souls and swelling up to a treasure making us in this world rich by title and relation but it shall be produced in the great necessities of doomesday In the mean time if the fire be quenched the fire of Gods Spirit God will kindle another in his anger that shall never be quenched but if we entertain Gods Spirit with our own purities and imploy it diligently and serve it willingly for Gods Spirit is a loving Spirit then we shall really be turned into spirits Irenaeus had a proverbiall saying Perfecti sunt qui tria sine querelâ Deo exhibent They that present three things right to God they are perfect that is a chast body a righteous soul and a holy spirit and the event shall be this which Maimonides expressed not amisse though he did not at all understand the secret of this mystery The soul of a man in this life is in potentiâ ad esse spiritum it is designed to be a spirit but in the world to come it shall be actually as very a spirit as an Angel is and this state is expressed by the Apostle calling it the earnest of the spirit that is here it is begun and given us as an antepast of glory and a principle of Grace but then we shall have it in plenitudine regit idem spiritus artus Orbe alio Here and there it is the same but here we have the earnest there the riches and the inheritance But then if this be a new principle and be given us in order to the actions of a holy life we must take care that we receive not the Spirit of God in vain but remember it is a new life and as no man can pretend that a person is alive that doth not alwayes do the works of life so it is certain no man hath the Spirit of God but he that lives the life of grace and doth the works of the Spirit that is in all holinesse and justice and sobriety Spiritus qui accedit animo vel Dei est vel Daemonis said Tertullian Every man hath within him the Spirit of God or the spirit of the devil The spirit of fornication is an unclean devil and extremely contrary to the Spirit of God and so is the spirit of malice or uncharitablenesse for the Spirit of God is the Spirit of love for as purities Gods Spirit sanctifies the body so by love he purifies the soul and makes the soul grow into a spirit into a Divine nature But God knows that even in Christian societies we see the devils walk up and down every day and every hour the devil of uncleannesse and the devil of drunkennesse the devil of malice and the devil of rage the spirit of filthy speaking and the spirit of detraction a proud spirit and the spirit of rebellion and yet all call Christian. It is generally supposed that unclean spirits walk in the night and so it used to be for they that are drunk are drunk in the night said the Apostle but Suidas tels of certain Empusae that used to appear at Noon at such time as the Greeks did celebrate the Funerals of the Dead and at this day some of the Russians fear the Noon-day Devil which appeareth like a mourning widow to reapers of hay and corn and uses to break their arms and legs unlesse they worship her The Prophet David speaketh of both kindes Thou shalt not be afraid for the terrour by night and a ruinâ daemonio meridiano from the Devil at noon thou shalt be free It were happy if we were so but besides the solemn followers of the works of darknesse in the times and proper seasons of darknesse there are very many who act their Scenes of darknesse in the face of the Sun in open defiance of God and all lawes and all modesty There is in such men the spirit of impudence as well as of impiety And yet I might have expressed it higher for every habituall sin doth not onely put us into the power of the devil but turns us into his very nature just as the Holy Ghost transforms us into the image of God Here therefore I have a greater Argument to perswade you to holy living then Moses had to the sons of Israel Behold I have set before you life and death blessing and cursing so said Moses but I adde that I have upon the stock of this Scripture set before you the good Spirit and the bad God and the devil choose unto whose nature you will be likened and into whose inheritance you will be adopted and into whose possession you will enter If you commit sin ye are of your father the Devil ye are begot of his principles and follow his pattern and shall passe into his portion when ye are led captive by him at his will and remember what a sad thing it is to go into the portion of evil and accursed spirits the sad and eternall portion of Devils But he that hath the Spirit of God doth acknowledge God for his Father and his Lord he despises the world and hath no violent appetites for secular pleasures and is dead to the desires of this life and his hopes are spirituall and God is his joy and Christ is his pattern and his support and Religion is his imployment and godlinesse is his gain and this man understands the things of God and is ready to die for Christ and fears nothing but to sin against God and his will is filled with love and it springs out in obedience to God and in charity to his brother and of such a man we cannot make judgement by his fortune or by his acquaintance by his circumstances or by his adherencies for they are the appendages of a naturall man but the spirituall is judged of no man that is the rare excellencies that make him happy do not yet make him illustrious unlesse we will reckon Vertue to be a great fortune and holinesse to be great Wisedom and God to be the best Friend and Christ the best Relative and the Spirit the hugest advantage and Heaven the greatest Reward He that knows how to value these things may sit down and reckon the felicities of him that hath the Spirit of God The purpose of this Discourse is this That since the Spirit of God is a new nature and a new life put into us we are thereby taught and enabled to serve God by a constant course of holy living without the frequent returns and intervening of such actions which men are pleased to call sins of infirmity Whosoever hath the Spirit of God lives the life of grace The Spirit of God rules in him and is strong according to its age and abode and allows not of those often sins which we think unavoidable because we call them naturall infirmities But if Christ be in you the body is dead because of sin but the spirit is life because of righteousnesse The state of sin is a state of death the state of a man under
then called the spirit of prayer and supplication For ever since the affections of the outward man prevailâ—d upon the ruins of the soul all our desires were sensuall and therefore hurtfull for ever after our body grew to be our enemy In the loosnesses of nature and amongst the ignorance or imperfection of Gentile Philosophy men used to pray with their hands full of rapine and their mouths of blood and their hearts of malice and they prayed accordingly for an opportunity to steal for a fair body for a prosperous revenge for a prevailing malice for the satisfaction of whatsoever they could be tempted to by any object by any lust by any Devil whatsoever The Jews were better taught for God was their teacher and he gave the spirit to them in single rayes But as the spirit of obsignation was given to them under a seal and within a veile so the spirit of Manifestation or patefaction was like the gem of a vine or the bud of a rose plain indices and significations of life and principles of juice and sweetnesse but yet scarce out of the doors of their causes they had the infancy of knowledge and revelations to them were given as Catechisme is taught to our children which they read with the eye of a bird and speak with the tongue of a bee and understand with the heart of a childe that is weakly and imperfectly and they understood so little that 1. They thought God heard them not unlesse they spake their prayers at least efforming their words within their lips and 2. Their forms of prayer were so few and seldome that to teach a forme of prayer or to compose a collect was thought a worke fit for a Prophet or the founder of an institution 3. Adde to this that as their promises were temporal so were their hopes as were their hopes so were their desires and according to their desires so were their prayers And although the Psalms of David was their Great office and the treasury of devotion to their Nation and very worthily yet it was full of wishes for temporals invocations of GOD the Avenger on GOD the Lord of Hosts on God the Enemy of their Enemies and they desired their Nation to be prospered and themselves blessed and distinguished from all the world by the effects of such desires This was the state of prayer in their Synagogue save onely that it had also this allay 4. That their addresses to GOD were crasse material typical and full of shadows and imagery paterns of things to come and so in its very being and constitution was relative and imperfect But that we may see how great things the Lord hath done for us God hath powred his spirit into our hearts the spirit of prayer and supplication and now 1. Christians pray in their spirit with sighs and groans and know that GOD who dwells within them can as clearly distinguish those secret accents and read their meaning in the Spirit as plainly as he knows the voice of his own thunder or could discern the letter of the law written in the tables of stone by the finger of God 2. likewise the spirit helpeth our infirmities for we know not what we should pray for as we ought That is when God sends an affliction or persecution upon us we are indeed extreme apt to lay our hand upon the wound and never take it off but when we lift it up in prayer to be delivered from that sadnesse and then we pray fervently to be cured of a sicknesse to be delivered from a Tyrant to be snatched from the grave not to perish in the danger But the spirit of God hath from all sad accidents drawn the veil of errour and the cloud of intolerablenesse and hath taught us that our happinesse cannot consist in freedom or deliverances from persecutions but in patience resignation and noble sufferance and that we are not then so blessed when God hath turn'd our scourges into ease and delicacy as when we convert our very scorpions into the exercise of vertues so that now the spirit having helped our infirmities that is comforted our weaknesses and afflictions our sorrows and impatience by this proposition that All things work together for the good of them that fear God he hath taught us to pray for grace for patience under the crosse for Charity to our persecutors for rejoycing in tribulations for perseverance and boldnesse in the faith and for whatsoever will bring us safely to Heaven 3. Whereas onely a Moses or a Samuel a David or a Daniel a John the Baptist or the Messias himself could describe and indite formes of prayer and thanksgiving to the time and accent of Heaven now every wise and good Man is instructed perfectly in the Scriptures which are the writings of the spirit what things he may and what things he must ask for 4. The Spirit of God hath made our services to be spiritual intellectual holy and effects of choice and religion the consequents of a spiritual sacrifice and of a holy union with God The prayer of a Christian is with the effects of the spirit of Sanctification and then we pray with the Spirit when we pray with Holinesse which is the great fruit the principal gift of the spirit And this is by Saint James called the prayer of faith and is said to be certain that it shall prevail Such a praying with the spirit when our prayers are the voices of our spirits and our spirits are first taught then sanctified by Gods spirit shall never fail of its effect because then it is that the spirit himself maketh intercession for us that is hath enabled us to do it upon his strengths we speak his sense we live his life we breath his accents we desire in order to his purposes and our persons are Gracious by his Holinesse and are accepted by his interpellation and intercession in the act and offices of Christ. This is praying with the spirit To which by way of explication I adde these two annexes of holy prayer in respect of which also every good man prayes with the spirit 5. The spirit gives us great relish and appetite to our prayers and this Saint Paul calls serving of God in his spirit 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 that is with a willing minde not as Jonas did his errand but as Christ did die for us he was straitned till he had accomplished it And they that say their prayers out of custome onely or to comply with external circumstances or collateral advantages or pray with trouble and unwillingnesse give a very great testimony that they have not the spirit of Christ within them that spirit which maketh intercession for the Saints but he that delighteth in his prayers not by a sensible or phantastic pleasure but whose choice dwells in his prayers and whose conversation is with God in holy living and praying accordingly that man hath the spirit of Christ and therfore belongs to Christ for by this spirit it is
that Christ prayes in Heaven for us and if we do not pray on earth in the same manner according to our measures we had as good hold our peace our prayers are an abominable sacrifice and send up to God no better a perfume then if wee burned assa faetida or the raw flesh of a murdered man upon the altar of incense 6. The spirit of Christ and of prayer helps our infirmities by giving us confidence and importunity I put them together For as our faith is and our trust in God so is our hope and so is our prayer weary or lasting long or short not in words but in works and in desires For the words of prayer are no part of the spirit of prayer words may be the body of it but the spirit of prayer alwayes consists in holinesse that is in holy desires and holy actions words are not properly capable of being holy all words are in themselves seâ—vants of things and the holinesse of a prayer is not at all concerned in the manner of its expression but in the spirit of it that is in the violence of its desires and the innocence of its ends and the continuence of its imployment this is the verification of that great Prophecie which Christ made that in all the world the true worshippers should worship in spirit and in truth that is with a pure minde with holy desires for spiritual things according to the minde of the spirit in imitation of Christs intercession with perseverance with charity or love That is the spirit of God and these are the spiritualities of the Gospel and the formalities of prayer as they are Christian and Evangelicall 7. Some men have thought of a seventh way and explicate our praying in the spirit by a mere volubilty of language which indeed is a direct undervaluing the spirit of God and of Christ the spirit of manifestation and intercession it is to return to the materiality and imperfection of the law it is to worship God in outward forms and to think that Gods service consists in shels and rinds in lips and voices in shadows and images of things it is to retire from Christ to Moses and at the best it is a going from real graces to imaginary gifts and when praying with the spirit hath in it so many excellencies and consists of so many parts of holinesse and sanctification and is an act of the inner man we shall be infinitely mistaken if we let go this substance and catch at a shadow and sit down and rest in the imagination of an improbable unnecessary uselesse gift of speaking to which the nature of many men and the art of all learned men and the very use and confidence of ignorant men is too abundantly sufficient Let us not so despise the spirit of Christ as to make it no other then the breath of our lungs * For though it might be possible that at the first and when formes of prayer were few and seldome the spirit of God might dictatethe very words to the Apostles and first Christians yet it follows not that therfore he does so still to all that pretend praying with the spirit For if he did not then at the first dictate words as we know not whether he did or no why shall he be supposâ—d to do so now If he did then it follows that he does not now because his doing it then was sufficient for all men since for so the formes taught by the spirit were paternes for others to imitate in all the descending ages of the Church There was once an occasion so great that the spirit of God did think it a work â—it for him to teach a man to weave silke or embroider gold or woke in brasse as it happened to Besaleel and Aholiab But then every weaver or worker in brasse may by the same reason pretend that he works by the spirit as that he prayes by the spirit if by prayer he means forming the words For although in the ease of working it was certain that the spirit did teach in the ease of inditing or forming the words it is not certain whether he did or no yet because in both it was extraordinary if it was at all and ever since in both it is infinitely needlesse to pretend the Spirit in forms of every mans making even though they be of contrary religions and pray one against the other it may serve an end of a phantastic and hypochondriacal religion or a secret ambition but not the ends of God or the honour of the Spirit The Jews in their declensions to folly and idolatry did worship the stone of imagination that is certain smooth images in which by art magic pictures and little faces were represented declaring hidden things and stoln goods and God severely forbad this basenesse but we also have taken up this folly and worship the stone of imagination we beget imperfect phantasmes and speculative images in our phansy and we fall down and worship them never considering that the spirit of God never appears through such spectres Prayer is one of the noblest exercises of Christian religion or rather is it that duty in which all graces are concentred Prayer is charity it is faith it is a conformity to Gods will a desiring according to the desires of Heaven an imitation of Christs intercession and prayer must suppose all holinesse or else it is nothing and therefore all that in which men need Gods Spirit all that is in order to prayer Baptisme is but a prayer and the holy Sacrament of the Lords Supper is but a prayer a prayer of sacrifice representative and a prayer of oblation and a prayer of intercession and a prayer of thanksgiving and obedience is a prayer and begs and procures blessings and if the Holy Ghost hath sanctified the whole man then he hath sanctified the prayer of the man and not till then and if ever there was or could be any other praying with the spirit it was such a one as a wicked man might have and therefore it cannot be a note of distinction between the good and bad between the saints and men of the world But this onely which I have described from the fountains of Scripture is that which a good man can have and therefore this is it in which we ought to rejoyce that he that glories may glory in the Lord. Thus I have as I could described the effluxes of the Holy Spirit upon us in his great chanels But the great effect of them is this That as by the arts of the spirits of darknesse and our own malice our souls are turned into flesh not in the naturall sense but in the morall and Theologicall and animalis homo is the same with carnalis that is his soul is a servant of the passions and desires of the flesh and is flesh in its operations and ends in its principles and actions So on the other side by the Grace of God and the promise of the
Father and the influences of the Holy Ghost our souls are not onely recovered from the state of flesh and reduced back to the intirenesse of animall operations but they are heightned into spirit and transformâ—d into a new nature And this is a new Article and now to be considered S. Hierom tels of the Custome of the Empire When a Tyrant was overcome they usâ—d to break the head of his Statues and upon the same Trunk to set the head of the Conquerour and so it passed wholly for the new Prince So it is in the kingdom of Grace As soon as the Tyrant sin is overcome and a new heart is put into us or that we serve under a new head instantly we have a new Name given us and we are esteemed a new Creation and not onely changed in manners but we have a new nature within us even a third part of essentiall constitution This may seem strange and indeed it is so and it is one of the great mysteriousnesses of the Gospel Every man naturally consists of soul and body but every Christian man that belongs to Christ hath more For he hath body and soul and spirit My Text is plain for it If any man have not the Spirit of Christ he is none of his and by Spirit is not meant onely the graces of God and his gifts enabling us to do holy things there is more belongs to a good man then so But as when God made man he made him after his own image and breath'd into him the spirit of life and he was made in animam viventem into a living soul then he was made a man So in the new creation Christ by whom God made both the worlds intends to conform us to his image and he hath given us the spirit of adoption by which we are made sons of God and by the spirit of a new life we are made new creatures capable of a new state intitled to another manner of duration enabled to do new and greater actions in order to higher ends we have new affections new understandings new wils Vetera transierunt ecce omnia nova facta sunt All things are become new And this is called the seed of God when it relates to the principle and cause of this production but the thing that is produced is a spirit and that is as much in nature beyond a soul as a soul is beyond a body This great Mystery I should not utter but upon the greatest authority in the world and from an infallible Doctor I mean S. Paul who from Christ taught the Church more secrets then all the whole Colledge besides And the very God of peace sanctifie you wholly and I pray God that your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blamelesse unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. We are not sanctified wholly nor preserved in safety unlesse besides our souls and bodies our spirit also be kept blamelesse This distinction nice and infinitely above humane reason but the word of God saith the same Apostle is sharper then a two-edged sword piercing even to the dividing asunder the soul and the spirit and that hath taught us to distinguish the principle of a new life from the principle of the old the celestiall from the naturall and thus it is This spirit as I now discourse of it is a principle infused into us by God when we become his children whereby we live the life of Grace and understand the secrets of the Kingdom and have passions and desires of things beyond and contrary to our naturall appetites enabling us not onely to sobriety which is the duty of the body not onely to justice which is the rectitude of the soul but to such a sanctity as makes us like to God * For so saith the Spirit of God Be ye holy as I am be pure be perfect as your heavenly Father is pure as he is perfect which because it cannot be a perfection of degrees it must be in similitudine naturae in the likenesse of that nature which God hath given us in the new birth that by it we might resemble his excellency and holinesse And this I conceive to be the meaning of S. Peter According as his divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain to life and godlinesse that is to this new life of godlinesse through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and vertue whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises that by these you might be partakers of the Divine nature so we read it But it is something mistaken it is not 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 The Divine nature for Gods nature is indivisible and incommunicable but it is spoken participativè or per analogiant partakers of a Divine nature that is of this new and God-like nature given to every person that serves God whereby he is sanctified and made the childe of God and framed into the likenesse of Christ. The Greeks generally call this 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 a gracious gift an extraordinary superaddition to nature not a single gift in order to single purposes but an universall principle and it remains upon all good men during their lives and after their death and is that white stone spoken of in the Revelation and in it a new name written which no man knoweth but he that hath it And by this Gods sheep at the day of judgement shall be discerned from goats If their spirits be presented to God pure and unblameable this great 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 this talent which God hath given to all Christians to improve in the banks of grace and of Religion if they bring this to God increased and grown up to the fulnesse of the measure of Christ for it is Christs Spirit and as it is in us it is called the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ then we shall be acknowledged for sons and our adoption shall passe into an eternall inheritance in the portion of our elder Brother I need not to apply this Discourse The very mystery it self is in the whole world the greatest engagement of our duty that is imaginable by the way of instrument and by the way of thankfulnesse Quisquis magna dedit voluit sibi magna rependi He that gives great things to us ought to have great acknowledgements and Seneca said concerning wise men That he that doth benefit to others hides those benefits as a man layes up great treasures in the earth which he must never see with his eyes unlesse a great occasion forces him to dig the graves and produce that which he buried but all the while the man was hugely rich and he had the wealth of a great relation so it is with God and us For this huge benefit of the Spirit which God gives us is for our good deposited in our souls not made for forms and ostentation not to be looked upon or serve little ends but growing in the secret of our
