Selected quad for the lemma: judgement_n
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A67826
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A sermon preached before the Right Honourable the lord mayor and aldermen of the city of London at Guild-Hall Chapell, February the 17th, 1677/8 / by Edw. Young.
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Young, Edward, 1641 or 2-1705.
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1678
(1678)
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Wing Y65; ESTC R39193
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12,745
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34
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on easie terms and his stomach so haughty too that he hates to stoop to due submission and allegeance He draws his sword and flings away the scabbard and resolves to defend himself by a meditated rebellion The first strong hold that the rebel sinner betakes himself to is Debauchery which in its proper notion is no more then an expresse art against Thinking To indulge appetites and gratifie senses to live soft and delicate according to the scheme of studied pleasure is the businesse of the Voluptuous but the Debauchee is not so choice For his end is not so much to please as to amuze and his whole study is onely for a course of expedients how to darken the mind and divert thought and fence out reflexion His wine is not to refresh but to drown and therefore he drinks not like an Epicure but rather like a Spartan Slave when he drunk to bring drinking into disgrace His Discourse is not for understanding but for noise Noise is good company and wit and so with hurry and laughter and any thing that is loud he stifles the remonstrances of Reason and murmurs of Conscience as drum and trumpet cover the cryes of a battel He guards himself against the awe of vertue by an habitual contempt of the good and secures himself against counsel by a preventing derision of the serious He hates every solemn act if it be but a grace at his meal lest the remembrance of a God should check his jollity and bridle his excesse But then if notwithstanding all this art his body chance to tire under the drudgery of vice and so he be overtaken with the intervals of apprehensive thoughts the last Refuge of his uneasie and desperate mind is Atheism And questionlesse how poor a Refuge soever Atheism be it was never any other then Refuge it is an Opinion that was never offered by Reason but always sought for by Distresse And this without doubt is the reason why one age of Christianity has produc'd more Atheists then were ever known in the whole extent and duration of Heathenism because the Christian lying under greater convictions and therefore stronger pressures of conscience must needs be more forcibly urg'd to fly to this Refuge then the Heathen could be whose knowledge of sin and judgement being lesse his fears must necessarily be so too After the man has once resolved upon Atheism he does generally in the first place swear Fidelity to his Opinion that is he doth by familiar forms of Oaths and raving Imprecations inculcate to himself that God is nothing but a Mormoe or Bug-bear and so he hardens himself in his pretence In the next place he pronounces Religion a Trick contrived by the Art of Princes and conserved by the Interest of Priests that if ever any talk't wisely about Religion it is onely they who discard all particular positive Religions and stick onely to that of Nature But then what is Nature or at least the Interpreter of Nature but common usage and Custome And what is it that we have not Custome for We have Custome for all sorts of Vices we have Custome for opposite Religions and for no Religion and so in fine from Nature can arise no Obligation at all In the next place the Doctrine of Spirits is cryed down as absurd and all the matters of fact that tend to assert their being can obtain no more credit then Lucian's raillery upon the inchanted Broomstaff But most of all absurd in his conceit and unphilosophical is the Doctrine of Immortal Souls For what do Souls act above the power of subtle matter in the state of Union and how can they disengage themselves from common perishing in the state of dissolution The Beasts approach very near us in our most wise and sagacious operations without the hazard of being Immortal and why should man fancy that hazard to himself No we are born at all adventures and we shall be as though we had never been and our Spirits shall vanish into soft air And now what can be done with a man of this perswasion 'T is to as little purpose to tell him of Hell and torments as of Charon and Cerberus All is Par sollicito Fabula somnio as his Minion Poet hath concluded it And thus the Atheist is become as safe and impregnable as in a Castle of Brasse But alas the miserable dream of peace that must wake into an eternity of real evils Alas the pityable Reasons that must be confuted by so sad an Experiment For as we have hitherto taken the prospect of the sinner's way so my Text requires us to look a little farther and advert his end You have seen what the man was he was gay and secure in his wickednesse but now Lo this is the