re state; and go on thus with a sort
of tranquillity and quiet of mind. This cannot be upon a thorough
consideration, and full resolution, that the pleasures and advantages
they propose are to be pursued at all hazards, against reason, against
the law of God, and though everlasting destruction is to be the
consequence. This would be doing too great violence upon themselves. No,
they are for making a composition with the Almighty. These of His
commands they will obey; but as to others--why, they will make all the
atonements in their power; the ambitious, the covetous, the dissolute
man, each in a way which shall not contradict his respective pursuit.
Indulgences before, which was Balaam's first attempt, though he was not
so successful in it as to deceive himself, or atonements afterwards, are
all the same. And here, perhaps, come in faint hopes that they may, and
half-resolves that they will, one time or other, make a change.

Besides these there are also persons, who, from a more just way of
considering things, see the infinite absurdity of this, of substituting
sacrifice instead of obedience; there are persons far enough from
superstition, and not without some real sense of God and religion upon
their minds; who yet are guilty of most unjustifiable practices, and go
on with great coolness and command over themselves. The same dishonesty
and unsoundness of heart discovers itself in these another way. In all
common ordinary cases we see intuitively at first view what is our duty,
what is the honest part. This is the ground of the observation, that the
first thought is often the best. In these cases doubt and deliberation
is itself dishonesty, as it was in Balaam upon the second message. That
which is called considering what is our duty in a particular case is very
often nothing but endeavouring to explain it away. Thus those courses,
which, if men would fairly attend to the dictates of their own
consciences, they would see to be corruption, excess, oppression,
uncharitableness; these are refined upon--things were so and so
circumstantiated--great difficulties are raised about fixing bounds and
degrees, and thus every moral obligation whatever may be evaded. Here is
scope, I say, for an unfair mind to explain away every moral obligation
to itself. Whether men reflect again upon this internal management and
artifice, and how explicit they are with themselves, is another question.
There are many operations of th