the law was a state of bondage and infirmity as S. Paul largely describes him in the seventh Chapter to the Romanes but he that hath the Spirit is made alive and free and strong and a conquerour over all the powers and violencies of sin such a man resists temptations falls not under the assault of sin returns not to the sin which he last repented of acts no more that errour which brought him to shame and sorrow but he that falls under a crime to which he still hath a strong and vigorous inclination he that acts his sin and then curses it and then is tempted and then sins again and then weeps again and calls himself miserable but still the inchantment hath confined him to that circle this man hath not the Spirit for where the Spirit of God is there is liberty there is no such bondage and a returning folly to the commands of sin But because men deceive themselves with calling this bondage a pitiable and excusable infirmity it will not be uselesse to consider the state of this question more particularly lest men from the state of a pretended infirmity fall into a reall death 1. No great sin is a sin of infirmity or excusable upon that stock But that I may be understood we must know that every sin is in some sense or other a sin of infirmity When a man is in the state of spirituall sicknesse or death he is in a state of infirmity for he is a wounded man a prisoner a slave a sick man weak in his judgement and weak in his reasoning impotent in his passions of childish resolutions great inconstancy and his purposes untwist as easily as the rude conjuncture of uncombining cables in the violence of a Northern tempest and he that is thus in infirmity cannot be excused for it is the aggravation of the state of his sin he is so infirm that he is in a state unable to do his duty Such a man is a servant of sin a slave of the Devil an heir of corruption absolutely under command and every man is so who resolves for ever to avoid such a sin and yet for ever falls under it for what can he be but a servant of sin who fain would avoid it but cannot that is he hath not the Spirit of God within him Christ dwels not in his soul for where the Son is there is liberty and all that are in the Spirit are sons of God and servants of righteousnesse and therefore freed from sin But then there are also sins of infirmity which are single actions intervening seldom in litle instances unavoidable or through a faultlesse ignorance Such as these are alwayes the allays of the life of the best men and for these Christ hath payd and they are never to be accounted to good men save onely to make them more wary and more humble Now concerning these it is that I say No great sin is a sin of excusable or unavoidable infirmity Because whosoever hath received the Spirit of God hath sufficient knowledge of his duty and sufficient strengths of grace and sufficient advertency of minde to avoid such things as do great and apparent violence to piety and religion No man can justly say that it is a sin of infirmity that he was drunk For there are but three causes of every sin a fourth is not imaginable 1. If ignorance cause it the sin is as full of excuse as the ignorance was innocent But no Christian can pretend this to drunkennesse to murder to rebellion to uncleannesse For what Christian is so uninstructed but that he knows Adultery is a sin 2. Want of observation is the cause of many indiscreet and foolish actions Now at this gap many irregularities do enter and escape because in the whole it is impossible for a man to be of so present a spirit as to consider and reflect upon every word and every thought but it is in this case in Gods laws otherwise then in mans the great flies cannot passe thorow without observation little ones do and a man cannot be drunk and never take notice of it or tempt his neighbours wife before he be aware therefore the lesse the instance be the more likely it is to be a sin of infirmity and yet if it be never so little if it be observed then it ceases to be a sin of infirmity 3. But because great crimes cannot pretend to passe undiscernably it follows that they must come in at the door of malice that is of want of Grace in the absence of the Spirit they destroy where ever they come and the man dies if they passe upon him It is true there is flesh and blood in every regenerate man but they do not both rule the flesh is left to tempt but not to prevail And it were a strange condition if both the godly and the ungodly were captives to sin and infallibly should fall into temptation and death without all difference saue onely that the godly sins unwillingly and the ungodly sins willingly But if the same things be done by both and God in both be dishonoured and their duty prevaricated the pretended unwillingnesse is the signe of a greater and a baser slavery and of a condition lesse to be endured For the servitude which is against me is intollerable but if I choose the state of a servant I am free in my minde Libertatis servaveris umbram Si quicquid jubeare velis certain it is that such a person who fain would but cannot choose but commit adultery or drunkennesse is the veriest slave to sin that can be imagined and not at all freed by the Spirit and by the liberty of the sons of God and there is no other difference but that the mistaken good man feels his slavery and sees his chains and his fetters but therefore it is certain that he is because he sees himself to be a slave No man can be a servant of sin and a servant of righteousnesse at the same time but every man that hath the Spirit of God is a servant of righteousnesse and therefore whosoever finde great sins to be unavoidable are in a state of death and reprobation as to the present because they willingly or unwillingly it matters not much whether of the two are servants of sin 2. Sins of infirmity as they are small in their instance so they put on their degree of excusablenesse onely according to the weaknesse or infirmity of a mans understanding So far as men without their own fault understand not their duty or are possessed with weaknesse of principles or are destitute and void of discourse or discerning powers and acts so far if a sin creeps upon them it is as naturall and as free from a law as is the action of a childe But if any thing else be mingled with it if it proceed from any other principle it is criminall and not excused by our infirmity because it is chosen and a mans will hath no
but that they are too big for man to hope for And yet he certainly beleeves that a holy life shall infallibly attain thither Is it I say imaginable that this man should for a transient Action forfeit all this Hope and certainly and knowing incur all that calamity Yea but the sin is pleasant and the man is clothed with flesh and blood and their appetites are materiall and importunate and present And the discourses of Religion are concerning things spirituall separate and apt for spirits Angels and souls departed To take off this also We will suppose the man to consider and really to beleeve that the pleasure of the sin is sudden vain empty and transient that it leaves bitternesse upon the tongue before it is descended into the bowels that there it is poison and makes the Belly to swell and the Thigh to rot That he remembers and actually considers that as soon as the moment of sin is past he shall have an intolerable Conscience and does at the instant compare moments with Eternity and with horrour remembers that the very next minute he is as miserable a man as is in the world Yet that this man should sin Nay suppose the sin to have no pleasure at all such as is the sin of swearing Nay suppose it really to have pain in it such as is the sin of Envy which never can have pleasure in its actions but much torment and consumption of the very heart What should make this man sin so for nothing so against himself so against all Reason and Religion and Interest without pleasure for no reward Here the heart betrayes it self to be desperately wicked What man can give a reasonable account of such a man who to prosecute his revenge will do himself an injury that he may do a lesse to him that troubles him Such a man hath given me ill language 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 My head akes not for his language nor hath he broken my thigh nor carried away my land But yet this man must be requited Well suppose that But then let it be proportionable you are not undone let not him be so Oh yes for else my revenge triumphs not Well if you do yet remember he will defend himself or the Law will right him at least do not do wrong to your self by doing him wrong This were but Prudence and self-Interest And yet we see that the heart of some men hath betrayed them to such furiousnesse of Appetite as to make them willing to die that their enemie may be buried in the same Ruines Jovius Pontanus tells of an Italian slave I think who being enraged against his Lord watched his absence from home and the employment and inadvertency of his fellow-servants he locked the doors and secured himself for a while and Ravished his Lady then took her three sons up to the battlements of the house and at the return of his Lord threw one down to him upon the pavement and then a second to rend the heart of their sad Father seeing them weltring in their blood and brains The Lord begd for his third and now his onely Son promising pardon and libertie if he would spare his life The slave seemed to bend a little and on condition his Lord would cut off his own Nose he would spare his Son The sad Father did so being willing to suffer any thing rather then the losse of that Childe But as soon as he saw his Lord all bloody with his wound he threw the third Son and himself down together upon the Pavement The story is sad enough and needs no lustre and advantages of sorrow to represent it But if a man sets himself down and considers sadly he cannot easily tell upon what sufficient inducement or what principle the slave should so certainly so horridly so presently and then so eternally ruine himself What could he propound to himself as a recompence to his own so immediate Tragedy There is not in the pleasure of the revenge nor in the nature of the thing any thing to tempt him we must confesse our ignorance and say that The Heart of man is desperately wicked and that is the truth in generall but we cannot fathom it by particular comprehension For when the heart of man is bound up by the grace of God and tied in golden bands and watched by Angels tended by those Nurse-keepers of the soul it is not easie for a man to wander And the evil of his heart is but like the ferity and wildnesse of Lyons-whelps But when once we have broken the hedge and got into the strengths of youth and the licenciousnesse of an ungoverned age it is wonderfull to observe what a great inundation of mischief in a very short time will overflow all the banks of Reason and Religion Vice first is pleasing then it grows easie then delightfull then frequent then habituall then confirmed then the man is impenitent then he is obstinate then he resolves never to Repent and then he is Damned And by that time he is come half way in this progresse he confutes the Philosophy of the old Moralists For they not knowing the vilenesse of mans Heart not considering its desperate amazing Impiety knew no other degree of wickednesse but This That men preferred Sense before Reason and their understandings were abused in the choice of a temporall before an intellectuall and eternall good But they alwayes concluded that the Will of man must of necessity follow the last dictate of the understanding declaring an object to be good in one sence or other Happy men they were that were so Innocent that knew no pure and perfect malice and lived in an Age in which it was not easie to confute them But besides that now the wells of a deeper iniquity are discovered we see by too sad experience that there are some sins proceeding from the heart of man which have nothing but simple and unmingled malice Actions of meer spite doing evil because it is evil sinning without sensuall pleasures sinning with sensuall pain with hazard of our lives with actuall torment and sudden deaths and certain and present damnation sins against the Holy Ghost open hostilities and professed enmities against God and all vertue I can go no further because there is not in the world or in the nature of things a greater Evil. And that is the Nature and Folly of the Devil he tempts men to ruine and hates God and onely hurts himself and those he tempts and does himself no pleasure and some say he increases his own accidentall torment Although I can say nothing greater yet I had many more things to say if the time would have permitted me to represent the Falsenesse and Basenesse of the Heart 1. We are false our selves and dare not trust God 2. We love to be deceived and are angry if we be told so 3. We love to seem vertuous and yet hate to be so 4. We are melancholy and impatient and we know not why 5. We
trifling and inconsiderable interest that they who have the most of this world have the most of that but in title and in supreme rights and reserved priviledges the real use descending upon others to more substantial purposes that the possession of this trifle is mixt with sorrow upon other accidents and is allayed with fear and that the greatnesse of mens possessions increase their thirst and enlarge their wants by swelling their capacitie and above all is of so great danger to a mans vertue that a great fortune and a very great vertue are not alwayes observed to grow together He that observes all this and much more he may observe will see that he that gains the whole world hath made no such great bargain of it although he had it for nothing but the necessary unavoidable troubles in getting it but how great a folly is it to buy so great a trouble so great a vanity with the losse of our pretious soules remains to be considered in the folowing parts of the text Sermon XIX The foolish exchange Part II. ANd lose his own soul or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul And now the question is finally stated and the dispute is concerning the sum of affaires De morte hominis nulla est cunctatio longa And therefore when the soul is at stake not for its temporal but for its eternal interest it is not good to be hasty in determining without taking just measures of the exchange Solomon had the good things of the world actually in possession and he tried the touch-stone of prudence and natural value and found them allayed with vanitie and imperfection and wee that see them wayed in the ballance of the sanctuary and tryed by the touch-stone of the spirit finde them not onely light and unprofitable but pungent and dolorous but now we are to consider what it is that men part with and lose when with passion and impotency they get the world and that will present the bargain to be a huge infelicity And this I observe to be intimated in the word lose for he gives gold for cloth or pretious stones for bread serves his needs of nature and loses nothing by it and the merchant that found a pearle of great price and sold al that he had to make the purchase of it made a good venture he was no loser but here the case is otherwise when a man gains the whole world and his soul goes in the exchange he hath not done like a merchant but like a childe or a prodigal he hath given himself away he hath lost all that can distinguish him from a slave or a miserable person he loses his soul in the exchange for the soul of a man all the world cannot be a just price a man may lose it or throw it away but he can never make good exchange when he parts with this Jewel and therefore our blessed Saviour rarely well expresses it by 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 which is fully opposed to 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 gain it is such an ill market a man makes as if he should proclaim his riches goods vendible for a garland of thistles decked and trimmed up with the stinking poppy But we shall better understand the nature of this bargain if we consider the soul that is exchanged what it is in it self in order not of nature but to felicity and the capacities of joy secondly what price the Son of God payed for it and thirdly what it is to lose it that is what miseries and tortures are signified by losing a mans soul. First if we consider what the soul is in its own capacity to happinesse we shall finde it to be an excellency greater then the sun of an angelicall substance sister to a cherubin an image of the divinity and the great argument of that mercy whereby God did distinguish us from the lower form of beasts and trees and minerals For so it was the scripture affirmes that God made man after his own image that is secundum illam imaginem ideam quam concepit ipse not according to the likenesse of any of those creatures which were prexistent to mans production not according to any of those images or ideas whereby God created the heavens and the earth but by a new form to distinguish him from all other substances he made him by a new idea of his own by an uncreated exemplar and besides that this was a donation of intelligent faculties such as we understand to be perfect and essential or rather the essence of God it was also a designation of him to a glorious immortality and a communication of the rayes and reflections of his own essential felicities But the soul is al that whereby we may be and without which we cannot be happy It is not the eye that sees the beauties of the heaven nor the ear that hears the sweetnesses of musick or the glad-tidings of a prosperous accident but the soul that perceives all the relishes of sensual and intellectual perfections and the more noble and excellent the soul is the greater and more savory are its perceptions and if a childe beholds the rich Ermine or the Diamonds of a starry night or the order of the world or hears the discourses of an Apostle because he makes no reflex acts upon himself and sees not that he sees he can have but the pleasure of a fool or the deliciousnesse of a mule But although the reflection of its own acts be a rare instrument of pleasure or pain respectively yet the souls excellency is upon the same reason not perceived by us by which the sapidnesse of pleasant things of nature are not understood by a childe even because the soul cannot reflect far enough For as the Sun which is the fountain of light and heat makes violent and direct emission of his rayes from himself but reflects them no further then to the bottom of a cloud or the lowest imaginary circle of the middle region and therefore receives a duplicate of his own heat so is the soul of man it reflects upon its own inferiour actions of particular sense or general understanding but because it knows little of its own nature the manners of volition the immediate instruments of understanding the way how it comes to meditate and cannot discern how a sudden thought arrives or the solution of a doubt not depending upon preceding premises therefore above halfe its pleasures are abated and its own worth lesse understood and possibly it is the better it is so If the Elephant knew his strength or the horse the vigorousnesse of his own spirit they would be as rebellious against their rulers as unreasonable men against government nay the Angels themselves because their light reflected home to their orbs and they understood all the secrets of their own perfection they grew vertiginous and fell from the battlements of heaven But the excellency of a humane soul shall then be truly understood when
Jesus seated in the East called the sides or obliquity of the North and as the seating of his humane nature in that glorious seat brought to him all adoration and the Majesty of God and the greatest of his exaltation So it was so great an advancement to us that all the Angels of heaven take notice of it and feel a change in the appendage of their condition not that they are lessened but that we who in nature are lesse then Angels have a relative dignity greater and an equall honour of being fellow-servants This mystery is plain in Scripture and the reall effect of it we read in both the Testaments When Manoah the father of Sampson saw an Angel he worshipped him and in the old Testament it was esteemed lawfull for they were the lieutenants of God sent with the impresses of his Majesty and took in his Name the homage from us who then were so much their inferiours But when the man Christ Jesus was exalted and made the Lord of all the Angels then they became our fellow servants and might not receive worship from any of the servants of Jesus especially from Prophets and Martyrs and those that are ministers of the testimony of Jesus And therefore when an Angel appeared to Saint John and he according to the Custom of the Jews fell down and worshipped him as not yet knowing or not considering any thing to the contrary the Angell reproved him saying see thou do it not I am thy fellow servant and of thy brethren the prophets and of them which keep the sayings of this book worship God or as Saint Cyprian reads it worship Jesus God and man are now onely capable of worship but no Angel God essentially Man in the person of Christ and in the exaltation of our great Redeemer but Angels not so high and therefore not capable of any religious worship and this dignity of man Saint Gregory explicates fully Quid est quod ante Redemptoris adventum adorantur ab hominibus Angeli tacent postmodum vero adorarirefugiunt why did the Angels of old receive worshippings and were silent but in the new testament decline it and fear to accept it Nisi quod naturam nostram quam prius despexerant postquam hanc super se assumptam aspiciunt prostratam sibi videre pertimescunt nec jam sub se velut infirmam contemnere ausi sunt quam super se viz. in caeli Rege venerantur the reason is because they seeing our nature which they did so lightly value raised up above them they fear to see humbled under them neither do they any more despise the weaknesse which themselves worship in the King of heaven The same also is the sense of the Glosse of Saint Ambrose Ansbertus Haymo Rupertus and others of old and Ribera Salmeron and Lewis of Granada of late which being so plainly consonant to the words of the Angel and consigned by the testimony of such men I the rather note that those who worship Angels and make religious addresses to them may see what priviledge themselves lose and how they part with the honour of Christ who in his nature relative to us is exalted far above all thrones and principalities and dominions I need not adde lustre to this It is like the Sun the biggest body of light and nothing can describe it so well as its own beams and there is not in nature or the advantages of honour any thing greater then that we have the issues of that mercy which makes us fellow servants with Angels too much honoured to pay them a religious worship whose Lord is a man and he that is their King is our Brother 4. To this for the likenesse of the matter I adde that the divine mercy hath so prosecuted us with the enlargement of his favours that we are not onely fellow ministers and servants with the Angels and in our nature in the person of Christ exalted above them but we also shall be their Judges and if this be not an honour above that of Joseph or Mordecai an honour beyond all the measures of a man then there is in honour no degrees no priority or distances or characters of fame and noblenesse Christ is the great Judge of all the world his humane nature shall then triumph over evil men and evil spirits then shall the Devils those Angels that fel from their first originals be brought in their chains from their dark prisons and once be allowed to see the light that light that shall confound them while all that follow the lamb and that are accounted worthy of that resurrection shall be assessors in the judgment Know ye not saith S. Paul that ye shall judge Angels And Tertullian speaking concerning Devils and accursed spirits de cultu foeminarum saith Hi sunt Angeli quos judicaturi sumus Hi sunt Angeli quibus in lavacro renunciavimus Those Angels which we renounced in baptisme those we shall judge in the day of the Lords Glory in the great day of recompences And that the honour may be yet greater the same day of sentence that condemns the evil Angels shal also reward the good and increase their glory which because they derive from their Lord and ours from their King and our elder Brother the King of glories whose glorious hands shall put the crown upon all our heads we who shall be servants of that judgement and some way or other assist in it have a part of that honour to be judges of all Angels and of all the world The effect of these things ought to be this that we do not by base actions dishonour that nature that sits upon the throne of God that reigns over Angels that shall sit in judgement upon all the world It is a great undecency that the son of a King should bear water upon his head and dresse vineyards among the slaves or to see a wise man and the guide of his country drink-drunk among the meanest of his servants but when members of Christ shall be made members of an harlot and that which rides above a rain-bow stoopes to an imperious whorish woman when the soul that is sister to the Lord of Angels shall degenerate into the foolishnesse or rage of a beast being drowned with the blood of the grape or made mad with passion or ridiculous with weaker follies we shall but strip our selves of that robe of honour with which Christ hath invested and adorned our nature and carry that portion of humanity which is our own and which God had honoured in some capacities above Angels into a portion of an eternal shame and became lesse in all senses and equally disgraced with Devils The shame and sting of this change shall be that we turned the glories of the Divine mercy into the basenesse of ingratitude and the amazement of suffering the Divine vengeance But I passe on 5. The next order of Divine mercies that I shall remark is also an improvement of
some by nature some by adoption To these also God gave her a very great love to hear the word of God preached in which because I had sometimes the honour to minister to her I can give this certain testimony that she was a diligent watchfull and attentive hearer and to this had so excellent a judgement that if ever I saw a woman whose judgement was to be revered it was hers alone and I have sometimes thought that the eminency of her discerning faculties did reward a pious discourse and placed it in the regions of honour and usefulnesse and gathered it up from the ground where commonly such homilies are spilt or scattered in neglect and inconsideration But her appetite was not soon satisfied with what was usefull to her soul she was also a constant Reader of Sermons and seldome missed to read one every day and that she might be full of instruction and holy principles she had lately designed to have a large Book in which she purposed to have a stock of Religion transcribâ—d in such assistances as she would chuse that she might be readily furnished and instructed to every good work But God prevented that and hath filled her desires not out of cisterns and little aquaeducts but hath carried her to the fountain where she drinks of the pleasures of the river and is full of God 9. She alwayes lived a life of much Innocence free from the violences of great sins her person her breeding her modesty her honour her religion her early marriage the Guide of her soul and the Guide of her youth were as so many fountains of restraining grace to her to keep her from the dishonours of a crime Bonum est portare jugum ab adolescentî it is good to bear the yoak of the Lord from our youth and though she did so being guarded by a mighty providence and a great favour and grace of God from staining her fair soul with the spots of hell yet she had strange fears and early cares upon her but these were not onely for her self but in order to others to her neerest Relatives For she was so great a lover of this Honourable family of which now she was a Mother that she desired to become a chanel of great blessings to it unto future ages and was extremely jealous lest any thing should be done or lest any thing had been done though an age or two since which should intail a curse upon the innocent posterity and therefore although I do not know that ever she was tempted with an offer of the crime yet she did infinitely remove all sacrilege from her thoughts and delighted to see her estate of a clear and disintangled interest she would have no mingled rights with it she would not receive any thing from the Church but religion and a blessing and she never thought a curse and a sin far enough off but would desire it to be infinitely distant and that as to this family God had given much honour and a wise head to govern it so he would also for ever give many more blessings And because she knew that the sins of Parents descend upon Children she endeavoured by justice and religion by charity and honour to secure that her chanel should convey nothing but health and a fair example and a blessing 10. And though her accounts to God was made up of nothing but small parcels little passions and angry words and trifling discontents which are the allayes of the piety of the most holy persons yet she was early at her repentance and toward the latter end of her dayes grew so fast in religion as if she had had a revelation of her approaching end and therefore that she must go a great way in a little time her discourses more full of religion her prayers more frequent her charity increasing her forgiveness more forward her friendships more communicative her passion more under discipline and so she trimm'd her lamp not thinking her night was so neer but that it might shine also in the day time in the Temple and before the Altar of incense But in this course of hers there were some circumstances and some appendages of substance which were highly remarkable 1. In all her Religion and in all her actions of relation towards God she had a strange evennesse and untroubled passage sliding toward her Ocean of God and of infinity with a certain and silent motion So have I seen a river deep and smooth passing with a still foot and a sober face and paying to the Fiscus the great Exchequer of the Sea the Prince of all the watry bodies a tribute large and full and hard by it a little brook skipping and making a noise upon its unequall and neighbour bottom and after all its talking and bragged motion it payed to its common Audit no more then the revenues of a little cloud or a contemptible vessel So have I sometimes compar'd the issues of her religion to the solemnities and fam'd outsides of anothers piety It dwelt upon her spirit and was incorporated with the periodicall work of every day she did not beleeve that religion was intended to minister to fame and reputation but to pardon of sins to the pleasure of God and the salvation of souls For religion is like the breath of Heaven if it goes abroad into the open air it scatters and dissolves like camphyre but if it enters into a secret hollownesse into a close conveyance it is strong and mighty and comes forth with vigour and great effect at the other end at the other side of this life in the dayes of death and judgement 2. The other appendage of her religion which also was a great ornament to all the parts of her life was a rare modesty and humility of spirit a confident despising and undervaluing of her self For though she had the greatest judgement and the greatest experience of things and persons that I ever yet knew in a person of her youth and sex and circumstances yet as if she knew nothing of it she had the meanest opinion of her self and like a fair taper when she shined to all the room yet round about her own station she had cast a shadow and a cloud and she shined to every body but her self But the perfectnesse of her prudence and excellent parts could not be hid and all her humility and arts of concealment made the vertues more amiable and illustrious For as pride sullies the beauty of the fairest vertues and makes our understanding but like the craft and learning of a Devil so humility is the greatest eminency and art of publication in the whole world and she in all her arts of secrecy and hiding her worthy things was but like one that hideth the winde and covers the oyntment of her right hand I know not by what instrument it hapned but when death drew neer befor it made any shew upon her body or revealed it self by a naturall signification it was conveyed to