man this is his present state he is become a spectacle of vengeance an object of terrour and of scorn and pointed out for a warning to all that shall come after Lo this is the Man that had shipwrackt his Faith and wasted his Conscience and corrupted his Mind so that he had lost the notices of what he should do as well as the care of what he did But now his Miseries have rectified his Notions He believes and trembles He sees God again in the terrour of his judgements and is convinced by an eternal dying that the soul is subject to no other death He now lies scourged with past enjoyments and terrified with his present passions His Wit and Parts groan under the Conviction of Folly and his shame and anguish are consummated by despair But my Text onely points at this nor is it my businesse to insist upon it any farther I have my end in minding you from the Example that Sin and Judgement are inseparably linkt together That if we will escape Doeg's end we must avoid his way That if we will resist sin successfully we must resist it in its first Issues and pluck up the roots of it which in passing I have discovered And now that the most important of what I have said may be left more immediately upon your thoughts I shall summe it up into one sentence and conclude The lesson that the whole example does most genuinely teach us is this That when a man once ceases to take God for his strength which was Doeg's first default when he once neglects to apply himself to Heaven for conduct and support that man naturally falls from one sin to another and there is no security of stopping betwixt Indevotion and the Bottomlesse Pit From which the Divine mercy prevent us FINIS Books Printed for William Birch A Description of the 17 Provinces commonly called the Low Countries the present Stage of Action also of the Rivers Commodities All Cities strong Towns and Forts as Utrecht Gaunt Bruges Ipre Ostend Newport S. Omers Cambray Valenciennes c. with other things remarkable therein Price bound 1 s. The Angler's delight Containing the whole Art of Neat and Clean Angling wherein is taught the readiest way to take all sorts of Fish from the Pike to the Minnow together with their proper haunts and times of fishing for them as also the Method of Fishing in Hackney River of the best stands there with the manner of making all sorts of good Tackle The like never printed before By W.G. Gent Bridge's Word to the Aged Steps of Ascension unto God or a Ladder to Heaven Containing Prayers and Meditations for every day of the week and for all other times and occasions By E. Gee Shepard's Court-keepers Guide The French King Conquered by the English the King of France and his Son brought prisoners into England besides divers Earls Lords and above 2000 Knights and Esquires wherein is given an account of several great Battels fought and wonderful Victories obtained over the French when they have had six to one against the English to the honour and renown of England's unparalleled Valour Conduct and Resolution Leybourn's Universal Instrument performing all such Conclusions Geometrical and Astronomical as are usually wrought by the Globes Spheres Sector Quadrants Planupheres or any other the like Instrument yet in being with much ease and exactness The Reasonableness of God's Law and Vnreasonableness of Sin Allen of Contentment The Young Merchants Glass wherein are exact Rules of all Weights Coins Measures Exchanges and other matters necessary used in Commerce as also Variety of Merchants Accompts after the Italian way of Debitor and Creditor in Factorage Partnership and Bartar likewise the Method of keeping Pursers books By J. Every Clark's Martyrology Fol. His Examples in 2 Vol. Fol. Marrow of Ecclesiastical History Fol. THE END
Deity and of such ill influence upon Manners that though they were accounted the most pertinacious sect of men in the world they have left it honestly retracted Chrysippus disavows it in Cicero Gellius the more Modern Stoicks build all their Morals upon a clear contrary foundation for 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 is their first Principle that is all men's internal actions are naturally free As for the Malignity of Matter it was a Notion more tolerable among the Heathens because their errours about the Eternity and Original Qualities of Matter were perhaps Invincible but for Christians to impute the same effects to the Corruption of our Nature by the Fall as though we had thereby contracted such a Complexional Necessity of sinning as neither precept nor caution nor all the remedies that God has provided could rescue us from that Necessity This is a great Calumny to Nature and affront to God's goodness and a meer crude apology of such as were first resolved for a lazy indulgence to Vice And yet this pretence is not unusual it is not unusual to hear men confess their sins in such a subtle form as though they were drawing schemes of Sophistry against the day of Judgement I must not deny my sins says the Man the righteous man falls seven times a day We dwell in a body of sin Our first Parent eat of the forbidden fruit and so derived a Curse upon his unhappy posterity Homo sum I am a son of Adam I need say no more to