on "Sin after Baptism" (Art. 16.), or for denying that "every such sin is sin against the Holy Ghost, and unpardonable." It had been a matter of course. The possibility or efficacy of such repentance I have not denied; God forbid: but that such repentance is likely, especially after a relapse, or that men, who have fallen, can be as assured of the adequacy of their repentance, as they might have been of God's free grace in Baptism, daily experience, as well as the probable meaning of Scripture, forbid us to hope. Had repentance been so easy a thing, as men would persuade themselves, how is it that there are so very many hardened sinners, who never apparently repent; so many, of whose repentance one can hardly hope that it is real; so many half-penitents? Again, the pardon in Baptism is free, full, instantaneous, universal, without any service on our part: the pardon on repentance for those who have forfeited their Baptismal pardon, is slow, partial, gradual, as is the repentance itself, to be humbly waited for, and to be wrought out through that penitence: were the repentance at once perfect, so, doubtless, would the pardon be; but it is part of the disease, entailed by grievous sin, that men can but slowly repent; they have disabled themselves from applying completely their only cure: the anguish of repentance, in its early stages, is often the sharpest; it is generally long afterwards that it is in any real degree purified and deepened; and therefore the ancient Church diligently noted out of the Old Testament the means whereby repentance might be heightened and secured, as humiliation, voluntary affliction, prayer, self-denying bountifulness, and the like. Again, the penitent must regard himself, not merely as a novice, but as a very weak one: he has already cast away the armour wherewith he was clad; he is beginning an irksome, distasteful course, and having already failed, it becomes him not to be impatient of suspense, or too confident