of the greater concernment that we be curious to hear in order to such purposes which are perfective of the soul and of the spirit and not to dwell in fancy and speculation in pleasures and trifling arrests which continue the soul in its infancy and childhood never letting it go forth into the wisdom and vertues of a man I have read concerning Dionysius of Sicily that being delighted extremely with a Ministrel that sung well and struck his Harp dexterously he promised to give him a great reward and that raised the fancy of the Man and made him play better But when the musick was done and the man waited for his great hope the King dismissed him empty telling him that he should carry away as much of the promised reward as himself did of the Musick and that he had payed him sufficiently with the pleasure of the promise for the pleasure of his song both their ears had been equally delighted and the profit just none at all So it is in many mens hearing Sermons they admire the Preacher and he pleases their ears and neither of them both bear along with them any good and the hearer hath as little good by the sermon as the Preacher by the ayr of the peoples breath when they make a noise and admire and understand not And that also is a second caution I desire all men would take 2. That they may never trouble the affairs of preaching and hearing respectively with admiring the person of any man To admire a preacher is such a reward of his pains or worth as if you should crown a Conqueror with a garland of roses or a Bride with Laurell it is an undecency it is no part of the reward which could be intended for him For though it be a good natur'd folly yet it hath in it much danger for by that means the Preacher may lead his hearers captive and make them servants of a faction or of a lust it makes them so much the lesse to be servants of Christ by how much they call any man Master upon earth it weakens the heart and hands of others it places themselves in a rank much below their proper station changing from hearing the word of God to admiration of the person and faces of men and it being a fault that falls upon the more easie natures and softer understandings does more easily abuse a man and though such a person may have the good fortune to admire a good man and a wise yet it is an ill disposition and makes him liable to every mans abuse Stupidum hominem quâvis oratione percelli said Heraclitus An undiscerning person is apt to be cozened by every oration And besides this That Preacher whom some do admire others will most certainly envy and that also is to be provided against with diligence and you must not admire too forwardly for your own sake lest you fall into the hands of a worse preacher and for his sake whom when you admire you also love for others will be apt to envy him 3. But that must by all men be avoided for envy is the worst counsellour in the world and the worst hearer of a wise discourse I pity those men who live upon flattery and wonder and while they sit at the foot of the Doctors chair stare in his face and cry 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 rarely spoken admirably done they are like callow and unfeathered birds gaping perpetually to be fed from anothers mouth and they never come to the knowledge of the truth such a knowledge as is effective and expressed in a prudent and holy life But those men that envy the preacher besides that they are great enemies of the Holy Ghost and are spitefully evil because God is good to him they are also enemies to themselves He that envies the honours or the riches of another envies for his own sake and he would fain be rich with that wealth which sweats in his neighbours coffers but he that envies him that makes good sermons envies himself and is angry because himself may receive the benefit and be improved or delighted or instructed by another He that is apt fondly to admire any mans person must cure himself by considering that the Preacher is Gods minister and servant that he speaks Gods word and does it by the Divine assistance that he hath nothing of his own but sin and imperfection that he does but his duty and that also hardly enough that he is highly answerable for his talent and stands deeply charged with the cure of souls and therefore that he is to be highly esteemed for the work sake not for the person his industry and his charity is to be beloved his ability is to be accounted upon another stock and for it the preacher and the hearer are both to give God thanks but nothing is due to the man for that save onely that it is the rather to be imployed because by it we may better be instructed but if any other reflexion be made upon his person it is next to the sin and danger of Herod and the people when the â—sine Oration was made 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 with huge fancy the people were pleased and Herod was admired and God was angry and an Angel was sent to strike him with death and with dishonour But the envy against a preacher is to be cured by a contrary discourse and we must remember that he is in the place of God and hath received the gift of God and the aids of the holy Ghost that by his abilities God is glorified and we are instructed and the interests of vertue and holy religion are promoted that by this means God who deserves that all souls should serve him for ever is likely to have a fairer harvest of glory and service and therefore that envie is against him that if we envie because we are not the instrument of this good to others we must consider tha we desire the praise to our selves not to God Admiration of a man supposes him to be inferiour to the person so admired but then he is pleased so to be but envie supposes him as low and he is displeased at it and the envious man is not onely lesse then the other mans vertue but also contrary the former is a vanity but this is a vice that wants wisdom but this wants wisdom and charity too that supposes an absence of some good but this is a direct affliction and calamity 4. And after all this if the preacher be not despised he may proceed cheerfully in doing his duty and the hearer may have some advantages by every Sermon I remember that Homer sayes the woers of Penelope laught at Vlisses because at his return he called for a loaf and did not to shew his gallantry call for swords and spears Vlysses was so wise as to call for that he needed and had it and it did him more good then a whole armory would in his case so is the plainest part
The foolish exchange fol. 224. 237. Matth. 16. ver 26. For what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul Sermon 20 21. 22. The Serpent and the Dove or a discourse of Christian Prudence fol. 251. 263. 274. Matth. 10. latter part of ver 16. Be ye therefore wise as serpents and harmlesse as doves Sermon 23. 24. Of Christian simplicity 289. 301. Matth. 10. latter part of ver 16. And harmlesse as doves Sermon 25. 26. 27. The miracles of the Divine Mercy fol. 313. 327. 340. Psal. 86. 5. For thou Lord art good and ready to forgive and plenteous in mercy to all them that call upon thee A Funerall Sermon preached at the Obsequies of the Right Honourable the Countesse of Carbery fol. 357. 2 Sam. 14. 14. For we must needs die and are as water spilt on the ground which cannot be gathered up again neither doth God respect any person yet doth he devise means that his banished be not expelled from him A Discourse of the Divine Institution necessity sacrednesse and separation of the Office Ministeriall Sermon I. VVHITSVNDAY OF THE SPIRIT OF GRACE 8. Romans v. 9. 10. But ye are not in the flesh but in the Spirit if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ he is none of his * And if Christ be in you the body is dead because of sin but the Spirit is life because of righteousnesse THe day in which the Church commemorates the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the Apostles was the first beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This was the first day that the Religion was professed now the Apostles first openâ—d their commission and read it to all the people The Lord gave his Spirit or the Lord gave his word and great was the company of the Preachers For so I make bold to render that prophesie of David Christ was the word of God verbum aeternum but the Spirit was the word of God verbum Patefactum Christ was the word manifested in the flesh the Spirit was the word manifested to flesh and set in dominion over and in hostility against the flesh The Gospel and the Spirit are the same thing not in substance but the manifestation of the Spirit is the Gospel of Jesus Christ and because he was this day manifested the Gospel was this day first preached and it became a law to us called the law of the Spirit of life that is a law taught us by the Spirit leading us to life eternal But the Gospel is called the Spirit 1. Because it contains in it such glorious mysteries which were revealed by the immediate inspirations of the Spirit not onely in the matter it self but also in the manner and powers to apprehend them For what power of humane understanding could have found out the incarnation of a God that two natures a finite and an infinite could have been concentred into one hypostasis or person that a virgin should be a Mother that dead men should live again that the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the ashes of dissolved bones should become bright as the Sun blessed as Angels swift in motion as thought clear as the purest Noone that God should so love us as to be willing to be reconcil'd to us and yet that himself must dye that he might pardon us that Gods most Holy Son should give us his body to eat and his bloud to crown our chalices and his Spirit to sanctifie our souls to turn our bodies into temperance our souls into mindes our mindes into Spirit our Spirit into glory that he who can give us all things who is Lord of Men and Angels and King of all the Creatures should pray to God for us without intermission that he who reigns over all the world should at the day of judgement give up the Kingdom to God the Father and yet after this resignation himself and we with him should for ever reign the more gloriously that we should be justified by Faith in Christ and that charity should be a part of faith and that both should work as acts of duty and as acts of relation that God should Crown the imperfect endeavours of his Saints with glory and that a humane act should be rewarded with an eternal inheritance that the wicked for the transient pleasure of a few minutes should be tormented with an absolute eternity of pains that the waters of baptisme when they are hallowed by the Spirit shall purge the soul from sin and that the Spirit of a man shall be nourished with the consecrated and mysterious elements and that any such nourishment should bring a man up to heaven and after all this that all Christian People all that will be saved must be partakers of the Divine nature of the Nature the infinite nature of God and must dwell in Christ and Christ must dwell in them and they must be in the Spirit and the Spirit must be for ever in them these are articles of so mysterious a Philosophy that we could have inferred them from no premises discours'd them upon the stock of no naturall or scientificall principles nothing but God and Gods spirit could have taught them to us and therefore the Gospel is Spiritus patefactus the manifestation of the Spirit ad aedificationem as the Apostle calls it for edification and building us up to be a Holy Temple to the Lord. 2. But when we had been taught all these mysterious articles we could not by any humane power have understood them unlesse the Spirit of God had given us a new light and created in us a new capacity and made us to be a new creature of another definition Animalis homo 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 that is as S. Jude expounds the word 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the animal or the naturall man the man that hath not the Spirit cannot discern the things of God for they are spiritually discerned that is not to be understood but by the light proceeding from the Sun of righteousnesse and by that eye whose bird is the Holy Dove whose Candle is the Gospel Scio incapacem te sacramenti Impie Non posse coecis mentibus mysterium Haurire nostrum nil diurnum nox capit He that shall discourse Euclids elements to a swine or preach as Venerable Bede's story reports of him to a rock or talk Metaphysicks to a Bore will as much prevail upon his assembly as S. Peter and S. Paul could do upon uncircumcised hearts and ears upon the indisposed Greeks and prejudicate Jews An Ox will relish the tender flesh of Kids with as much gust and appetite as an unspirituall and unsanctified man will do the discourses of Angels or of an Apostle if he should come to preach the secrets of the Gospel And we finde it true by a sad experience How many times doth God
speak to us by his servants the Prophets by his Son by his Apostles by sermons by spirituall books by thousands of homilies and arts of counsell and insinuation and we sit as unconcerned as the pillars of a Church and hear the sermons as the Athenians did a story or as we read a gazet and if ever it come to passe that we tremble as Felix did when we hear a sad story of death of righteousnesse and judgement to come then we put it off to another time or we forget it and think we had nothing to do but to give the good man a hearing and as Anacharsis said of the Greeks they used money for nothing but to cast account withall so our hearers make use of sermons and discourses Evangelical but to fill up void spaces of our time to help to tell an hour with or without tediousnesse The reason of this is a sad condemnation to such persons they have not yet entertained the Spirit of God they are in darknesse they were washed in water but never baptized with the Spirit for these things are spiritually discerned They would think the Preacher rude if he should say they are not Christians they are not within the Covenant of the Gospel but it is certain that the spirit of Manifestation is not yet upon them and that is the first effect of the Spirit whereby we can be called sons of God or relatives of Christ. If we do not apprehend and greedily suck in the precepts of this holy Discipline as aptly as Merchants do discourse of gain or Farmers of fair harvests we have nothing but the Name of Christians but we are no more such really then Mandrakes are men or spunges are living creatures 3. The Gospel is called Spirit because it consists of Spiritual Promises and Spiritual precepts and makes all men that embrace it truly to be Spiritual men and therefore S. Paul addes an Epithete beyond this calling it a quickening Spirit that is it puts life into our Spirits which the law could not The law bound us to punishment but did not help us to obedience because it gave not the promise of Eternal life to its Disciples The Spirit that is the Gospel onely does this and this alone is it which comforts afflicted mindes which puts activenesse into wearyed Spirits which inflames our cold desires and does 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 blows up sparks into live coles and coles up to flames and flames to perpetual burnings and it is impossible that any man who believes and considers the great the infinite the unspeakable the unimaginable the never ceasing joyes that are prepared for all the sons and daughters of the Gospel should not desire them and unlesse he be a fool he cannot but use means to obtain them effective hearty pursuances For it is not directly in the nature of a man to neglect so great a good there must be something in his manners some obliquity in his will or madnesse in his intellectuals or incapacity in his naturals that must make him sleep such a reward away or change it for the pleasure of a drunken feaver or the vanity of a Mistresse or the rage of a passion or the unreasonablenesse of any sin However this promise is the life of all our actions and the Spirit that first taught it is the life of our soules 4. But beyond this is the reason which is the consummation of all the faithful The Gospel is called the Spirit because by and in the Gospel God hath given to us not onely the Spirit of manifestation that is of instruction and of Catechisme of faith and confident assent but the Spirit of Confirmation or obsignation to all them that believe and obey the Gospel of Christ that is the power of God is come upon our hearts by which in an admirable manner we are made sure of a glorious inheritance made sure I say in the nature of the thing and our own persuasions also are confirmed with an excellent a comfortable a discerning and a reasonable hope in the strength of which and by whose ayde as we do not doubt of the performance of the promise so we vigorously pursue all the parts of the condition and are inabled to work all the work of God so as not to be affrighted with fear or seduced by vanity or oppressed by lust or drawn off by evil example or abused by riches or imprison'd by ambition and secular designes This the Spirit of God does work in all his Servants and is called the spirit of obsignation or the confirming spirit because it confirms our hope and assures our title to life eternall and by means of it and other its collateral assistances it also confirms us in our duty that we may not onely professe in word but live lives according to the Gospel And this is the sense of the Spirit mentionâ—d in the Text ye are not in the flesh but in the Spirit if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you That is if ye be made partakers of the Gospel or of the spirit of manifestation if ye be truly intitled to God and have received the promise of the Father then are ye not carnal men ye are spirituall ye are in the Spirit if ye have the Spirit in one sense to any purpose ye have it also in another if the Spirit be in you you are in it if it hath given you hope it hath also inabled and ascertainâ—d your duty For the Spirit of manifestation will but upbraid you in the shame and horrours of a sad eternity if you have not the Spirit of obsignation if the Holy Ghost be not come upon you to great purposes of holinesse all other pretences are vain ye are still in the flesh which shall never inherit the kingdom of God In the Spirit that is in the power of the spirit so the Greeks call him 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 who is possessed by a spirit whom God hath filled with a coelestial immission he is said to be in God when God is in him and it is a similitude taken from persons encompassed with guards they are in custodiâ that is in their power under their command moved at their dispose they rest in their time and receive laws from their authority and admit visiters whom they appoint and must be employed as they shall suffer so are men who are in the Spirit that is they beleeve as he teaches they work as he inables they choose what he calls good they are friends of his friends and they hate with his hatred with this onely difference that persons in custody are forced to do what their keepers please and nothing is free but their wils but they that are under the command of the Spirit do all things which the Spirit commands but they do them cheerfully and their will is now the prisoner but it is in liberâ custodiâ the will is where it ought to be and where it desires to be and it cannot easily
choose any thing else because it is extreamly in love with this as the Saints and Angels in their state of Beatific vision cannot choose but love God and yet the liberty of their choice is not lessenâ—d because the object fils all the capacities of the will and the understanding Indifferency to an object is the lowest degree of liberty and supposes unworthinesse or defect in the object or the apprehension but the will is then the freest and most perfect in its operation when it intirely pursues a good with so certain determination and clear election that the contrary evil cannot come into dispute or pretence Such in our proportions is the liberty of the sons of God it is an holy and amiable captivity to the Spirit the will of man is in love with those chains which draws to God and loves the fetters that confine us to the pleasures and religion of the kingdom And as no man will complain that his temples are restraind and his head is prisoner when it is encircled with a crown So when the Son of God had made us free and hath onely subjected us to the service and dominion of the Spirit we are free as Princes within the circles of their Diadem and our chains are bracelets and the law is a law of liberty and his service is perfect freedom and the more we are subjects the more we shall reign as Kings and the faster we run the easier is our burden and Christs yoke is like feathers to a bird not loads but helps to motion without them the body fals and we do not pity birds when in summer we wish them unfeathered and callow or bald as egges that they might be cooler and lighter such is the load and captivity of the soul when we do the work of God and are his servants and under the Government of the spirit They that strive to be quit of this subjection love the liberty of out-laws and the licentiousness of anarchy and the freedom of sad widows and distressed Orphans For so Rebels and fools and children long to be rid of their Princes and their Guardians and their Tutors that they may be accursed without law and be undone without control and be ignorant and miserable without a teacher and without discipline He that is in the Spirit is under Tutours and Governours untill the time appointed of the Father just as all great Heirs are onely the first seizure the Spirit makes is upon the will He that loves the yoke of Christ and the discipline of the Gospel he is in the Spirit that is in the spirits power Upon this foundation the Apostle hath built these two propositions 1. Whosoever hath not the Spirit of Christ he is none of his he does not belong to Christ at all he is not partaker of his Spirit and therefore shall never be partaker of his glory 2. Whosoever is in Christ is dead to sin and lives to the Spirit of Christ that is lives a Spirituall a holy and a sanctifyed life These are to be considered distinctly 1. All that belong to Christ have the Spirit of Christ Immediately before the ascension our blessed Saviour bid his Disciples tarry in Jerusalem till they should receive the promise of the Father Whosoever stay at Jerusalem and are in the actuall Communion of the Church of God shall certainly receive this promise For it is made to you and to your children saith S. Peter and to as many as the Lord our God shall call All shall receive the Spirit of Christ the promise of the Father because this was the great instrument of distinction between the Law and the Gospel In the Law God gave his Spirit 1. to some to them 2. extraregularly 3. without solennity 4. in small proportions like the dew upon Gideons fleece a little portion was wet sometime with the dew of heaven when all the earth besides was dry And the Jewes calld it filiaâ— voois the daughter of a voice still and small and seldom and that by secret whispers and sometimes inarticulate by way of enthusiasme rather then of instruction and God spake by the Prophets transmitting the sound as thorough an Organ pipe things which themselves oftentimes understood not But in the Gospel the spirit is given without measure first powred forth upon our head Christ Jesus then descending upon the beard of Aaron the Fathers of the Church and thence falling like the tears of the balsam of Judea upon the foot of the plant upon the lowest of the people And this is given regularly to all that ask it to all that can receive it and by a solemn ceremony and conveyed by a Sacrament and is now not the Daughter of a voice but the Mother of many voices of divided tongues and united hearts of the tongues of Prophets and the duty of Saints of the Sermons of Apostles and the wisdom of Governours It is the Parent of boldness and fortitude to Martyrs the fountain of learning to Doctors an Ocean of all things excellent to all who are within the ship and bounds of the Catholike Church so that Old men and young men maidens and boyes the scribe and the unlearned the Judge and the Advocate the Priest and the people are full of the Spirit if they belong to God Moses's wish is fulfilled and all the Lords people are Prophets in some sense or other In the wisdom of the Ancient it was observed that there are four great cords which tye the heart of Man to inconvenience and a prison making it a servant of vanity and an heir of corruption 1. Pleasure and 2. Pain 3. Fear and 4. Desire 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 These are they that exercise all the wisdom and resolutions of man and all the powers that God hath given him 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 said Agathon These are those evil Spirits that possess the heart of man mingle with al his actions so that either men are tempted to 1. lust by pleasure or 2. to baser arts by covetousness or 3. to impatience by sorrow or 4. to dishonourable actions by fear and this is the state of man by nature and under the law and for ever till the Spirit of God came and by four special operations curâ—d these four inconveniences and restrained or sweetned these unwholesome waters 1. God gave us his Spirit that we might be insensible of worldly pleasures having our souls wholly filâ—d with spiritual and heavenly relishes For when Gods Spirit hath entred into us and possessed us as his Temple or as his dwelling instantly we begin to taste Manna and to loath the diet of Egypt we begin to consider concerning heaven and to prefer eternity before moments and to love the pleasures of the soul above the sottish and beastly pleasures of the body Then we can consider that the pleasures of a drunken meeting cannot make recompence for the pains of a surfet and that
