Direction Second. If yet there remains any qualm of fear on thy heart, from the wrath of bloody men threatening thee for thy profession of the truth, then to a heart inflamed with the love of truth, labour to add a heart filled with the fear of that wrath which God hath in store for all that apostatize from the truth. When you chance to burn your finger, you hold it to the fire, which being a greater fire draws out the other. Thus when thy thoughts are scorched and thy heart seared with the fire of man’s wrath, hold them awhile to hell-fire, which God hath prepared for the fearful, Rev. 21:8, and all that run away from truth’s colours, Heb. 10:39, and thou wilt lose the sense of the one for fear of the other. Ignosce imperator, said the holy man, in carcerem Deus gehennam minatur—pardon me, O emperor, if I obey not thy command; thou threatenest a prison, but God a hell. Observable is that of David, ‘Princes have persecuted me without a cause: but my heart standeth in awe of thy word,’ Ps. 119:161. He had no cause to fear them that had no cause to persecute him. One threatening out of the word—that sets the point of God’s wrath to his heart—scares him more than the worst that the greatest on earth can do to him. Man’s wrath, alas, when hottest, is but a temperate climate to the wrath of the living God. They who have felt both have testified as much. Man’s wrath cannot hinder the access of God’s love to the creature, which hath made the saints sing in the fire in spite of their enemies’ teeth. But the creature under God’s wrath, is like one shut up in a close oven—no crevice open to let any of the heat out, or any refreshing in to him.