EXTRACT FROM A SERMON BY JOHN HILL OF LONDON, about 1750

Brethren! do nothing which you cannot pray for a blessing on; be no where, where you cannot with pleasure remember, ‘Thou, God, seest me;’ nay, where you would not willingly die and go to God. Take heed that you fall not into gross sins, because many have so fallen.

Take heed, because there is nothing in your circumstances, gifts, station of life, experience, or attainments, that will of itself keep you from falling. Corrupt nature is corrupt nature in one, as well as in another. Peter was a disciple, but his discipleship would not keep him from falling, when he was in the way of temptation. David was a man after God’s own heart; but all David’s past prayers and past communion would not keep him from present sin, and that of the grossest kind, when he indulged sloth and the ease of the flesh. Would any have thought of Moses, that he should speak rashly and unadvisedly with his lips; ‘when the man Moses was meek above all the men upon the face of the earth?’ That patient Job would have cursed the day of his birth? Or, that Noah, would have been drunken, who, by his upright conversation, condemned the old world of his sin among others? But who can say what the power of temptation is, when an evil heart and a suitable occasion for sin meet? All considerations are nothing then; lust incorporates itself with the affections; and a man’s reputation, his honour, nay, his peace of cinscience, and his loss of God’s presence and Spirit, they are all forgotten and set aside for the present: temptation meeting with approbation and acceptance in the heart, like a violent land-flood rushing down a steep place, carries all before it. When sin is committed, a man wonders he should be so overtaken, so sadly foiled; he can scarcely believe that it is he that has sinned. But thus the case too often stands, wherefore take heed.

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