desires of God and this I say is the Great benefit of the Spirit which God hath given to us as an antidote against worldly pleasures And therefore S. Paul joynes them as consequent to each other For it is impossible for those who were once enlightned and have tasted of the heavenly gift and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the world to come c. First we are enlightned in Baptisme and by the Spirit of manifestation the revelations of the Gospel then we relish and taste interiour excellencies and we receive the Holy Ghost the Spirit of confirmation and he gives us a taste of the powers of the world to come that is of the great efficacy that is in the Article of eternall life to perswade us to religion and holy living then we feel that as the belief of that Article dwels upon our understanding and is incorporated into our wils and choice so we grow powerfull to resist sin by the strengths of the Spirit to desie all carnall pleasure and to suppresse and mortifie it by the powers of this Article those are the powers of the world to come 2. The Spirit of God is given to all who truly belong to Christ as an anidote against sorrows against impatience against the evil accidents of the world and against the oppression and sinking of our spirits under the crosse There are in Scripture noted two births besides the naturall to which also by analogy we may adde a third The first is to be born of water and the Spirit It is 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 one thing signified by a divided appellative by two substantives water and the Spirit that is Spiritus aqueus the Spirit moving upon the waters of Baptisme The second is to be born of Spirit and fire for so Christ was promised to baptize us with the Holy Ghost and with fire that is cum spiritu igneo with a fiery spirit the Spirit as it descended in Pentecost in the shape of fiery tongues And as the watry spirit washed away the sins of the Church so the spirit of fire enkindles charity and the love of God 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 sayes Plutarch the Spirit is the same under both the titles and it enables the Church with gifts and graces And from these there is another operation of the new birth but the same Spirit the spirit of rejoycing or spiritus exultans spiritus laetitiae Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in beleeving that ye may abound in hope through the power of the Holy Ghost There is a certain joy and spirituall rejoycing that accompanies them in whom the Holy Ghost doth dwell a joy in the midst of sorrow a joy given to allay the sorrows of saecular troubles and to alleviate the burden of persecution This S. Paul notes to this purpose And ye became followers of us and of the Lord having received the word in much afâ—liction with joy of the Holy Ghost Worldly afflictions and spirituall joyes may very well dwell together and if God did not supply us out of his storehouses the sorrows of this world would be mere and unmixt and the troubles of persecution would be too great for naturall considences For who shall make him recompence that lost his life in a Duel fought about a draught of wine or a cheaper woman What arguments shall invite a man to suffer torments in testimony of a proposition of naturall Philosophy And by what instruments shall we comfort a man who is sick and poor and disgracâ—d and vitious and lies cursing and despairs of any thing hereafter That mans condition proclaims what it is to want the Spirit of God the Spirit of comfort Now this Spirit of comfort is the hope and confidence the certain expectation of partaking in the inheritance of Jesus This is the faith and patience of the Saints this is the refreshment of all wearied travellers the cordiall of all languishing sinners the support of the scrupulous the guide of the doubtfull the anchor of timorous and fluctuating souls the confidence and the staff of the penitent He that is deprived of his whole estate for a good conscience by the Spirit he meets this comfort that he shall finde it again with advantage in the day of restitution and this comfort was so manifest in the first dayes of Christianity that it was no infrequent thing to see holy persons court a Martyrdom with a fondnesse as great as is our impatience and timorousnesse in every persecution Till the Spirit of God comes upon us we are 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 inopis nos atque pusilli finxerunt animi we have little souls little faith and as little patience we fall at every stumbling block and sink under every temptation and our hearts fail us and we die for fear of death and lose our souls to preserve our estates or our persons till the Spirit of God fills us with joy in beleeving and a man that is in a great joy cares not for any trouble that is lesse then his joy and God hath taken so great care to secure this to us that he hath turn'd it into a precept Rejoyce evermore and Rejoyce in the Lord always and again I say rejoyce But this rejoycing must be onely in the hope that is laid up for us 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 so the Apostle Rejoycing in hope For although God sometimes maks a cup of sensible comfort to overflow the spirit of a man and thereby loves to refresh his sorrows yet that is from a secret principle not regularly given not to be waitd for not to be prayed for and it may fail us if we think upon it but the hope of life eternall can never fail us and the joy of that is great enough to make us suffer any thing or to do any thing ibimus ibimus utcunque praecedes supremum Carpere iter comites parati To death to bands to poverty to banishment to tribunals any whither in hope of life eternall as long as this anchor holds we may suffer a storm but cannot suffer shipwrack And I desire you by the way to observe how good a God we serve and how excellent a Religion Christ taught when one of his great precepts is that we should rejoyce and be exceeding glad and God hath given as the spirit of rejoycing not a sullen melancholy spirit not the spirit of bondage or of a slave but the Spirit of his Son consigning us by a holy conscience to joyes unspeakable and full of glory And from hence you may also infer that those who sink under a persecution or are impatient in a sad accident they put out their own fires which the Spirit of the Lord hath kindled and lose those glories which stand behinde the cloud Part II. 3. THe Spirit of God is given us as an antidote against evil concupiscences and sinfull desires and is
sin A sin is either in its bosom or in its retinue But the ignorance that I now intend is a voluntary chosen delightful ignorance taken in upon designe even for no other end but that we may perish quietly and infallibly God hath opened all the windows of Heaven and sent the Sun of Righteousnesse with glorious apparition and hath discoverd the abysses of his own wisdom made the second person in the Trinity to be the doctor and preacher of his sentences and secrets and the third person to be his Amanuensis or scribe and our hearts to be the Book in which the doctrine is written and miracles and prophecies to be its arguments and all the world to be the verification of it and those leaves contain within their folds all that excellent morality which right reason pickt up after the shipwrack of nature and all those wise sayings which singly made so many men famous for preaching some one of them all them Christ gathered and added some more out of the immediate book of Revelation So that now the wisdom of God hath made every mans heart to be the true Veronica in which he hath imprinted his own lineaments so perfectly that we may dresse our selves like God and have the aire and features of Christ our Elder-Brother that we may be pure as God is perfect as our Father meek and humble as the Son and may have the holy Ghost within us in gifts and Graces in wisdom and holinesse This hath God done for us and see what we do for Him We stand in our own light and quench Gods we love darknesse more then light and entertain our sâ—lves accordingly For how many of us are there that understand nothing of the wayes of God that know no more of the law of Jesus Christ then is remaining upon them since they learned the childrens Catechisme But amongst a thousand how many can explicate and unfold for his own practise the ten Commandments And how many sorts of sins are there forbidden which therefore passe into action and never passe under the scrutinies of repentance because they know not that they are sinnes Are there not very many who know not the particular duties of meeknesse and never consider concerning Long suffering and if you talk to them of growth in Grace or the spirit of obsignation or the melancholy lectures of the Crosse and imitation of and conformitie to Christs sufferings or adherences to God or rejoycing in him or not quenching the spirit you are too deep learned for them And yet these are duties set down plainly for our practise necessary to be acted in order to our Salvation We brag of light and reformation and fulnesse of the spirit in the mean time we understand not many parts of our dutie We enquire into something that may make us talk or be talked of or that we may troâ—ble a Church or disturb the peace of mindes but in things that concern Holy living and that wisdom of God whereby we are wise unto Salvation never was any age of Christendom more ignorant then we For if we did not wink hard we must needs see that obedience to supreâ—â— Powers Denying of our selves Humility Peacefulnesse and Charity are written in such Capital text letters that it is impossible to be ignorant of them And if the heart of man had not rare arts to abuse the understanding it were not to be imagined that any man should bring the 13. Chapter to the Romans to prove the lawfulnesse of taking up Armes against our rulers but so we may abuse our selves at noon and go to bed if we please to call it midnight And there have been a sort of wittie men that maintained that snow was hot I wonder not at the probleme but that a man should beleeve his paradox and should let eternity go away with the fallacie and rather lose heaven then leave his foolish argument is a signe that wilfulnesse and the deceiving heart is the Sophister and the great ingredient into our Deception But that I may be more particular the heart of man uses devices that it may be ignorant 1. We are impatient of honest and severe reproofe and order the circumstances of our persons and address that we shall never come to the true knowledge of our condition Who will endure to heare his curate tell him that he is Covetous or that he is proud 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 It is Calumny and Reviling if he speak it to his head and relates to his person and yet if he speak onely in general every man neglects what is not recommended to his particular But yet if our Physitian tell us you look well Sir but a Feaver lurks in your spirits 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 drink Julips and abstain from flesh no than thinks it shame or calumny to be told so but when we are told that our liver is inflamed with lust or anger that our heart is vexed with envie that our eyes rowl with wantonnesse And though we think all is well yet we are sick sick unto death neer to a sad and fatal sentence we shall think that man that tells us so is impudent or uncharitable and yet he hath done him no more injury then a deformed man receives daily from his looking-glasse which if he shall dash against the wall because it showes him his face just as it is his face is not so ugly as his manners And yet our heart is so impatient of seeing its own staines that like the Elephant it tramples in the pure streames and first troubles them then stoops and drinks when he can least see his huge deformitie 2. In order to this we heap up teachers of our own and they guide us not whither but which way they please for we are curious to go our own way and carelesse of our Hospitall or Inne at night A faire way and a merry company and a pleasant easie guide will entice us into the Enemies quarters and such guides we cannot want Improbitati occasio nunquam defuit If we have a minde to be wicked we shall want no prompters and false teachers at first creeping in unawares have now so filled the pavement of the Church that you can scarce set your foot on the ground but you tread upon a snake Cicero l. 7. ad Atticum undertakes to bargain with them that kept the Sybils books that for a sum of money they shall expound to him what he please and to be sure ut quidvis potius quam Regem proferrent They shall declare against the government of kings say that the Gods will endure any thing rather then Monarchy in their beloved republick And the same mischief God complains of to be among the Jews the Prophets prophecie lies and my people love to have it so and what will the end of these things be even the same that Cicero complain'd of Ad opinionem imperitorum fictas esse Religiones Men shall have what Religion they please and God
authority and the person and the law and the religion The sin cannot grow to its height if it be crushed at the beginning unlesse it prosper in its progresse a man cannot easily fill up the measure of his iniquity but then that the sin swels to its fulnesse by prosperity and grows too big to be suppressed without a miracle it is so far from excusing or lessening the sin that nothing doth so nurse the sin as it It is not vertue because it is prosperous but if it had not been prosperous the sin could never be so great Facere omnia saevè Non impunè licet nisi dum facis A little crime is sure to smart but when the sinner is grown rich and prosperous and powerfull he gets impunity Jusque datum sceleri But that 's not innocence and if prosperity were the voice of God to approve an action then no man were vitious but he that is punished and nothing were rebellion but that which cannot be easily suppressed and no man were a Pirate but he that robs with a little vessell and no man could be a Tyrant but he that is no prince and no man an unjust invader of his neighbours rights but he that is beaten and overthrown Then the crime grows big and loud then it calls to Heaven for vengeance when it hath been long a growing when it hath thrived under the Devils managing when God hath long suffered it and with patience in vain expecting the repentance of a sinner he that treasures up wrath against the day of wrath that man hath been a prosperous that is an unpunished and a thriving sinner but then it is the sin that thrives not the man and that is the mistake upon this whole question for the sin cannot thrive unlesse the man goes on without apparent punishment and restraint And all that the man gets by it is that by a continual course of sin he is prepared for an intollerable ruine The Spirit of God bids us look upon the end of these men not the way they walk or the instrument of that pompous death When Epaminondas was asked which of the three was happiest himself Chalrias or Iphicrates bid the man stay till they were all dead for till then that question could not be answered He that had seen the Vandals besiege the city of Hippo and have known the barbarousnesse of that unchristned people and had observed that S. Augustine withall his prayers and vows could not obtain peace in his own dayes not so much as a reprieve for the persecution and then had observed S. Augustine die with grief that very night would have perceived his calamity more visible then the reward of his piety and holy religion When Lewis firnamed Pius went his voyage to Palestine upon a holy end and for the glory of God to fight against the Saracens and Turks and Mamalukes the world did promise to themselves that a good cause should thrive in the hands of so holy a man but the event was far otherwise his brother Robert was killed and his army destroyed and himself taken prisoner and the money which by his Mother was sent for his redemption was cast away in a storm and he was exchanged for the last town the Christians had in Egypt and brought home the crosse of Christ upon his shoulder in a real pressure and participation of his Masters sufferings When Charles the fifth went to Algier to suppresse pirates and unchristned villains the cause was more confident then the event was prosperous and when he was almost ruined in a prodigious storme he told the minutes of the clock expecting that at midnight when religious persons rose to Mattins he should be eased by the benefit of their prayers but the providence of God trod upon those waters and left no footstoops for discovery his navie was beat in pieces and his designe ended in dishonour and his life almost lost by the bargain Was ever cause more baffled then the Christian cause by the Turks in all Asia and Africa and some parts of Europe if to be persecuted and afflicted be reckoned a calamity What prince was ever more unfortunate then Henry the sixt of England and yet that age saw none more pious and devout and the title of the house of Lancaster was advanced against the right of York for three descents but then what was the end of these things the persecuted men were made Saints and their memories are preserved in honour and their souls shall reigne for ever and some good men were ingaged in a wrong cause and the good cause was sometimes managed by evil men till that the suppressed cause was lifted up by God in the hands of a young and prosperous prince and at last both interests were satisfied in the conjunction of two roses which was brought to issue by a wonderful chain of causes managed by the divine providence and there is no age no history no state no great change in the world but hath ministred an example of an afflicted truth and a prevailing sin For I will never more call that sinner prosperous who after he hath been permitted to finish his businesse shall die and perish miserably for at the same rate we may envie the happinesse of a poor fisherman who while his nets were drying slept upon the rock and dreamt that he was made a King on a sudden starts up and leaping for joy fals down from the rock and in the place of his imaginary felicities loses his little portion of pleasure and innocent solaces he had from the sound sleep and little cares of his humble cottage And what is the prosperity of the wicked to dwel in fine houses or to command armies or to be able to oppresse their brethren or to have much wealth to look on or many servants to feed or much businesse to dispatch and great cares to master these things are of themselves neither good nor bad but consider would any man amongst us looking and considering before hand kill his lawful King to be heire of all that which I have named would any of you choose to have God angry with you upon these terms would any of you be a perjured man for it all A wise man or a good would not choose it would any of you die an Atheist that you might live in plenty and power I belâ—â—ve you tremble to think of it It cannot therefore be a happinesse to thrive upon the stock of a great sin for if any man should contâ—act with an impure spirit to give his soul up at a certain day it may be 2â— years hence upon the condition he might for 20. years have his vain desires should we not think that person infinitely miserable every prosperous thriving sinner is in the same condition within these twenty years he shall be thrown into the portion of Devils but shall never come out thence in twenty millions of years His wealth must needs sit uneasie upon him that remembers that within a
and when he hath delivered up our bodies will rescue our souls from the hands of unrighteous judges I remember in the story that Plutarch tels concerning the soul of Thespesius that it met with a Prophetick Genius who told him many things that should happen afterwards in the world and the strangest of all was this That there should be a King Qui bonus cum sit tyrannide vitam finiet An excellent Prince and a good man should be put to death by a rebell and usurping power and yet that Prophetick soul could not tell that those rebels should within three yeers die miserable and accursed deaths and in that great prophecy recorded by Saint Paul That in the last dayes perillous times should come and men should be traitours and selvish having forms of godlinesse and creeping into houses yet could not tell us when these men should come to finall shame and ruine onely by a generall signification he gave this signe of comfort to Gods persecuted servants But they shall proceed no further for their folly shall be manifest to all men that is at long running they shall shame themselves and for the elects sake those dayes of evil shall be shortned But you and I may be dead first And therefore onely remember that they that with a credulous heart and a loose tongue are too decretory and enunciative of speedy judgements to their enemies turn their religion into revenge and therefore do beleeve it will be so because they vehemently desire it should be so which all wise and good men ought to suspect as lesse agreeing with that charity which overcomes all the sins and all the evils of the world and sits down and rests in glory 4. Do not trouble your self by thinking how much you are afflicted but consider how much you make of it For reflex acts upon the suffering it self can lead to nothing but to pride or to impatience to temptation or apostacy He that measures the grains and scruples of his persecution will soon sit down and call for ease or for a reward will think the time long or his burden great will be apt to complain of his condition or set a greater value upon his person Look not back upon him that strikes thee but upward to God that supports thee and forward to the crown that is set before thee and then consider if the losse of thy estate hath taught thee to despise the world whether thy poor fortune hath made thee poor in spirit and if thy uneasie prison sets thy soul at liberty and knocks off the fetters of a worse captivity For then the rod of suffering turns into crowns and scepters when every suffering is a precept and every change of condition produces a holy resolution and the state of sorrows makes the resolution actuall and habituall permanent and persevering For as the silk-worm eateth it self out of a seed to become a little worm and there feeding on the leaves of mulberies it grows till its coat be off and then works it self into a house of silk then casting its pearly seeds for the young to breed it leaveth its silk for man and dieth all white and winged in the shape of a flying creature So is the progresse of souls when they are regenerate by Baptisme and have cast off their first stains and the skin of worldly vanities by feeding on the leaves of Scriptures and the fruits of the vine and the joyes of the Sacrament they incircle themselves in the rich garments of holy and vertuous habits then by leaving their blood which is the Churches seed to raise up a new generation to God they leave a blessed memory and fair example and are themselves turned into Angels whose felicity is to do the will of God as their imployments was in this world to suffer it fiat voluntas tua is our daily prayer and that is of a passive signification thy will be done upon us and if from thence also we translate it into an active sence and by suffering evils increase in our aptnesses to do well we have done the work of Christians and shall receive the reward of Martyrs 5. Let our suffering be entertained by a direct election not by collateral ayds and phantastick assistances It is a good refreshment to a weak spirit to suffer in good company and so Phoeion encouraged a timerous Greek condemned to die and he bid him be confident because that he was to die with Phocion and when 40. Martyrs in Cappadocia suffered and that 〈◊〉 souldier standing by came and supplyed the place of the one Apostate who fell from his crown being overcome with pain it added warmth to the frozen confessors and turnd them into consummate Martyrs But if martyrdom were but a phantastick thing or relyed upon vain accidents and irregular chances it were then very necessary to be assisted by images of things and any thing lesse then the proper instruments of religion But since it is the greatest action of the religion and relies upon the most excellent promises and its formality is to be an action of love and nothing is more firmely chosen by an after election at least then an act of love to support Martyrdom or the duty of sufferings by false arches and exteriour circumstances is to build a tower upon the beams of the Sun or to set up a woodden ladder to climbe up to Heaven the soul cannot attain so huge and unimaginable felicities by chance and instruments of fancy and let no man hope to glorifie God and go to Heaven by a life of sufferings unlesse he first begin in the love of God and from thence derive his choice his patience and considence in the causes of vertue and religion like beams and warmth and influence from the body of the Sun Some there are that fall under the burden when they are pressed hard because they use not the proper instruments in fortifying the will in patience and resignation but endeavour to lighten the burden in imagination and when these temporary supporters fail the building that relies upon them rushes into coldnesse recidivation and lukewarmnesse and among all instances that of the main question of the Text is of greatest power to abuse imprudent and lesse severe persons Nullos esse Deos inane coelum Affirmat Selius probatque Quod se videt dum negat haec beatum When men choose a good cause upon confidence that an ill one cannot thrive that is not for the love of vertue or duty to God but for profit and secular interests they are easily lost when they see the wickednesse of the enemy to swell up by impunity and successe to a great evil for they have not learned to distinguish a great growing sin from a thriving and prosperous fortune Vlla si juris tibi pejerati Poena Barine noeuisset unquam Dente si nigro fieret vel uno turpior ungui Crederem They that beleeve and choose because of idle fears and unreasonable fancies or by
