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and forgotten; the other does not only see great danger, but is surprised by his enemies, is taken and carried captive, and is a long time in cruel bondage and fear of his life, till at length he is redeemed out of their hand. Such a fear as this can never be forgotten.

You may evidently know, whether you had sufficient grief and fear in your first conversion, by these signs. Had you ever such, and so much grief for sin, that it made you dislike sin, and to dislike yourself for it, and to be weary and heavy laden with it; so as to make you heartily confess your sins unto God, and to ask of him mercy and forgiveness? Has it made you to look better to your ways, and more careful to please God? Then be sure, it was a competent and sufficient grief; because it was a godly sorrow to repentance, never to be repented of, 2 Cor. vii. 10.

Again, are you now grieved and troubled, when you fall into particular sins? Then you may be certain, that there was a time when you were sufficiently humbled in your conversion; for this latter grief is but putting that grief into further act; whereof you received an habit in your first conversion.

If you can for the present find any proof of conversion, it should not trouble you, though you know not when, or by whom, or how you were converted; any more than thus, that you know God has wrought it by his word and Spirit. When any field brings forth a crop of good corn, this proves that it was sufficiently ploughed: for God does never sow, until the fallow ground of men's hearts is sufficiently broken up.

Now as for those who remember that they have had terrors of conscience, and, it may be, ever and anon feel them still, who fear that these were not beginnings of conversion, but rather beginnings of desperations and hellish torments; you should know, that there is a great difference between these and those.

1. Those fears and horrors, which are only flashes and beginnings of hellish torments, are wrought only by the law and spirit of bondage, giving not so much as a secret hope of salvation. But those fears, which make way unto, and which are the beginnings of conver-