speak my guilt And now what means such a Confession as this but that the Man is willing to discharge the burthen of his Conscience upon something out of his own power and to insinuate that it is not will and choice but force of constitution that makes us sinners that we are born with such tainted principles flesh so stubborn and appetites so impetuous that neither Rule nor Institution nor Endeavour nor Grace it self can regulate them and that thereupon as Adam urged against God for the first sin committed The Woman that thou gavest me beguiled me and I did eat so his Posterity might urge for all that have been committed since The Nature that thou hast allotted us has betrayed us and we are sinners Thus will men dawb with untempered mortar in the Prophet's Allegory though the wall shall be cast down and they in the midst of it For to assign the true measures of Nature in reference to Defect I lay down this for the Fundamental Truth That whatsoever there is either of impotence or positive malignity in our Natures it is onely such as is consistent both with the Purity and Mercy of God and therefore we may certainly conclude that it cannot be so much as shall either administer matter of excuse to those that will be bad or argument of despair to those that desiret o be good We are born with propensions to Vice and appetites prone to close with tempting Evils but these are so far from being actually evil themselves that they are the very life of Vertue and foundation of Reward 'T is true they create difficulties in vertue and make the way rugged but then God is pleased to consider these difficulties indulgently and for that very reason he admits man to terms of repentance and reconciliation whereas the Angels who were made of a purer nature and less obnoxious to temptation were allowed no such remedy But moreover these difficulties which our infirmity creates are far from being insuperable we know our armour and we are commanded to fight and we are assured of Victory whatsoever of strength we have not in our selves we know where to have supplied and whatsoever those excellencies are which we deplore as lost in the Fall the Gospel assures us that supervening Grace makes a full repair of them Grace is new light to the understanding and new power to the will and new regularity to the faculties that ought to obey and a new harmony to our whole discomposed frame In a word Grace is more to us now in the state of corruption then in the state of primitive perfection we could have been to our selves Whosoever therefore shall consider the defects and impotence of our present state together with the rich promises of God in Christ I know nothing that he ought reasonably to argue or inferr thence but this that we now lie under a stricter obligation to live in a perpetual dependance upon God that we have now a double tye to be Religious that is both to serve God and our selves forasmuch as our addresses do not more effectually pay him homage then they do supply our own wants God could give without asking if it seemed good but then perhaps we should be more apt to glory as though we had not Received whereas to receive when we want is the same thing in effect as to have had it in store but with this advantage that it makes us retain a greater veneration for the Donor as a man is in greater probability to live humble and dutifull when he has his livelihood conferred on him by daily dispensation then if he had the whole in entire possession God could redintegrate Nature if it seemed good and re-instate her in her original rights and powers But then perhaps the man who now in the state of corruption attributes his vices to his Constitution not to his Will would if he had been born with greater strength and sufficiency have attributed the glory of his vertue to his own conduct and not unto God and so had he had in him lesse of the sin of the man he would have had more of the sin of Lucifer that is pride and affectation 'T is a wise Rule in all things of Providence to conclude That that is best that now is and questionless it could not be better with us then it is notwithstanding all the infirmities of our Nature if we had but the happiness to make such use of them as God intends that is to fix our dependance and application more strictly to himself I pass in the second place to the Notion of those that exalt Nature above her due measures invest her with such a self sufficiency as would make the Grace of God appear superfluous Quid opus est Votis saith the Philosopher what need is there to pray make thy self a good man 't is idle to petition God for that which thou canst bestow upon thy self And many among Christians beside Pelagius seem to have consulted the Philosopher more then the Scriptures for their method of inculcating Religion and a good life They recommend vertue in pompous harangues and urge Religion from the Rational Topicks of conveniency and inconveniency they display the amiableness and advantages of Good and the deformity and mischiefs of Evil. How ugly is envy how tormenting is revenge how brutal is drunkenness how pernicious is lust On the contrary meekness temperance and beneficence how serene are they in their state and how