mistaking the accounts of a man for the measures of God or dare not commit treason for fear of being blasted may come to be tempted when they see a sinner thrive and are scandalized all the way if they die before him or they may come to receive some accidentall hardnesses and every thing in the world may spoil such persons and blast their resolutions Take in all the aids you can and if the fancy of the standers by or the hearing a cock crow can adde any collaterall aids to thy weaknesse refuse it not But let thy state of sufferings begin with choice and be confirmed with knowledge and rely upon love and the aids of God and the expectations of heaven and the present sense of duty and then the action will be as glorious in the event as it is prudent in the enterprise and religious in the prosecution 6. Lastly when God hath brought thee into Christs school and entered thee into a state of sufferings remember the advantages of that state consider how unsavoury the things of the world appear to thee when thou art under the arrest of death remember with what comforts the Spirit of God assists thy spirit set down in thy heart all those entercourses which happen between God and thy own soul the sweetnesses of religion the vanity of sins appearances thy newly entertained resolutions thy longings after heaven and all the things of God and if God finishes thy persecution with death proceed in them if he restores thee to the light of the world and a temporall refreshment change but the scene of sufferings into an active life and converse with God upon the same principles on which in thy state of sufferings thou dost build all the parts of duty If God restores thee to thy estate be not lesse in love with heaven nor more in love with the world let thy spirit be now as humble as before it was broken and to what soever degree of sobriety or austerity thy suffering condition did enforce thee if it may be turned into vertue when God restores thee because then it was necessary thou shouldest entertain it by an after choice do now also by a praâ—election that thou mayest say with David It is good for me that I have been afflicted for thereby I have learned thy commandments and Paphnutius did not do his soul more advantage when he lost his right eye and suffered his left knee to be cut for Christianity and the cause of God then that in the dayes of Constantine and the Churches peace he lived not in the toleration but in the active piety of a Martyrs condition not now a confessor of the faith onely but of the charity of a Christian we may every one live to have need of these rules and I do not at all think it safe to pray against it but to be armed for it and to whatsoever degree of sufferings God shal call us we see what advantages God intends for us and what advantages we our selves may make of it I now proceed to make use of all the former â—â—scourse by removing it a little further even into its utmost spiritual sense which the Apostle does in the last words of the text If the righteous scarcely be saved where shall the wicked and the sinner appear These words are taken out of the proverbs * according to the translation of the 70. If the righteous scarcely â—s safe where the word 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 implyes that he is safe but by intermedâ—â— difficulties and 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 he is safe in the midst of his persecutions they may disturb his rest and discompose his fancy but they are like the firy charriot to Elias he is encircled with fire and rare circumstances and strange usages but is carried up to Heaven in a robe of flames and so was Noah safe when the flood came and was the great type and instance too of the verification of this proposition he was 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 he was put into a strange condition perpetually wandring shut up in a prison of wood living upon faith having never had the experience of being safe in flouds And so have I often seen young and unskilful persons sitting in a little boat when every little wave sporting about the sides of the vessel and every motion and dancing of the barge seemed a danger and made them cling fast upon their fellows and yet all the while they wereas safe as if they sat under a tree while a gentle winde shaked the leaves into a refreshment and a cooling shade And the unskiful unexperienced Christian shrikes out when ever his vessel shakes thinking it alwayes a danger that the watry pavement is not stable and resident like a rock and yet all his danger is in himself none at all from without for he is indeed moving upon the waters but fastned to a rock faith is his foundation and hope is his anchor and deathis his harbour and Christ is his pilot and heaven is his countrey and all the evils of poverty or affronts of tribunals and evil judges of fears and sadder apprehensions are but like the loud wind blowing from the right point they make a noise and drive faster to the harbour and if we do not leave the ship and leap into the sea quit the interests of religion and run to the securities of the world cut our cables and dissolve our hopes grow impatient and hug a wave and die in its embraces we are as safe at sea safer in the storm which God sends us then in a calm when we are be friended with the world 2. But 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 may also signifie raro If the righteous is seldom safe which implyes that sometimes he is even in a temporal sense God sometimes sends Halcyon dayes to his Church and when he promised Kings and Queens to be their nurses he intended it for a blessing and yet this blessing does of teâ—imes so ill succeed that it is the greater blessing of the two not to give us that blessing too freely but 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 this is scarcly done and yet sometimes it is and God sometimes refreshes languishing piety with such arguments as comply with our infirmities and though it be a shame to us to need such allectives and infant gauds such which the heathen world and the first rudiments of the Israelites did need God who pitties us and will be wanting in nothing to us as he corroborates our willing spirits with proper entertainments so also he supports our weak flesh and not onely cheers an afflicted soul with beams of light and antepasts and earnests of glory but is kinde also to our man of flesh and weaknesse and to this purpose he sends thunder-bolts from heaven upon evil men dividing their tongues infatuating their counsels cursing their posterity and ruining their families 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Sometimes God destroyes their armies or
that be all their hopes then we may with a sad spirit and a soul of pity inquire into the Question of the Text Where shall the ungodly and sinner appear Even there where Gods face shall never shine where there shall be fire and no light where there shall be no Angels but what are many thousands yeers ago turned into Devils whereno good man shall ever dwell and from whence the evil and the accursed shall never be dismissed O my God let my soul never come into their counsels nor lie down in their sorrows Sermon XII THE MERCY OF THE DIVINE IVDGMENTS OR Gods Method in curing Sinners 2. Romanes 4. Despisest thou the riches of his goodnesse and forbearance and long-suffering not knowing that the goodnesse of God leadeth thee to repentance FRom the beginning of Time till now all effluxes which have come from God have been nothing but emanations of his goodnesse clothed in variety of circumstances He made man with no other designe then that man should be happy and by receiving derivations from his fountain of mercy might reflect glory to him And therefore God making man for his own glory made also a paradise for mans use and did him good to invite him to do himself a greater for God gave forth demonstrations of his power by instances of mercy and he who might have made ten thousand worlds of wonder and prodigy and created man with faculties able onely to stare upon and admire those miracles of mightinesse did choose to instance his power in the effusions of mercy that at the same instant he might represent himself desireable and adorable in all the capacities of amability that is as excellent in himself and profitable to us For as the Sun sends forth a benigne and gentle influence on the seed of Plants that it may invite forth the active and plastick power from its recesse and secresie that by rising into the tallnesse and dimensions of a tree it may still receive a greater and more refreshing influence from its foster-father the prince of all the bodies of light and in all these emanations the Sun its self receives no advantage but the honour of doing benefits so doth the Almighty Father of all the creatures He at first sends forth his blessings upon us that we by using them aright should make our selves capable of greater while the giving glory to God and doing homage to him are nothing for his advantage but onely for ours our duties towards him being like vapours ascending from the earth not at all to refresh the region of the clouds but to return back in a fruitfull and refreshing shower And God created us not that we can increase his felicity but that he might have a subject receptive of felicity from him thus he causes us to be born that we may be capable of his blessings he causes us to be baptized that we may have a title to the glorious promises Evangelicall he gives us his Son that we may be rescued from hell and when we constraine him to use harsh courses towards us it is also in mercy he smites us to cure a disease he sends us sicknesse to procure our health and as if God were all mercy he his mercifull in his first designe in all his instruments in the way and in the end of the journey and does not onely shew the riches of his goodnesse to them that do well but to all men that they may do well he is good to make us good he does us benefits to make us happy and if we by despising such gracious rayes of light and heat stop their progresse and interrupt their designe the losse is not Gods but ours we shall be the miserable and accursed people This is the sense and paraphrase of my Text. Despisest thou the riches of his goodnesse c. Thou dost not know that is thou considerest not that it is for further benefit that God does thee this the goodnesse of God is not a designe to serve his own ends upon thee but thine upon him The goodnesse of God leadeth thee to repentance Here then is Gods method of curing man-kind 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 First goodnesse or inviting us to him by sugred words by the placid arguments of temporall favour and the propositions of excellent promises Secondly 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 at the same time although God is provoked every day yet he does 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 he tolerates our stubbornnesse he forbears to punish and when he does begin to strike takes his hand off and gives us truce and respite For so 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 signifies laxamentum and inducias too Thirdly 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 still a long putting off and deferring his finall destroying anger by using all meanes to force us to repentance and this especially by the way of judgements these being the last reserves of the Divine mercy and how ever we esteem it is the greatest instance of the divine long sufferance that is in the world After these instruments we may consider the end the strand upon which these land us the purpose of this variety of these laborious and admirable arts with which God so studies and contrives the happinesse and salvation of man it is onely that man may be brought by these meanes unto repentance and by repentance may be brought to eternall life This is the treasure of the Divine goodnesse the great and admirable efflux of the eternal beneficence the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the riches of his goodnesse which whosoever despises despises himself and the great interest of his own felicity he shall die in his impenitence and perish in his folly 1. The first great instrument that God chooses to bring us to him is 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 profit or benefit and this must needs be first for those instruments whereby we have a being are so great mercies that besides that they are such which give us the capacities of all other mercies they are the advances of us in the greatest instances of promotion in the world For from nothing to something is an infinite space and a man must have a measure of infinite passed upon him Before he can perceive himself to be either happy or miserable he is not able to give God thanks for one blessing untill he hath received many But then God intends we should enter upon his service at the beginning of our dayes because even then he is before-hand with us and hath already given us great instances of his goodnesse What a prodigy of favour is it to us that he hath passed by so many formes of his creatures and hath not set us down in the rank of any of them till we came to be paulò minores angelis a little lower then the angels and yet from the meanest of them God can perfect his own praise The deeps and the snows the hail and the rain the birds of the air and the fishes of the sea they can and do glorifie
riches to despise such a goodnesse However that we may see the greatnesse of this treasure of goodnesse God seldom leaves us thus for he sees be it spoken to the shame of our natures and the dishonour of our manners he sees that his mercies do not allure us do not make us thankful but as the Roman said felicitate corrumpimur we become worse for Gods mercy and think it will be alwayes holiday and are like the Christal of Arabia hardned not by cold but made crusty and stubborn by the warmth of the divine fire by its refreshments and mercies therefore to demonstrate that God is good indeed he continues his mercise still to us but in another instance he is merciful to us in punishing us that by such instruments we may be led to repentance which will scare us from sin he delivers us up to the paedagogy of the divine judgements and there begins the second part of Gods method intimated in the word 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 or forbearance God begins his cure by causticks by incisions and instruments of vexation to try if the disease that will not yeild to the allectives of cordials and perfumes friction and baths may be forced out by deleteries scarifications and more salutary but least pleasing Physicke 2. 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 forbearance it is called in the text which signifies laxamentum or inducias that is when the decrees of the divine judgements temporal are gone out either wholly to suspend the executio◠of them which is induciae or a reprieve or else when God hath struck once or twice he takes off his hand that is laxamentum an ease of remission of his judgment in both these although in judgement God remembers mercy yet we are under discipline we are brought into the paenitential chamber at least we are shewed the rod of God and if like Moses rod it turnes us into serpents and that we repent not but grow more Devils yet then it turnes into a rod again and finishes up the smiting or the first designed affliction But I consider it first in general the riches of the divine goodnesse is manifest in beginning this new method of curing us by severity and by a rod. And that you may not wonder that I expound this forbearance to be an act of mercy punishing I observe that besides that the word supposes the method changed and it is a mercy about judgements and their manner of execution it is also in the nature of the thing in the conjunction of circumstances and the designes of God a mercy when he threatens us or strike us into repentance We think that the way of blessings and prosperous accidents is the finer way of securing our duty and that when our heads are anointed our cups crowned and our tables full the very caresses of our spirits will best of all dance before the Ark and sing perpetual Anthemes to the honour of our Benefactor and Patron God and we are apt to dream that God will make his Saints raigne here as kings in a millenary kingdom and give them the riches and fortunes of this world that they may rule over men and sing psalms to God for ever But I remember what Xenophanes saies of God 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 God is like to men neither in shape nor in counsel he knowes that his mercies confirm some and encourage more but they convert but few alone they lead men to dissolution of manners and forgetfulnesse of God rather then repentance not but that mercies are competent and apt instruments of grace if we would but because we are more dispersed in our spirits and by a prosperous accident are melted into joy and garishness and drawn off from the sobriety of recollection Jeshurun waxed fat and kicked Many are not able to suffer and endure prosperity it is like the light of the sun to a weak eye glorious indeed in it self but not proportioned to such an instrument Adam himself as the Rabbins say did not dwell one night in Paradise but was poisoned with prosperity with the beauty of his fair wife and a beauteous tree and Noah and Lot were both righteous and examplary the one to Sodom the other to the old world so long as they lived in a place in which they were obnoxious to the common suffering but as soon as the one of them had scaped from drowing and the other from burning and were put into security they fell into crimes which have dishonoured their memories for above thirty generations together the crimes of drunkennesse and incest wealth and a full fortune make men licenciously vitious tempting a man with power to act all that he can desire or designe vitiously Inde irae faciles Namque ut opes nimias mundo fortuna subacto Intulit et rebus mores cessere secundis Cultus gest are decoros vix nuribus rapuere mares totoque accersitur orbe Quo gens quaeque perit Lucan And let me observe to you that though there are in the new Testament many promises and provisions made for the poor in that very capacity they haveing a title to some certain circumstances and additionals of grace and blessing yet to rich men our blessed Saviour was pleased to make none at all but to leave them involved in general comprehensions and to have a title to the special promises onely by becomming poor in spirit and in preparation of minde though not in fortune and possession How ever it is hard for God to perswade us to this till we are taught it by a sad experience that those prosperities which we think will make us serve God cheerfully make us to serve the world and secular ends diligently and God not at all Repentance is a duty that best complies with affliction 〈◊〉 is a symbolical estate of the same complexion and constitution half the work of repentance is done by a sad accident our spirits are made sad our gayeties mortified our wildnesse corrected the water springs are ready to run over but if God should grant our desires and give to most men prosperity with a designe to lead them to repentance all his pompe and all his employment and all his affections and passions and all his circumstances are so many degrees of distance from the conditions and natures of repentance It was reported by Dio concerning Neros mother that she often wished that her Son might be Emperour and wished it with so great passion that upon that condition she cared not though her Son might kill her Her first wish and her second fear were both granted but when she began to fear that her Son did really designe to murder her she used all the art and instruments of diversion that a witty and a powerfull a timerous person and a woman could invent or apply Just so it is with us so we might have our wishes of prosperity we promise to undergo all the severities of repentance but when we are landed upon our desire then every degree of
satisfaction of those sensualities is a temptation against repentance for a man must have his affections weaned from those possessions before he can be reconciled to the possibilities of repentance And because God knowes this well and loves us better then we do our selves therefore he sends upon us the 1. scrolls of vengeance the hand writing upon the wall to denounce judgement against us for God is so highly resolved to bring us to repentance some way or other that if by his goodnesse he cannot shame us into it he will try if by his judgements he can scare us into it not that he strikes alwayes as soon as he hath sent his warrants out 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 said Philo Thus God sent Jonas and denounced judgements against Niniveh but with the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 with the forbearance of forty dayes for the time of their escape if they would repent When Noah the great preacher of righteousnesse denounced the flood to all the world it was with the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 with the forbearance of 120. years and when the great extermination of the Jewish nation and their total deletion from being Gods people was foretold by Christ and decreed by God yet they had the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 of forty years in which they were perpetually called to repentance These were reprieves and deferrings of the stroke But sometimes God strikes once and then forbeares and such are all those sadnesses which are lesse then death every sicknesse every losse every disgrace the death of friends and neerest relatives sudden discontents these are all of them the lowder calls of God to repentance but still instances of forbearance Indeed many times this forbearance makes men impudent it was so in the case of Pharaoh when God smote him and then forbore Pharaohs heart grew callous and insensible till God struck again and this was the meaning of these words of God I will harden the heart of pharaoh that is I wil forbear him smite him and then take the blow off Sic enim Deus induravit Pharaonis cor said Saint Basil For as water taken off from fire will sooner congeale and become icy then if it had not been attenuated by the heate so is the heart of some men when smitten by God it seemes soft and plyable but taken off from the fire of affliction it presently becomes horrid then stiff and then hard as a rock of Adamant or as the gates of death and hell But this is besides the purpose and intention of the Divine mercy this is an 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 a plain contradiction to the riches of Gods goodnesse this is to be evill because God is good to burn with flames because we are coold with water this is to put out the lamps of heaven or if we cannot do it to put our own eyes out least we should behold the fair beauty of the Lord and be enamoured of his goodnesse and repent and live O take heed of despising this goodnesse for this is one of Gods latest arts to save us he hath no way left beyond this but to punish us with a lasting judgement and a poinant affliction In the tomb of Terentia certain lamps burned under ground many ages together but as soon as ever they were brought into the aire and saw a bigger light they went out never to be reenkindled so long as we are in the retirements of sorrow of want of fear of sicknesse or of any sad accident we are burning and shining lamps but when God comes with his 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 with his forbearance and lifts us up from the gates of death and carries us abroad into the open aire that we converse with prosperity and temptation we go out in darknesse and we cannot be preserved in heat and light but by still dwelling in the regions of sorrow And if such be our weaknesses or our folly it concerns us to pray against such deliverances to be afraid of health to beg of God to continue a persecution and not to deny us the mercy of an affliction And do not we finde all this to be a great truth in our selves are we so great strangers to our own weaknesses and unworthinesse as not to remember when God scared us with judgements in the neighbourhood whence we lived in a great plague or if were ever in a storm or God had sent a sicknesse upon us then we may please to remember that repentance was our businesse that we designed mountains of piety renewed our holy purposes made vows and solemn sacraments to God to become penitent and obedient persons and we may also remember without much considering that assoon as God began to forbear us we would no longer forbear to sin but adde flame to flame a heap of sins to a treasure of wrath already too big being like Pharaoh or Herod or like the oxe and mule more hardy and callous for our stripes and melted in the fire and frozen harder in the cold worse for all our afflictions and the worse for all Gods judgements not bettered by his goodnesse nor mollified by his threatnings and what is there more left for God to do unto us He that is not won by the sence of Gods mercy can never finde any thing in God that shall convert him and he whom fear and sense of pain cannot mend can never finde any argument from himself that shall make him wise This is sad that nothing from without and nothing from within shall move us nothing in Heaven and nothing in Hell neither love nor fear gratitude to God nor preservation of our selves shall make us to repent 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 that shall be his final sentence He shall never escape that ruine from which the greatest art of God could not entice nor his terrour scare him he loved cursing therefore shall it happen to him he loved not blessing therefore shall it be far from him Let therefore every one of us take the account of our lives and read over the sermons that God hath made us besides thâ—â— sweet language of his mercy and his still voice from Heaven consider what voices of thunder you have heard and presently that noise ceased and God was heard in the still voice agaiâ— What dangers have any of you escaped were you ever assaâ—â—â—ed by the rudenesse of an ill natur'd man have you never had a dangerous fall and escaped it did none of you ever scape drowning and in a great danger saw the forbearance of God have you never been sick as your feared unto death or suppose none of these things hath happened hath not God threatned you all and forborne to smite you or smitten you and forborne to kill you that is evident But if you had been a Privado and of the Cabinet councel with your Angel Guardian that from him you might have known how many dangers you have escaped how often you have been neer a ruine so neer that if you had seen
