fay we are perfect, that also shall prove us perverfe; for if thou contend with us, we are not able to answer thee for one of a thousand.

If we knew nothing by ourfelves, yet were we not thereby juftified, for he that judgeth us is the Lord; who is greater than our hearts, and knows all things. But we ourselves know that we have finned, father, against heaven, and before thee, and are no more worthy to be called thy children.

2. We must take hold of the great encouragement

God hath given us to humble ourfelves before him with forrow and fhame, and to confefs our fins.

If thou, Lord, fhouldeft mark iniquities, O Lord, who fhall ftand! But there is forgivenefs with thee, that thou mayeft be feared; with thee there is mercy, yea, with our God there is plenteous redemption, and he fhall redeem Ifrael from all his iniquities.

Thy facrifices, O God, are a broken fpirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise: nay, tho' thou art the high and lofty one that inhabiteft eternity, whofe name is holy; though the heaven be thy throne, and the earth thy footstool, yet to this man wilt thou look, that is poor and humble, of a broken and a contrite fpirit, and that trembleth at thy word, to revive the fpirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones.

Thou haft graciously affured us, that though they that cover their fins fhall not profper, yet thofe that confefs and forfake them fhall find mercy. And when a poor penitent fays, I will confefs my tranfgreffion unto the Lord, thou forgiveft the iniquity of his fin; and for this fhall every one that is godly, in like manner, pray unto thee in a time when thou mayest be found.

We know that, if we fay we have no fin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us; but thou haft faid that, if we confcfs our fins, thou art faithful and just to forgive us our fins, and to cleanfe us from all unrighteousness.

3.

We must therefore confefs and bewail our original corruption, in the first place, that we were the children of apoftate and rebellious parents, and the nature of man is depraved, and wretchedly degenerated from its primative purity and rectitude, and our nature is fo.

Lord, thou madeft man upright, but they have fought out many inventions: and being in honour did not understand, and therefore abode not, but became like the beafts that perish.

By one man, fin entered into this world, and death by fin, and so death paffed upon all men, for that all have finned: by that one man's difobedience, many were made finners, and we among the reft.

We are a feed of evil-doers; our father was an Amorite, and our mother a Hittite, and we ourselves were called (and not mifcalled) tranfgreffors from the womb, and thou knoweft we would deal very treacherously.

The nature of man was planted a choice and noble vine, wholly a right feed, but it is become the degenerate plant of a strange vine; producing the grapes of Sodom, and the clusters of Gomarrah. How is the gold become dim, and the moft fine god changed!

Behold, we are shapen in iniquity, and in fin did our mother conceive us. For, who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one. We are by nature ehildren of wrath, because children of disobedience, even as others.

All flesh hath corrupted their way, we are all gone afide, we are all together become filthy, there is none that doth good; no, not one.

4. We must lament our prefent corrupt difpofitions to that which is evil, and our indifpofedness to, and impotency in that which is good. We must look into our own hearts, and confefs with holy blushing, 1. The blindness of our understandings, and their unaptness to admit the rays of the divine light.

By nature our understandings are darkened, being alienated from the life of God, through the ignorance that is in us, because of the blindness of our hearts.

The things of the fpirit of God are foolishness to the natural man, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

We are wife to do evil; but to do good we have no knowledge: we know not, neither do we understand, we walk on in darkness.

God fpeaketh once, yea, twice, but we perceive it

not; but hearing, we hear, and do not underftand, and we fee men as trees walking.

2. The stubbornnefs of our wills, and their unapt nefs to fubmit to the rules of the divine law.

We have within us a carnal mind, which is enmity against God, and is not in fubjection to the law of God, neither indeed can be.

Thou haft written to us the great things of thy law, but they have been accounted by us as a strange thing, and our corrupt hearts have been fometimes ready to fay, what is the Almighty, that we should serve him? and that we would certainly do whatfoever thing goes forth of our own mouth: for we have walked in the way of our own heart, and in the fight of our eyes, fulfilling the defires of the flesh, and of the mind.

Our neck hath been an iron finew, and we have made our heart as an adamant; we have refused to bearken, have pulled away the fhoulder, and stopped our ears, like the deaf adder, that will not hearken to the voice of the charmer, charming never so wifely,

How have we hated inftruction, and our heart defpifed reproof, and have not obeyed the voice of our teachers, nor inclined our ear to them that instructed us!

3. The vanity of our thoughts, their neglect of thofe things which they ought to be converfant with, and dwelling upon those things that are unworthy of them, and tend to corrupt our minds.

Every imagination of the thoughts of our heart is evil, only evil, and that continually, and it has been fo from our youth..

O how long hath thofe vain thoughts lodged within us! thofe thoughts of folifhnefs which are fin. From within, out of the heart, proceed evil thoughts, which devife mifchief upon the bed, and carry the heart with the fools eyes into the ends of the earth.

But God is not in all thoughts, it is well if he be in any of the rock that begat us we have been unmindful, and have forgotten the God that formed us:

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we have forgotten him, days without number, and our hearts have walked after vanity, and become vain. Their inward thought having been, that our houses fhould continue for ever; this our way is our folly.

4. The carnality of our affections; their being placed upon wrong objects, and carried beyond due

bounds.

We have fet thofe affections on things beneath, which fhould Have been fet on things above, where our treasure is, and where Chrift fits on the right hand of God, the things which we should feek.

We have followed after lying vanities, and forfaken our own mercies; have forfaken the fountain of living waters, for fifterns, broken fifterns, that can hold

no water.

We have panted after the duft of the earth, and have been full of care what we shall eat, and what we fhall drink, and wherewithal we fhall be cloathed, the things after which the gentiles feek, but have neglected the kingdom of God, and the righteoufnefs thereof.

We have lifted up our fouls unto vanity, and fet our eyes upon that which is not, have looked at the things that are feen, which are temporal; but the things that are not feen, that are eternal, have been forgotten and postponed.

5. The corruption of the whole man: irregular appetites towards those things that are pleafing to fense, and inordinate paffions, againft thofe things that are difpleafing, and an alienation of the mind from the principals, power, and pleasures of the spiritual and divine life.

We are born of the flesh, and we are flesh; dust we are: we have born the image of the earthly; and in us, that is, in our flesh, there dwells no good thing : for, if to will is present to us, yet how to perform that which is good we find not; for the good that we would do, we do it not; and the evil which we would not do, that we do.