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bled for the remainder of hypocrisy which you discern to be in you; yet chiefly I would have you to be thankful to God, and to take comfort in this, that you feel it, and dislike it: thank God therefore for your uprightness, comfort yourselves in it, and cherish and nourish it in you, and fear not.

(2.) Fears because of the decay of grace and comfort removed.

Others object, that they are already fallen far backward in religion; they do not feel so much zeal and fervency of affection to goodness, nor against wickedness; nor do they now enjoy those comforts and clear apprehensions of God's favour towards them, as they did in their first conversion.

It may be that you are declined in the ways of godliness, and have lost your first love, from whence all those inconveniences have arisen; but may it not befall any child of God to have lost his first love, as well as a whole church, the church of Ephesus? Rev. ii. 4. You could not from thence conclude that Ephesus was no church, neither can you hence conclude, that you are none of God's children, or that you shall not hold out unto the end. But if it be so, be willing to see your sin, and to be humbled, and repent heartily of it; following the counsel of Christ, remember whence you are fallen, repent and do your first works, Rev. ii. 5; and certainly God's child shall have grace to repent, Psa. lxxiii. 24, lxxxix. 30, 32; then you, enduring to the end, shall not be hurt of the second death, notwithstanding that sin of yours in losing your first love, Rev. ii. 11.

But it may, and often does happen, that a true child of God does in his own feeling think he has less grace now than at first, when it is not so; the reasons of his mistake may be these:

At the first a truly regenerate man does not see so much as afterwards he does. At first you had, indeed, the light of the Sun, but as at the first dawning of the day, whereby you saw your greater enormities, and reformed many things, yea, as you thought, all; but now since the Sun being risen higher towards the per-