your danger with a sober spirit the fear of it would have half killed you If he had but told you how often God had sent out his Warrants to the exterminating Angel and our Blessed Saviour by his intercession hath obtained a reprieve that he might have the content of rejoycing at thy conversion and repentance If you had known from him the secrets of that providence which governs us in secret and how many thousand times the Devil would have done thee hurt and how often himself as a ministring spirit of Gods goodnesse and forbearance did interpose and abate or divert a mischief which was falling on thy head it must needs cover thy head with a cloud of shame and blushing at that ingratitude and that folly that neither will give God thanks nor secure thy own well being Hadst thou never any dangerous fall in thy intemperance then God shewed thee thy danger and that he was angry at thy sin but yet did so pity thy person that he would forbear thee a little longer else that fall had been into thy grave When thy gluttony gave thee a surfet and God gave thee a remedy his meaning then was that thy gluttony rather should be cured then thy surfet that repentance should have been thy remedy and abstinence and fasting should be thy cure Did ever thy proud or revengefull spirit engage the upon a Duell or a vexatious Law-suit and God brought thee off with life or peace his purpose then was that his mercy should teach thee charity and he that cannot read the purposes of God written with the finger of judgement for as yet his whole hand is not laid on either is consigned to eternall ruine because God will no more endeavour his cure or if his mercy still continues and goes on in long-suffering it shall be by such vexatious instruments such causticks and corrosives such tormenting and desperate medicaments such which in the very cure will soundly punish thy folly and ingratitude For deceive not your selves Gods mercy cannot be made a patron for any mans impiety the purpose of it is to bring us to repentance and God will do it by the mercies of his mercies or by the mercies of his judgements he will either break our hearts into a thousand fragments of contrition or break our bones in the ruines of the grave and hell And since God rejoyces in his mercy above all his works he will be most impatient that we shall despise that in which he most delights and in which we have the greatest reason to delight the riches of that goodnesse which is essentiall and part of his glory and is communicated to us to bring us to repentance that we may partake of that goodnesse and behold that glory Sermon XIII The mercies of the Divine Judgements Part II. 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 long-suffering in this one word are contained all the treasures of the Divine goodnesse here is the length and extension of his mercy pertrahit spiritum super nos Dominus so the Syrian Interpreter reads Luk. 18. 7. God holds his breath He retains his anger within him lest it should come forth and blast us and here is also much of the Divine justice For although God suffers long yet he does not let us alone he forbears to destroy us but not to punish us and in both he by many accidents gives probation of his power according to the prayer of the Wise man 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Thou art mercifull towards us all because thou canst do all things and thou passedst by the sins of men that they may repent And that God shall support our spirit and preserve our patience and nourish our hope and correct our stubbornnesse and mortifie our pride and bring us to him whether we will or no by such gracious violences and mercifull judgements which he uses towards us as his last remedies is not onely the demonstration of a mighty mercy but of an almighty power So hard a thing it is to make us leave our follies and become wise that were not the mercies of God an effective pity and clothed in all the way of its progresse with mightinesse and power every sinner should perish irrevocably But this is the fiery triall the last purgatory fire which God uses to burn the thistles and purifie the drosse When the gentle influence of a Sun-beam will not wither them nor the weeding hook of a short affliction cut them out then God comes with fire to burn us with the ax laid to the root of the tree but then observe that when we are under this state of cure we are so neer destruction that the same instrument that God uses for remedy to us is also prepared to destroy us the fire is as apt to burn us to ashes as to cleansing when we are so overgrown and the ax as instrumentall to cut us down for fewell as to square us for building in Gods temple and therefore when it comes thus far it will be hard discerning what the purpose of the ax is and whether the fire means to burn we shall know it by the change wrought upon our selves For what Plato said concerning his dream of Purgatory is true here Quicunque non purgatus migrat ad inferos jacebit in luto quicunque verò mitratus illuc accesserit habitabit cum Deis He that dies in his impurities shall lie in it for ever but he that descends to his grave purged and mitred that is having quitted his vices superinduens justitiam being clothed with righteousnesse shall dwell in light and immortality It is sad that we put God to such extremities and as it happens in long diseases those which Physitians use for the last remedies seldom prevail and when consumptive persons come to have their heads shaven they do not often escape So it is when we put God to his last remedies God indeed hath the glory of his patience and his long-suffering but we seldom have the benefit and the use of it For if when our sin was young and our strength more active and our habits lesse and vertue not so much a stranger to us we suffered sin to prevail upon us to grow stronger then the ruins of our spirit and to lesson us into the state of sicknesse and disability in the midst of all those remedies which God used to our beginning diseases much more desperate is our recovery when our disease is stronger and our faculties weaker when our sins raigne in us and our thoughts of vertue are not alive However although I say this and it is highly considerable to the purpose that we never suffered things to come to this extremity yet if it be upon us we must do as well as we can But then we are to look upon it as a designe of Gods last mercy beyond which if we protract our repentance our condition is desperately miserable The whole state of which mercy we understand by the parable of the King reckoning
that is he that repents him of his sins But theâ—e are a great many despisers all they that live in their sins they that have more blessings then they can reckon houres in their lives that are courted by the divine favour and woed to salvation as if mankinde were to give not to receive so great a blessing all they that answer not to so friendly summons they are despisers of Gods mercies and although God overflows with mercies and does not often leave us to the onely hopes of being cured by â—â—â—ctions and gentle cataplasmes but proceeds further and gives us stibium or prepared steele sharp arrows of his anger and the sword and the hand of sicknesse yet we are not sure of so much favour as to be entertained longer in Gods hospital but many be thrust forth among the incurabili Plutarch reports concerning swine that their optick nervs are so disposed to turne their eyes downwards that they cannot look upwards nor behold the face of heaven unlesse they be thrown upon their backs Such Swine are we we seldom can look up to heaven til God by his judgements throws us upon our backs till he humbles us softens us with showers of our own blood and tears of sorrow and yet God hath not promised that he will do so much for us but for ought we know as soon as ever the devil enters into our swinish and brutish hearts we shall run down the hill and perish in the floods and seas of intolerable miserie And therefore besides that it is a huge folly in us that we wil not be cured with pleasant medicines but must be longing for colliquintida and for vomits for knives and poniards instead of the gentle shoures of the divine refreshments besides that this is an imprudence and sottishnesse we do infinitely put it to the venture whether we shall be in a saverable condition or no after the rejection of the first state of mercies But however then begins the first step of the judgement and pungent misery we are perishing people or if not yet at the last not to be cured without the abscision of a member without the cutting of a hand or leg or the putting out of an eye we must be cut to take the stone out of our hearts and that is a state of a very great infelicity and if we scape the stone we cannot escape the surgeons knife if we scape death yet we have a sicknesse and though that be a great mercy in respect of death yet it is as great a misery in respect of health and that is the first punishment for the despite done to the first and most sensible mercies we are fallen into a sicknesse that cannot be cured but by disease and hardship But if this despite runs further and when the mercies look on us with an angry countenance and that God gives us onely the mercy of a punishment if we despise this too we increase but our misery as we increase our sin the summe of which is this that if Pharaoh will not be cured by one plague he shall have ten and if ten will not do it the great and tenth wave which is far bigger then all the rest the severest and the last arrow of the quiver then we shall perish in the red sea the sea of flames and blood in which the ungodly shall roule eternally But some of these despisers are such as are unmooved when God smites others like Gallio when the Jews took Softhenes and beat him in the pleading place he cared for none of these things he was not concerned in that interest and many Gallio's there are amongst us that understand it not to be a part of the divine method of Gods long sufferance to strike others to make us afraid But however we sleep in the midst of such alarums yet know that there is not one death in all the neighbour-hood but is intended to thee every crowing of the cock is to awake thee to repentance and if thou sleepest still the next turn may be thine God will send his Angel as he did to Peter and smite thee on thy side and wake thee from thy dead sleep of sin and sottishnesse But beyond this some are despisers still and hope to drown the noises of mount Sinai the sound of Canons of thunders and lightnings with a counternoise of revelling and clamorous roarings with merry meetings like the sacrifices to Moloch they sound drums and trumpets that they might not hear the sad shrikings of their children as they were dying in the cavety of the brazen idoll and when their conscience shrikes out or murmurs in a sad melancholy or something that is dear to them is smitten they attempt to drown it in a sea of drink in the heathenish noises of idle and drunen company and that which God sends to lead them to repentance leads them to a taverne not to refresh their needs of nature or for ends of a tolerable civility or innocent purposes but like the condemned persons among the Levantines they tasted wine freely that they might die and be insensible I could easily reprove such persons with an old Greek proverb mentioned by Plutarch 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 You shall ill be cured of the knotted Gout if you have nothing else but a wide shoe But this reproof is too gentle for so great a madnesse it is not onely an incompetent cure to apply the plaister of a sin or vanity to cure the smart of a divine judgement but it is a great increaser of the misery by swelling the cause to bigger and monstrous proportions It is just as if an impatient fool feeling the smart of his medicine shall tear his wounds open and throw away the instruments of his cure because they bring him health at the charge of a little pain 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 He that is full of stripes and troubles and decked round about with thorns he is neer to God But he that because he sits uneasily when he sits neer the King that was crowned with thorns shall remove thence or strew flowers roses and Jessamine the downe of thistles and the softest Gossamere that he may die without pain die quietly and like a lamb sink to the bottom of hell without noise this man is a fool because he accepts death if it arrest him in civil language is content to die by the sentence of an eloquent Judge and prefers a quiet passage to hell before going to heaven in a storm That Italian Gentleman was certainly a great lover of his sleep who was angry with the lizard that wak't him when a viper was creeping into his mouth when the Devil is entring into us to poison our spirits and steal our souls away while we are sleeping in the lethargy of sin God sends his sharp messages to awaken us and we call that the enemy and use arts to cure the remedy not to cure the disease There are some persons that will never be cured not because
boyes that went to Athens the first year were wise men the second year Philosophers the third Orators and the fourth were but Plebeians and understood nothing but their own ignorance And just so it happens to some in the progresses of religion at first they are violent and active and then they satiate all the appetites of religion and that which is left is that they were soon weary and sat down in displeasure and return to the world and dwell in the businesse of pride or mony and by this time they understand that their religion is declined and passed from the heats and follies of youth to the coldnesse and infirmities of old age The remedies of which is onely a diligent spirit and a busie religion a great industry a full portion of time in holy offices that as the Oracle said to the Cirrheans noctes diesque belligerandum they could not be happy unlesse they waged war night and day that is unlesse we perpetually fight against our own vices and repell our Ghostly enemies and stand upon our guard we must stand for ever in the state of babes in Christ or else return to the first imperfections of an unchristened soul and an unsanctified spirit That 's the first particular 2. The second step of our growth in grace is when vertues grow habitual apt and easie in our manners and dispositions For although many new converts have a great zeal and a busie spirit apt enough as they think to contest against all the difficulties of a spiritual life yet they meet with such powerful oppositions from without and a false heart within that their first heats are soon broken and either they are for ever discouraged or are forced to march more slowly and proceed more temperately for ever after 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 It is an easie thing to commit a wickednesse for temptation and infirmity are alwayes too neer us But God hath made care and sweat prudence and diligence experience and watchfulnesse wisdom and labour at home and good guides abroad to be instruments and means to purchase vertue The way is long and difficult at first but in the progresse and pursuit we finde all the knots made plain and the rough wayes made smooth jam monte potius Now the spirit of grace is like a new soul within him and he hath new appetites and new pleasures when the things of the world grow unsavory and the things of religion are delicious when his temptations to his old crimes return but seldom and they prevail not at all or in very inconsiderable instances and stay not at all but are reproached with a penitentiall sorrow and speedy amendment when we do actions of vertue quickly frequently and with delight then we have grown in grace in the same degree in which they can perceive these excellent dispositions Some persons there are who dare not sin they dare not omit their hours of prayer and they are restlesse in their spirits till they have done but they go to it as to execution they stay from it as long as they can and they drive like Pharoahs charets with the wheels off sadly and heavily and besides that such persons have reserved to themselves the best part of their sacrifice and do not give their will to God they do not love him with all their heart they are also soonest tempted to retire and fall off Sextius Romanus resigned the honours and offices of the city and betook himself to the severity of a Philosophical life But when his unusual diet and hard labour began to pinch his flesh and he felt his propositions smart and that which was fine in discourse at a Symposiack or an Academical dinner began to sit uneasily upon him in the practise he so despaired that he had like to have cast himself into the sea to appease the labours of his religion Because he never had gone further then to think it a fine thing to be a wise man he would commend it but he was loth to pay for it at the price that God and the Philosopher set upon it But he that his grown 〈◊〉 grace and hath made religion habitual to his spirit is not at ease but when he is doing the works of the new man he rests in religion and comforts his sorrows with thinking of his prayers and in all crosses of the world he is patient because his joy is at hand to refresh him when he list for he cares not so he may serve God and if you make him poor here he is rich there and he counts that to be his proper service his worke his recreation and reward 3. But â—â—cause in the course of holy living although the duty be regular and constant yet the sensible relishes and the flowrings of affections the zeal and the visible expressions do not alwayes make the same emission but sometimes by designe and sometimes by order somtimes by affection we are more busie more intire and more intent upon the actions of religion in such cases we are to judge of our growth in grace if after every interval of extraordinary piety the next return be more devout and more affectionate the labour be more cheerfull and more active and if religion returnes oftner and stayes longer in the same expressions and leaves more satisfaction upon the spirit Are your communions more frequent and when they are do ye approach neerer to God have you made firmer resolutions and entertained more hearty purposes of amendment Do you love God more dutifully and your neighbour with a greater charity do you not so easily return to the world as formerly are not you glad when the thing is done do you go to your secular accounts with a more weaned affection then before if you communicate well it is certain that you will still do it better if you do not communicate well every opportunity of doing it is but a new trouble easily excused readily omitted done because it is necessary but not because we love it and we shall finde that such persons in their old age do it worst of all And it was observed by a Spanish Confessor who was also a famous preacher that in persons not very religious the confessions which they made upon their deathbed were the coldest the most imperfect and with lesse contrition then all that he had observed them to make in many years before For so the Canes of Egypt when they newly arise from their bed of mud and slime of Nilus start up into an equal and continual length and are interrupted but with few knots and are strong and beauteous with great distances and intervals but when they are grown to their full length they lessen into the point of a pyramis and multiply their knots and joynts interrupting the finenesse and smoothnesse of its body so are the steps declensions of him that does not grow in grace at first when he springs up from his impurity by the waters of baptisme and
over-lay thy infant-vertue or drown it with a flood of breast-milk Sermon XV. Of Growth in Grace Part II. 5. HE is well grown in or towards the state of grace who is more patient of a sharp reproof then of a secret flattery For a reprehension contains so much mortification to the pride and complacencies of a man is so great an affront to an easie and undisturbed person is so empty of pleasure and so full of profit that he must needs love vertue in a great degree who can take in that which onely serves her end and is displeasant to himself and all his gayeties A severe reprehender of anothers vice comes dressed like Jacob when he went to cozen his brother of the blessing his outside is rough and hairy but the voice is Jacobs voice rough hands and a healthfull language get the blessing even against the will of him that shall feel it but he that is patient and even not apt to excuse his fault that is lesse apt to anger or to scorn him that snatches him rudely from the flames of hell he is vertues Confessor and suffers these lesser stripes for that interest which will end in spirituall and eternall benedictions They who are furious against their monitors are incorrigible but it is one degree of meeknesse to suffer discipline and a meek man cannot easily be an ill man especially in the present instance he appears at least to have a healthfull constitution he hath good flesh to heal his spirit is capable of medicine and that man can never be despaired of who hath a disposition so neer his health as to improve all physick and whose nature is relieved by every good accident from without But that which I observe is That this is not onely a good disposition towards repentance and restitution but is a signe of growth in grace according as it becomes naturall easie and habituall Some men chide themselves for all their misdemeanours because they would be represented to the censures and opinions of other men with a fair Character and such as need not to be reproved others out of inconsideration sleep in their own dark rooms and untill the charity of a Guide or of a friend draws the curtain and lets in a beam of light dream on untill the graves open and hell devours them But if they be called upon by the grace of God let down with a sheet of counsels and friendly precepts they are presently inclined to be obedient to the heavenly monitions but unlesse they be dressed with circumstances of honour and civility with arts of entertainment and insinuation they are rejected utterly or received unwillingly Therefore although upon any termes to endure a sharp reproof be a good signe of amendment yet the growth of grace is not properly signified by every such sufferance For when this disposition begins amendment also begins and goes on in proportion to the increment of this To endure a reproof without adding a new sin is the first step to amendments that is to endure it without scorn or hatred or indignation 2. The next is to suffer reproof without excusing our selves For he that is apt to excuse himself is onely desirous in a civill manner to set the reproof aside and to represent the charitable monitour to be too hasty in his judgement and deceived in his information and the fault to dwell there not with himself 3. Then he that proceeds in this instance admits the reprovers sermon or discourse without a private regret he hath no secret murmurs or unwillingnesses to the humiliation but is onely ashamed that he should deserve it but for the reprehension it self that troubles him not but he looks on it as his own medicine and the others charity 4. But if to this he addes that he voluntary confesses his own fault and of his own accord vomits out the loads of his own intemperance and eases his spirit of the infection then it is certain he is not onely a professed and hearty enemy against sin but a zealous and a prudent and an active person against all its interest and never counts himself at ease but while he rests upon the banks of Sion or at the gates of the temple never pleased but in vertue and religion Then he knows the state of his soul and the state of his danger he reckons it no objection to be abased in the face of man so he may be gracious in the eyes of God And that 's a signe of a good grace and a holy wisdom That man is grown in the grace of God and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. Justus in principio sermonis est accusator sui said the Wise man The righteous accuseth himself in the beginning that is quickly lest he be prevented And certain it is he cannot be either wise or good that had rather have a reall sin within him then that a good man should beleeve him to be a repenting sinner that had rather keep his crime then lose his reputation that is rather to be so then to be thought so rather be without the favour of God then of his neighbour Diogenes once spied a young man coming out of a Tavern or place of entertainment who perceiving himself observed by the Philosopher with some confusion stepped back again that he might if possible preserve his fame with that severe person But Diogenes told him Quanto magis intraveris tanto magis eris in cauponâ The more you go back the longer you are in the place where you are ashamed to be seen and he that conceals his sin still retains that which he counts his shame and his burden Hippocrates was noted for an ingenious person that he published and confessed his errour concerning the futures of the head and all ages since Saint Austin have called him pious for writing his book of retractations in which he published his former ignorances and mistakes and so set his shame off to the world invested with a garment of modesty and above half changed before they were seen I did the rather insist upon this particular because it is a consideration of huge concernment and yet much neglected in all its instances and degrees We neither confesse our shame nor endure it we are privately troubled and publikely excuse it we turn charity into bitternesse and our reproof into contumacy and scorne and who is there amongst us that can endure a personall charge or is not to be taught his personall duty by generall discoursings by parable and apologue by acts of insinuation and wary distances but by this state of persons we know the estate of our own spirits When God sent his Prophets to the people and they stoned them with stones and sawed them asunder and cast them into dungeons and made them beggers the people fell into the condition of Babylon Quam curavimus non est sanata We healed her said the Prophets But she would not be cured Derelinquamus eam that 's her
