Obadiah Sedgwick (1600-1658) writes on how harboring a secret sin ends up being more than you bargined for:"There are, at the least, three horrible sins that you commit at once:
"First, that very sin that you would so conceal. Perhaps it may be a sin of the deepest dye. Yea, mark this: the most damnable sins are usually such that are committed insecret, as Sodom’s adulteries, and such fearful kinds of pollutions, murders, and treasons, etc.
"Second, hypocrisy, which is a screen to your sin, a holy cover for an unholy heart and practice. [This] makes thesinner so much the more vile in God’s eyes, by how much the more that he not only sins against God, but wrests, as itwere, something from God to cover and palliate his rebellion against Him.
"A third is atheism. If there is not formal atheism, yet, there is a virtual atheism. [It is] as if God were not God in secret, but only in public; that He could see in the light and not in the darkness; that His eye is as the eye of a man only, whereas He is a universal eye and is a Light without all darkness.Outward occasions can incline to secret sinnings. Beloved, there lies a snare against us in almost all society. We have such vile natures that as a spark of fire will easily kindle a box of tinder, [just] a word spoken, many times, kindles aworld of passion, of malice, of revenge within us! Yea, the misplacing of a look begets in us secret disdain and discontent! Yea, the casting of an eye may enflame the heart with excess of lust. Need we not then (putting all these things together) to search our inward frame to see what care we have about and against secret sinnings?"
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