a great hell to those persons who by their evil lives are consigned to such sad and miserable portions A thousand yeers is a long while to be in torment we finde a fever of 21. dayes to be like an age in length but when the duration of an intolerable misery is for ever in the height and for ever beginning and ten thousand yeers hath spent no part of its terme but it makes a perpetual efflux and is like the centre of a circle which ever transmits lines to the circumference this is a consideration so sad that the horrour of it and the reflexion upon its abode and duration make a great part of the hell for hell could not be hell without the despair of accursed souls for any hope were a refreshment and a drop of water which would help to allay those flames which as they burn intolerably so they must burn for ever And I desire you to consider that although the Scripture uses the word fire to expresse the torments of accursed souls yet fire can no more equal the pangs of hell then it can torment a material substance the pains of perishing souls being as much more afflictive then the smart of fire as the smart of fire is troublesome beyond the softnesse of Persian carpets or the sensuality of the Asian Luxury for the pains of hell and the perishing or losing of the soul is to suffer the wrath of God 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 our God is a consuming fire that is the fire of hell when God takes away all comfort from us nothing to support our spirit is left us when sorrow is our food and tears our drink when it is eternal night without Sun or star or lamp or sleep when we burn with fire without light that is are loaden with sadnesse without remedy or hope or ease and that this wrath is to be expressed and to fall upon us in spiritual immateriall but most accursed most pungent and dolorous emanations then we feel what it is to lose a soul. We may guesse at it by the terrours of a guilty conscience those verbera laeniatus those secret lashings and whips of the exterminating Angel those thorns in the soul when a man is haunted by an evil spirit those butcheries which the soul of a Tyrant or a violent or a vitious person when he falls in to fear or any calamity does feel are the infinite arguments that Hell which is the consummation of the torment of conscience just as man-hood is the consummation of infancy or as glory is the perfection of grace is an affliction greater then the bulk of heaven and eaâ—th for there it is that God powrs out the treasures of his wrath and empties the whole magazin of thunder bolts and all the â—rmory of God is imployed not in the chastising but in the tâ—â—menting of a perishing soul. Lucian brings in Radamanthus telâ—ing the poor wandring souls upon the banks of Elysium 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 for every wickednesse that any man commits in his life when he comes to hell he hath stamped upon his soul an invisible brand and mark of torment and this begins here and is not cancâ—â—led by deathâ— but there is enlarged by the greatnesse of infinite and â—he aboads of eternity How great these tormens of conscience are here let any man imagine that can but understand what despair means despair upon just reason let it be what it will no misery can be greater then despair and because I hope none here have felt those horrors of an evil conscience which are consignations to eternity you may please to learn it by your own reason or els by the sad instances of story It is reported of Petrus Ilosuanus A Polonian School-master that having read some ill managed discourses of absolute decrees and divine reprobation began to be Phantastick and melancholy and apprehensive that he might be one of those many whom God had decreed for hell from all eternity from possible to probable from probable to certain the temptation soon carried him and when he once began to believe himself to be a person inevitably perishing it is not possible to understand perfectly what infinite fears and agonies and despairs what tremblings what horrors what confusion and amazement the poor man felt within him to consider that he was to be tormented extremely without remedy even to eternal ages This in a short continuance grew insufferable and prevailed upon him so far that he hanged himself and left this account of it or to this purpose in writing in his study I am gone from hence to the flames of hell have forced my way thither being impatient to try what those great torments are which here I have heard with an insupportable amazement this instance may suffice to show what it is to lose a soul. But I will take off from this sad discourse onely I shall crave your attention to a word of exhortation That you take care lest for the purchase of a little trifling inconsiderable portion of the world you come into this place and state of torment Although Homer was pleased to complement the beauty of Helena to such a height as to say it was a sufficient price for all the evils which the Greeks and Trojans suffered in ten years 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Yet it was a more reasonable conjecture of Herodotus that during the ten years siege of Troy Helena for whom the Greeks fought was in Egypt not in the city because it was unimaginable but that the Trojans would have thrown her over the walls rather then for the sake of such a trifle have endured so great calamities we are more sottish then the Trojans if we retain our Helena any one beloved lust any painted Devil any sugar'd temptation with not the hazard but the certainty of having such horrid miseries such in valuable losses And certainly its a strange stupidity of spirit that can sleep in the midst of such thunder when God speaks from heaven with his lowdest voice and draws aside his curtain and shows his arsenal and his armory full of arrows steeled with wrath headed and pointed and hardned with vengeance still to snatch at those arrows if they came but in the retinue of a rich fortune or a vain Mistris if they wait but upon pleasure or profit or in the reare of an ambitious designe But let not us have such a hardinesse against the threats and representments of the divine vengeance as to take the little imposts and revenues of the world and stand in defiance against God and the fears of hell unlesse we have a charm that we can be 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 invisible to the judge of heaven and earth and are impregnable against or are sure we shall be insensible of the miseries of a perishing soul. There is a sort of men who because they will be vitious and Atheistical in their lives have no way to go on with any plaisance and
in a cock-boat or use a childe for his interpreter and that Generall is a Cyclops without an eye who chooses the sickest men to man his Towns and the weakest to fight his battels It cannot be a vigorous prosecution unlesse the means have an efficacy or worth commensurate to all the difficulty and something of the excellency of that end which is designed And indeed men use not to be so weak in acquiring the possessions of their temporals But in matters of religion they think any thing effective enough to secure the greatest interest as if all the fields of heaven and the regions of the Kingdom were waste ground and wanted a Colony of planters and that God invited men to heaven upon any terms that he might rejoyce in the multitude of subjects For certain it is men do more to get a little money then for all the glories of heaven Men rise up early and sit up late and eat the bread of carefulnesse to become richer then their neighbours and are amazed at every losse and impatient of an evil accident and feel a direct strom of passion if they suffer in their interest But in order to heaven they are cold in their religion indevout in their prayers incurious in their walking unwatchfull in their circumstances indifferent in the use of their opportunities infrequent in their discoursings of it not inquisitive of the way and yet think they shall surely go to heaven But a prudent man knows that by the greatnesse of the purchase he is to make an estimate of the value and the price When we ask of God any great thing As wisdom delivery from sicknesse his holy Spirit the forgivenesse of sins the grace of chastity restitution to his favour or the like do we hope to obtain them without a high opinion of the things we ask and if we value them highly must we not desire them earnestly and if we desire them earnestly must we not pray for them fervently and whatsoever we ask for fervently must not we beg for frequently and then because prayer is but one hand toward the reaching a blessing and God requires our cooperation and endeavour and we must work with both hands are we not convinced that our prayers are either faint or a designe of lazinesse when we either ask coldly or else pray loudly hoping to receive the graces we need without labour A prudent person that knows to value the best object of his desires will also know that he must observe the degrees of labour according to the excellency of the reward Prayer must be effectuall fervent frequent continuall holy passionate that must get a grace or secure a blessing The love that we must have to God must be such as to keep his commandements and to make us willing to part with all our estate and all our honour and our life for the testimony of a holy conscience Our charity to our neighbours must be expressive in a language of a reall friendship aptnesse to forgive readinesse to forbear in pitying infirmities in relieving necessities in giving our goods and our lives and quitting our privileges to save his soul to secure and support his vertue Our repentance must be full of sorrows and care of diligence and hatred against sin it must drive out all and leave no affections towards it it must be constant and persevering fearfull of relapse and watchfull of all accidents Our temperance must sometimes turn into abstinence and most commonly be severe and ever without reproof He that striveth for masteries is temperate saith Saint Paul in all things he that does all this may with some pretence and reason say he intends to go to heaven But they that will not deny a lust nor refrain an appetite they that will be drunk when their friends do merrily constrain them or love a cheap religion and a gentle and lame prayer short and soft quickly said and soon passed over seldome returning and but little observed How is it possible that they should think themselves persons disposed to receive such glorious crowns and scepters such excellent conditions which they have not faith enough to believe nor attention enough to consider and no man can have wit enough to understand But so might an Arâ—adian shepherd look from the rocks or thorow the clefts of the valley where his sheep graze and wonder that the messenger stayes so long from comming to him to be crowned King of all the Greek Ilands or to be adopted heir to the Macedonian Monarchy It is an infinite love of God that we have heaven upon conditions which we can perform with greatest diligence But truely the lives of men are generally such that they do things in order to heaven things I say so few so trifling so unworthy that they are not proportionable to the reward of a crown of oak or a yellow riband the slender reward with which the Romans payed their souldiers for their extraordinary valour True it is that heaven is not in a just sense of a commutation a reward but a gift and an infinite favour but yet it is not reached forth but to persons disposed by the conditions of God which conditions when we pursue in kinde let us be very carefull we do not fail of the mighty price of our high calling for want of degrees and just measures the measures of zeal and a mighty love 3. It is an office of prudence so to serve God that we may at the same time preserve our lives and our estates our interest and reputation for our selves and our relatives so farre as they can consist together Saint Paul in the beginning of Christianity was careful to instruct the forwardnesse and zeal of the new Christians into good husbandry and to catechize the men into good trades and the women into useful imployments that they might not be unprofitable For Christian religion carrying us to heaven does it by the way of a man and by the body it serves the soul as by the soul it serves God and therefore it endeavours to secure the body and its interest that it may continue the opportunities of a crown and prolong the stage in which we are to run for the mighty price of our salvation and this is that part of prudence which is the defensative and guards of a Christian in the time of persecution and it hath in it much of duty He that through an indiscreet zeal casts himself into a needlesse danger hath betrayed his life to tyranny and tempts the sin of an enemy he loses to God the service of many yeers and cuts off himself from a fair opportunity of working his salvation in the main parts of which we shall finde a long life and very many yeers of reason to be little enough he betrayes the interest of his relatives which he is bound to preserve he disables himself of making provision for them of his own house and he that fails in this duty by his own fault is worse then
many particulars and yet if her children separate from her they may be unreasonable and impious 5. The wayes of direction which we have from holy Scripture to distinguish false Apostles from true are taken from their doctrine or their lives That of the doctrine is the most sure way if we can hit upon it but that also is the thing signified and needs to have other signes Saint John and Saint Paul took this way for they were able to do it infallibly All that confesse Jesus incarnate are of God said Saint John those men that deny it are hereticks avoid them and Saint Paul bids to observe them that cause divisions and offences against the doctrine delivered Them also avoid that do so And we might do so as easily as they if the world would onely take their depositum that doctrine which they delivered to all men that is the Creed and superinduce nothing else but suffer Christian faith to rest in its own perfect simplicity unmingled with arts and opinions and interests This course is plain and easie and I will not intricate it with more words but leave it directly in its own truth and certainty with this onely direction That when we are to choose our doctrine or our side we take that which is in the plain unexpounded words of Scripture for in that onely our religion can consist Secondly choose that which is most advantageous to a holy life to the proper graces of a Christian to humility to charity to forgivenesse and alms to obedience and complying with governments to the honour of God and the exaltation of his attributes and to the conservation and advantages of the publike societies of men and this last Saint Paul directs Let our be carefull to maintain good works for necessary uses for he that heartily pursues these proportions cannot be an ill man though he were accidentally and in the particular applications deceived 6. But because this is an act of wisdom rather then prudence and supposes science or knowledge rather then experience therefore it concerns the prudence of a Christian to observe the practise and the rules of practise their lives and pretences the designes and colours the arts of conduct and gaining proselytes which their Doctors and Catechists do use in order to their purposes and in their ministery about souls For although many signes are uncertain yet some are infallible and some are highly probable 7. Therefore those teachers that pretend to be guided by a private spirit are certainly false Doctors I remember what Simmias in Plutarch tels concerning Socrates that if he heard any man say he saw a divine vision he presently esteemed him vain and proud but if he pretended onely to have heard a voice or the word of God he listened to that religiously and would enquire of him with curiosity There was some reason in his fancy for God does not communicate himself by the eye to men but by the ear ye saw no figure but ye heard a voice said Moses to the people concerning God and therefore if any man pretends to speak the word of God we will enquire concerning it the man may the better be heard because he may be certainly reproved if he speaks amisse but if he pretends to visions and revelations to a private spirit and a mission extraordinary the man is proud and unlerned vicious and impudent No Scripture is of private interpretation saith S. Peter that is of private emission or declaration Gods words were delivered indeed by single men but such as were publikely designed Prophets remarked with a known character approved of by the high Priest and Sanhedrim indued with a publike spirit and his doctrines were alwayes agreeable to the other Scriptures But if any man pretends now to the spirit either it must be a private or publike if it be private it can but be usefull to himself alone and it may cozen him too if it be not assisted by the spirit of a publike man But if it be a publike spirit it must enter in at the publike door of ministeries and divine ordinances of Gods grace and mans endeavour it must be subject to the Prophets it is discernable and judicable by them and therefore may be rejected and then it must pretend no longer For he that will pretend to an extraordinary spirit and refuses to be tried by the ordinary wayes must either prophecy or work miracles or must have a voice from heaven to give him testimony The Prophets in the old Testament and the Apostles in the New and Christ between both had no other way of extraordinary probation and they that pretend to any thing extraordinary cannot ought not to be beleeved unlesse they have something more then their own word If I bear witnesse of my self my witnesse is not true said Truth it self our Blessed Lord. But secondly they that intend to teach by an extraordinary spirit if they pretend to teach according to Scripture must be examined by the measures of Scripture and then their extraordinary must be judged by the ordinary spirit and stands or falls by the rules of every good mans religion and publike government and then we are well enough But if they speak any thing against Scripture it is the spirit of Antichrist and the spirit of the Devil For if an Angel from heaven he certainly is a spirit preach any other doctrine let him be accursed But this pretence of a single and extraordinary spirit is nothing else but the spirit of pride errour and delusion a snare to catch easie and credulous souls which are willing to die for a gay word and a distorted face it is the parent of folly and giddy doctrine impossible to be proved and therefore uselesse to all purposes of religion reason or sober counsels it is like an invisible colour or musick without a sound it is and indeed is so intended to be a direct overthrow of order and government and publike ministeries It is bold to say any thing and resolved to prove nothing it imposes upon willing people after the same manner that Oracles and the lying Daemons did of old time abusing men not by proper efficacy of its own but because the men love to be abused it is a great disparagement to the sufficiency of Scripture and asperses the Divine providence for giving to so many ages of the Church an imperfect religion expressely against the truth of their words who said they had declared the whole truth of God and told all the will of God and it is an affront to the Spirit of God the Spirit of wisdom and knowledge of order and publike ministeries But the will furnishes out malice and the understanding sends out levity and they marry and produce a phantastick dream and the daughter sucking winde instead of the milk of the word growes up to madnesse and the spirit of reprobation Besides all this an extraordinary spirit is extremely unnecessary and God does not give immissions and miracles from heaven to
it takes from him the spirit of government and render him diffident pusillanimous private and ashamed if it happen in the person of a subject it makes him hate the man that shall shame him and punish him it hates the light and the Sun because that opens him and therefore is much more against government because that publishes and punishes too One thing I desire to be observed that though the primitive heresies now named and all those others their successors practised and taught horrid impurities yet they did not invade government at all and therefore those sects that these Apostles did signifie by prophecy and in whom both these are concentred were to appear in some latter times and the dayes of the prophecy were not then to be fulfill'd what they are since every age must judge by its own experience for its own interest But Christian religion is so pure and holy that chastity is sometimes used for the whole religion and to do an action chastly signifies purity of intention abstraction from the world and separation from low and secular ends the virginity of the soul and its union with God and all deviations and estrangements from God and adhesion to forbidden objects is called fornication and adultery Those sects therefore that teach incourage or practise impious or unhallowed mixtures and shameful lusts are issues of the impure spirit and most contrary to God who can behold no unclean thing 10. Those prophets and Pastors that pretend severity and live loosely or are severe in small things and give liberty in greater or forbid some sins with extreme rigour and yet practise or teach those that serve their interest or constitute their sect are to be suspected and avoided accordingly Nihil est hominum ineptâ persuasione falsius nec fictâ severitate ineptius All ages of the Church were extremely curious to observe when any new teachers did arise what kinde of lives they lived and if they pretended severely and to a strict life then they knew their danger doubled for it is certain all that teach doctrines contrary to the established religion delivered by the Apostles all they are evil men God will not suffer a good man to be seduced damnably much lesse can he be a seducer of others and therefore you shall still observe the false Apostles to be furious and vehement in their reproofs and severe in their animadversions of others but then if you watch their private or stay till their numbers are full or observe their spiritual habits you shall finde them indulgent to themselves or to return from their disguises or so spiritually wicked that their pride or their revenge their envie or their detraction their scorn or their complacency in themselves their desire of preheminence and their impatience of arrival shall place them far enough in distance from a poor carnal sinner whom they shall load with censures and an upbraiding scorn but themselves are like Devils the spirits of darknesse the spiritual wickednesses in high places Some sects of men are very angry against servants for recreating and easing their labours with a lesse prudent and an unsevere refreshment but the patron of their sect shall oppresse a wicked man and an unbelieving person they shall chastise a drunkard and entertain murmurrers they shall not abide an oath and yet shal force men to break three or four This sect is to be avoided because although it is good to be severe against carnal or bodily sins yet it is not good to mingle with them who chastise a bodily sin to make way for a spiritual or reprove a servant that his Lord may sin alone or punish a stranger and a begger that will not approve their sins but will have sins of his own Concering such persons Saint Paul hath told us that they shall not proceed far but their folly shall be manifest 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 said Lysias Cito ad naturam ficta reciderunt sua They that dissemble their sin and their manners or make severity to serve loosnesse and an imaginary vertue to minister to a real vice they that abhor Idols and would commit sacrilege chastise a drunkard and promote sedition declaime against the vanity of great persons and then spoil them of their goods reform manners and engrosse estates talk godly and do impiously these are teachers which the Holy spirit of God hath by three Apostles bid us to beware of and decline as we would run from the hollownesse of a grave or the despaires and sorrows of the damned 11. The substance of al is this that we must not chose our doctrine by our guide but our guide by the doctrine if we doubt concerning the doctrine we may judge of that by the lives and designes of the Teachers By their fruits you shall know them and by the plain words of the scripture by the Apostles Creed and by the commandments and by the certain known and established forms of government These are the great indices and so plain apt and easy that he that is deceived is so because he will be so he is betrayed into it by his own lust and a voluntary chosen folly 12 Besides these premises there are other little candles that can help to make the judgement clearer but they are such as do not signifie alone but in conjunction with some of the precedent characters which are drawn by the great lines of scripture Such as are 1. when the teachers of sects stir up unprofitable and uselesse Questions 2. when they causelesly retire from the universal customs of Christendom 3. And cancel all the memorials of the greatest mysteries of our redemption 4. When their confessions and Catechismes and their whole religion consist 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 in speculations and ineffective notions in discourses of Angels and spirits in abstractions and raptures in things they understand not and of which they have no revelation 5. Or else if their religion spends it self in ceremonies outward guises and material solemnities and imperfect formes drawing the heart of the vine forth into leaves and irregular fruitless suckers turning the substance into circumstances and the love of God into gestures and the effect of the spirit into the impertinent offices of a burdensom ceremonial For by these two particulars the Apostles reproved the Jews and the Gnostics or those that from the school of Pythagoras pretended conversation with Angels and great knowledge of the secrets of the spirit chosing tutelar Angels and assigning them offices and charges as in the Church of Rome to this day they do to Saints to these adde 6. that we observe whether the guides of souls avoid to suffer for their religion for then the matter is foul or the man not fit to lead that dares not die in cold blood for his religion will the man lay his life and his soul upon the proposition If so then you may consider him upon his proper grounds but if he refuses that refuse his conduct
and forms some faces of religion or sweetnesse of language confident affirmatives or bold oaths protracted treaties or multitude of words affected silence or grave deportment a good name or a good cause a fair relation or a worthy calling great power or a pleasant wit any thing that can be fair or that can be usefull any thing that can do good or be thought good we use it to abuse our brother or promote our interests Leporina resolved to die being troubled for her husbands danger and he resolved to die with her that had so great a kindnesse for him as not to out-live the best of her husbands fortune It was agreed and she temperd the poyson and drank the face of the unwholesome goblet but the weighty poyson sunke to the bottome and the easie man drank it all off and died and the woman carried him forth to funeral and after a little illnesse which she soon recovered she enterd upon the inheritance and a second marriage Tuta frequensque via est This is an usual and a safe way to cozen upon colour of friendship or religion but that is hugely criminal to tell a lie to abuse a mans belief and by it to enter upon any thing of his possession or his injury is a perfect destruction of all humane society the most ignoble of all humane follies perfectly contrary to God who is Truth it self the greatest argument of a timorous and a base a cowardly and a private minde not at all honest or confident to see the Sun a vice fit for slaves 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 as Dio Chrysostomus calls it 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 for the most timorous and the basest of beasts use craft and lie in wait and take their prey and save their lives by deceit and it is the greatest injury to the abused person in the world for besides that it abuses his interest it also makes him for ever insecure and uneasie in his confidence which is the period of cares the rest of a mans spirit it makes it necessary for a man to be jealous and suspicious that is to be troublesome to himself and every man else and above all lying or craftinesse and unfaithful usages robs a man of the honour of his soul making his understanding uselesse and in the condition of a fool spoiled and dishonoured and despised 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Said Plato Every soul loses truth very unwillingly Every man is so great a lover of truth that if he hath it not he loves to beleeve he hath and would fain have all the world to beleeve as he does either presuming that he hath truth or else hating to be deceived or to be esteemed a cheated and an abused person Non licet suffurari mentem hominis etiam Samaritani said R. Moses sed veritatem loquere atque age ingenuè If a man be a Samaritan that is a hated person a person from whom you differ in matter of religion yet steal not his minde away but speak truth to him honestly and ingenuously A mans soul loves to dwell in truth it is his resting place and if you take him from thence you take him into strange regions a place of banishment and dishonour Qui ignotos laedit latro appellatur qui amicos paulò minus quam parricida He that hurts strangers is a thief but he that hurts his friends is little better then a parricide That 's the brand and stigma of hypocrisie and lying it hurts our friends mendacium in damnum potens and makes the man that owns it guilty of a crime that is to be punished by the sorrows usually suffered in the most execrable places of the cities But I must reduce the duty to particulars and discover the contrary vice by the several parts of its proportion 1. The first office of Christian simplicity consists in our religion and manners that they be open and honest publike and justifiable the same at home and abroad for besides the ingenuity and honesty of this there is an indispensable and infinite necessity it should be so because whoever is a hypocrite in his religion mocks God presenting to him the outside and reserving the inward for his enemy which is either a denying God to be the searcher of our hearts or else an open defiance of his omniscience and of his justice To provoke God that we may deceive men to defie his Almightinesse that we may abuse our brother is to destroy all that is Sacred all that is prudent it is an open hostility to all things humane and divine a breaking from all the bands of all relations and uses God so cheaply as if he were to be treated or could be cozened like a weak man and an undiscerning and easie merchant But so is the life of many men Vita fallax abditos sensus gerens Nimisque pulchram turpibus faciem induens It is a crafty life that men live carrying designes and living upon secret purposes Pudor impudentem celat audacem quies pietas nefandum vera fallaces probant simulantque molles dura Men pretend modesty and under that red vail are bold against Superiours saucy to their betters upon pretences of religion invaders of others rights by false propositions in Theology pretending humility they challenge superiority above all orders of men and for being thought more holy think that they have title to govern the world they bear upon their face great religion and are impious in their relations false to their trust unfaithful to their friend unkinde to their dependants 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 turning up the white of their eye and seeking for reputation in the streets so did some of the old hypocrites the Gentile Pharisees Asperum cultum intonsum caput negligentiorem barbam nitidum argento odium cubile humi positum quicquid aliud ambitionem viâ perversâ sequitur being the softest persons under an austere habit the loosest livers under a contracted brow under a pale face having the reddest and most spritely livers these kinde of men have abused all ages of the world and all religions it being so easie in nature so prepared and ready for mischiefs that men should creep into opportunities of devouring the flock upon pretence of defending them and to raise their estates upon colour of saving their souls Introrsum turpes speciosi pelle decorâ Men that are like painted sepulchres entertainment for the eye but images of death chambers of rottennesse and repositories of dead mens bones It may sometimes concern a man to seem religious Gods glory may be shewed by fair appearances or the edification of our brother or the reputation of a cause but this is but sometimes but it alwayes concerns us that we be religious and we may reasonably think that if the colours of religion so well do advantage to us the substance and reality would do it much more For no man can have a good by seeming religious and another by not being so
our nature or an appendage to it for whereas our constitution is weak our souls apt to diminution and impedite faculties our bodies to mutilation and imperfection to blindnesse and crookednesse to stammering and sorrows to baldnesse and deformity to evil conditions and accidents of body and to passions and sadnesse of spirit God hath in his infinite mercy provided for every condition rare suppletories of comfort and usefulnesse to make recompence and sometimes with an overrunning proportion for those natural defects which were apt to make our persons otherwise contemptible and our conditions intolerable God gives to blinde men better memories For upon this account it is that Rufinus makes mention of Didymus of Alexandria who being blinde was blessed with a rare attention and singular memory and by prayer and hearing and meditating and discoursing came to be one of the most excellent Divines of that whole age And it was more remarkable in Nicasius Machliniensis who being blockish at his book in his first childhood fell into accidental blindnesse and from thence continually grew to so quick an apprehension and so tenacious a memory that he became the wonder of his contemporaries and was chosen Rector of the College at Mechlin and was made licentiate of Theology at Lovaine and Doctor of both the laws at Colein living and dying in great reputation for his rare parts and excellent learning At the same rate also God deals with men in other instances want of children he recompences with freedom from care and whatsoever evil happens to the body is therefore most commonly single and unaccompanied because God accepts that evil as the punishment of the sin of the man or the instrument of his vertue or his security and is reckoned as a sufficient cure or a sufficient Antidote God hath laid laid a severe law upon all women thâ—â— in sorrow they shall bring forth children yet God hath so attempeâ—ed that sorrow that they think themselves more accursed if they want that sorrow and they have reason to rejoyce in that state the trouble of which is alleviated by a promise that they shall be saved in bearing children He that wants one eye hath the force and vigorousnesse of both united in that which is left him and when ever any man is afflicted with sorrow his reason and his religion himself and all his friends persons that are civil and persons that are obliged run into comfort him and he may if he will observe wisely finde so many circumstances of ease and remission so many designes of providence and studied favours such contrivances of collateral advantage and certain reserves of substantial and proper comforâ— that in the whole sum of affaires it often happens that a single crosse is a double blessing that even in a temporal sense it is better to go to the house of mourning then of joyes and festival egressions Is not the affliction of â—overty better then the prosperity of a great and tempting fortune does not wisdom dwell in a mean estate and a low spirit retired thoughts and under a sad roof and is it not generally true that sicknesse it self is appayed with religion and holy thoughts with pious resolutions and penitential prayers with returns to God and to sober councels and if this be true that God sends sorrow to cure sin and affliction be the hand-maid to grace it is also certain that every sad contingency in nature is doubly recompenced with the advantages of religion besides those intervening refreshments which support the spirit and refresh its instruments I shall need to instance but once more in this particular God hath sent no greater evil into the world then that in the sweat of our brows we shall eat our bread and in the difficulty and agony in the sorrows and contention of our souls we shall work out our salvation But see how in the first of these God hath out done his own anger and defeated the purposes of his wrath by the inundation of his mercy for this labour and sweat of our brows is so far from being a curse that without it our very bread would not be so great a blessing It is not labour that makes the Garlick and the pulse the Sycamore and the Cresses the cheese of the Goats and the butter of the sheep to be savoury and pleasant as the flesh of the Roe-buck or the milk of the Kine the marrow of Oxen or the thighs of birds If it were not for labour men neither could eat so much nor relish so pleasantly nor sleep so soundly nor be so healthful nor so useful so strong nor so patient so noble or so untempted and as God hath made us beholding to labour for the purchase of many good things so the thing it self ows to labour many degrees of its worth and value and therefore I need not reckon that besides these advantages the mercies of God have found out proper and natural remedies for labour Nights to cure the sweat of the day sleep to ease our watchfulnesse rest to alleviate our burdens and dayes of religion to procure our rest and things are so ordered that labour is become a duty and an act of many vertues and is not so apt to turne into a sin as is its contrary and is therefore necessary not onely because we need it for making provisions of our life but even to ease the labour of our rest there being no greater tediousnesse of spirit in the world then want of imployment and an unactive life and the lasie man is not onely unprofitable but also accursed and he groans under the load of his time which yet passes over the active man light as a dreame or the feathers of a bird while the disimployed is a desease and like a long sleeplesse night to himself and a load unto his country And therefore although in this particular God hath been so merciful in this infliction that from the sharpnesse of the curse a very great part of mankinde are freed and there are myriads of people good and bad who do not eat their bread in the sweat of their brows yet this is but an overrunning and an excesse of the divine mercy God did more for us then we did absolutely need for he hath disposed of the circumstances of this curse that mans affections are so reconciled to it that they desire it and are delighted in it and so the Anger of God is ended in loving Kindnesse and the drop of water is lost in the full chalice of the wine and the curse is gone out into a multiplied blessing But then for the other part of the severe law and laborious imposition that we must work out our spiritual interest with the labours of our spirit seems to most men to be so intolerable that rather then passe under it they quit their hopes of heaven and passe into the portion of Devils and what can there be to alleviate this sorrow that a man shall be perpetually sollicited with an
be partakers of the first resurrection that is from sin to grace from the death of vitious habits to the vigour life and efficacy of an habituall righteousnesse For as it hapned to those persons in the New Testament now mentioned to them I say in the literall sense Blessed are they that have part in the first resurrection upon them the second death shall have no power meaning that they who by the power of Christ and his holy Spirit were raised to life again were holy and blessed souls and such who were written in the book of God and that this grace happened to no wicked and vitious person so it is most true in the spirituall and intended sense You onely that serve God in a holy life you who are not dead in trespasses and sins you who serve God with an early diligence and an unwearied industry and a holy religion you and you onely shall come to life eternall you onely shall be called from death to life the rest of mankind shall never live again but passe from death to death from one death to another to a worse from the death of the body to the eternall death of body and soul and therefore in the Apostles Creed there is no mention made of the resurrection of wicked persons but of the resurrection of the body to everlasting life The wicked indeed shall be haled forth from their graves from their everlasting prisons where in chains of darknesse they are kept unto the judgement of the great day But this therefore cannot be called in sensu favoris a resurrection but the solennities of the eternall death It is nothing but a new capacity of dying again such a dying as cannot signifie rest but where death means nothing but an intolerable and never ceasing calamity and therefore these words of my Text are otherwise to be understood of the wicked otherwise of the godly The wicked are spilt like water and shall never be gathered up again no not in the gatherings of eternity They shall be put into vessels of wrath and set upon the flames of hell but that is not a gathering but a scattering from the face and presence of God But the godly also come under the sense of these words They descend into their graves and shall no more be reckoned among the living they have no concernment in all that is done under the Sun Agamemnon hath no more to do with the Turks armies invading and possessing that part of Greece where he reigned then had the Hippocentaur who never had a beeing and Cicero hath no more interest in the present evils of Christendome then we have to do with his boasted discovery of Catilines conspiracie What is it to me that Rome was taken by the Gauls and what is it now to Camillus if different religions be tolerated amongst us These things that now happen concern the living and they are made the scenes of our duty or danger respectively and when our wives are dead and sleep in charnel houses they are not troubled when we laugh loudly at the songs sung at the next marriage feast nor do they envy when another snatches away the gleanings of their husbands passion It is true they envy not and they lie in a bosome where there can be no murmure and they that are consigned to Kingdoms and to the feast of the marriage-supper of the Lamb the glorious and eternall Bride-groom of holy souls they cannot think our marriages here our lighter laughings and vain rejoycings considerable as to them And yet there is a relation continued still Aristotle said that to affirm the dead take no thought for the good of the living is a disparagement to the laws of that friendship which in their state of separation they cannot be tempted to rescind And the Church hath taught in generall that they pray for us they recommend to God the state of all their Relatives in the union of the intercession that our blessed Lord makes for them and us and Saint Ambrose gave some things in charge to his dying brother Satyrus that he should do for him in the other world he gave it him I say when he was dying not when he was dead And certain it is that though our dead friends affection to us is not to be estimated according to our low conceptions yet it is not lesse but much more then ever it was it is greater in degree and of another kind But then we should do well also to remember that in this world we are something besides flesh and blood that we may not without violent necessities run into new relations but preserve the affections we bear to our dead when they were alive We must not so live as if they were perished but so as pressing forward to the most intimate participation of the communion of Saints And we also have some wayes to expresse this relation and to bear a part in this communion by actions of intercourse with them and yet proper to our state such as are strictly performing the will of the dead providing for and tenderly and wisely educating their children paying their debts imitating their good example preserving their memories privately and publikely keeping their memorials and desiring of God with hearty and constant prayer that God would give them a joyfull resurrection and a mercifull judgement for so S. Paul prayed in behalf of Onesiphorus that God would shew them mercy in that day that fearfull and yet much to be desired day in which the most righteous person hath need of much mercy and pity and shall find it Now these instances of duty shew that the relation remains still and though the Relict of a man or woman hath liberty to contract new relations yet I do not finde they have liberty to cast off the old as if there were no such thing as immortality of souls Remember that we shall converse together again let us therefore never do any thing of reference to them which we shall be ashamed of in the day when all secrets shall be discovered and that we shall meet again in the presence of God In the mean time God watcheth concerning all their interest and he will in his time both discover and recompense For though as to us they are like water spilt yet to God they are as water fallen into the sea safe and united in his comprehension and inclosures But we are not yet passed the consideration of the sentence This descending to the grave is the lot of all men neither doth God respect the person of any man The rich is not protected for favour nor the poor for pity the old man is not reverenced for his age nor the infant regarded for his tendernesse youth and beauty learning and prudence wit and strength lie down equally in the dishonours of the grave All men and all natures and all persons resist the addresses and solennities of death and strive to preserve a miserable and an unpleasant life and yet they all
sink down and die For so have I seen the pillars of a building assisted with artificiall props bending under the pressure of a roof and pertinaciously resisting the infallible and prepared ruine Donec certa dies omni compage solutâ Ipsum cum rebus subruat auxilium till the determined day comes and then the burden sunk upon the pillars and disordered the aids and auxiliary rafters into a common ruine and a ruder grave so are the desires and weak arts of man with little aids and assistances of care and physick we strive to support our decaying bodies and to put off the evil day but quickly that day will come and then neither Angels nor men can rescue us from our grave but the roof sinks down upon the walls and the walls descend to the foundation and the beauty of the face and the dishonours of the belly the discerning head and the servile feet the thinking heart and the working hand the eyes and the guts together shall be crush'd into the confusion of a heap and dwell with creatures of an equivocall production with worms and serpents the sons and daughters of our own bones in a house of durt and darknesse Let not us think to be excepted or deferred If beauty or wit or youth or Noblenesse or wealth or vertue could have been a defence and an excuse from the grave we had not met here to day to mourn upon the hearse of an excellent Lady and God onely knows for which of us next the mourners shall go about the streets or weep in houses 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 We have lived so many years and every day and every minute we make an escape from those thousands of dangers and deaths that encompasse us round about and such escapings we must reckon to be an extraordinary fortune and therefore that it cannot last long Vain are the thoughts of Man who when he is young or healthfull thinks he hath a long threed of life to run over and that it is violent and strange for young persons to die and naturall and proper onely for the aged It is as naturall for a man to die by drowning as by a fever And what greater violence or more unnaturall thing is it that the horse threw his Rider into the river then that a drunken meeting cast him into a fever and the strengths of youth are as soon broken by the strong sicknesses of youth and the stronger intemperance as the weaknesse of old age by a cough or an asthma or a continuall rheume Nay it is more naturall for young Men and Women to die then for old because that is more naturall which hath more naturall causes and that is more naturall which is most common but to die with age is an extreme rare thing and there are more persons carried forth to buriall before the five and thirtieth year of their age then after it And therefore let no vain confidence make you hope for long life If you have lived but little and are still in youth remember that now you are in your biggest throng of dangers both of body and soul and the proper sins of youth to which they rush infinitely and without consideration are also the proper and immediate instruments of death But if you be old you have escaped long and wonderfully and the time of your escaping is out you must not for ever think to live upon wonders or that God will work miracles to satisfie your longing follies and unreasonable desires of living longer to sin and to the world Go home and think to die and what you would choose to be doing when you die that do daily for you will all come to that passe to rejoyce that you did so or wish that you had that will be the condition of every one of us for God regardeth no mans person Well! but all this you will think is but a sad story What we must die and go to darknesse and dishonour and we must die quickly and we must quit all our delights and all our sins or do worse infinitely worse and this is the condition of us all from which none can be excepted every man shall be spilt and fall into the ground and be gathered no more Is there no comfort after all this shall we go from hence and be no more seen and have no recompense Miser ô miser aiunt omnia ademit Vna die infausta mihi tot praemia vitae Shall we exchange our fair dwellings for a coffine our softer beds for the moistned and weeping turf and our pretty children for worms and is there no allay to this huge calamity Yes there is There is a yet in the Text For all this yet doth God devise means that his banished be not expelled from him All this sorrow and trouble is but a phantasme and receives its account and degrees from our present conceptions and the proportion to our relishes and gust When Pompey saw the Ghost of his first Lady Julia who vexed his rest and his conscience for superinducing Cornelia upon her bed within the ten moneths of mourning he presently fancied it either to be an illusion or else that death could be no very great evil Aut nihil est sensus animis in morte relictum Aut mors ipsa nihil Either my dead wife knows not of my unhandsome marriage and forgetfulnesse of her or if she does then the dead live longae canitis si cognita vitae Mors media est Death is nothing but the middle point between two lives between this and another concerning which comfortable mystery the holy Scripture instructs our faith and entertains our hope in these words God is still the God of Abraham Isaak and Jacob for all do live to him and the souls of Saints are with Christ I desire to be dissolved saith S. Paul and to be with Christ for that is much better and Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord they rest from their labours and their works follow them For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved we have a building of God a house not made with hands eternall in the heavens and this state of separation S. Paul calls a being absent from the body and being present with the Lord This is one of Gods means which he hath devised that although our Dead are like persons banished from this world yet they are not expelled from God They are in the hands of Christ they are in his presence they are or shall be clothed with a house of Gods making they rest from all their labours all tears are wiped from their eyes and all discontents from their spirits and in the state of separation before the soul be reinvested with her new house the spirits of al persons are with God so secured and so blessed and so sealed up for glory that this state of interval and imperfection is in respect of its certain
brighter and discourses wiser and rejoyces louder and loves noblier and desires purer and hopes stronger then it can do here But if these arguments should fail yet the felicity of Gods Saints cannot fail For suppose the body to be a necessary instrument but out of tune and discomposed by sin and anger by accident and chance by defect and imperfections yet that it is better then none at all and that if the soul works imperfectly with an imperfect body that then she works not at all when she hath none and suppose also that the soul should be as much without sense or perception in death as it is in a deep sleep which is the image and shadow of death yet then God devises other means that his banished be not expelled from him For 2. God will restore the soul to the body and raise the body to such a perfection that it shall be an Organ fitt to praise him upon it shall be made spiritual to minister to the soul when the soul is turned into a Spirit then the soul shall be brought forth by Angels from her incomparable and easie bed from her rest in Christs Holy Bosome and be made perfect in her being and in all her operations And this shall first appear by that perfection which the soul shall receive as instrumental to the last judgement for then she shall see clearly all the Records of this world all the Register of her own memory For all that we did in this life is laid up in our memories and though dust and forgetfulnesse be drawn upon them yet when God shall lift us from our dust then shall appear clearly all that we have done written in the Tables of our conscience which is the souls memory We see many times and in many instances that a great memory is hindered and put out and we thirty years after come to think of something that lay so long under a curtain we think of it suddenly and without a line of deduction or proper consequence And all those famous memories of Simonides and Theodectes of Hortensins and Seneca of Sceptius Metrodorus and Carneades of Cyneas the Embassadour of Pyrrhus are onely the Records better kept and lesse disturbed by accident and desease For even the memory of Herods son of Athens of Bathyllus and the dullest person now alive is so great and by God made so sure a record of all that ever he did that assoon as ever God shall but tune our instrument and draw the curtains and but light up the candle of immortality there we shal finde it all there we shall see all and all the world shall see all then we shall be made fit to converse with God after the manner of Spirits we shall be like to Angels In the mean time although upon the perswasion of the former discourse it be highly probable that the souls of Gods servants do live in a state of present blessednesse and in the exceeding joyes of a certain expectation of the revelation of the day of the Lord and the coming of Jesus yet it will concern us onely to secure our state by holy living and leave the event to God that as S. Paul said whether present or absent whether sleeping or waking whether perceiving or perceiving not we may be accepted of him that when we are banished this world and from the light of the sun we may not be expelled from God and from the light of his countenance but that from our beds of sorrows our souls may passe into the bosome of Christ and from thence to his right hand in the day of sentence For we must all appear before the judgement seat of Christ then if we have done wel in the body we shal never be expelled from the beatifical presence of God but be domesticks of his family and heires of his Kingdom and partakers of his glory Amen I Have now done with my Text but yet am to make you another Sermon I have told you the necessity and the state of death it may be too largely for such a sad story I shal therefore now with a better compendium teach you how to live by telling you a plain narrative of a life which if you imitate and write after the copy it will make that death shall not be an evil but a thing to be desired and to be reckoned amongst the purchases and advantages of your fortune When Martha and Mary went to weep over the grave of their brother Christ met them there and preached a Funeral Sermon discoursing of the resurrection and applying to the purposes of faith and confession of Christ and glorification of God We have no other we can have no better precedent to follow and now that we are come to weep over the grave of our Dear Sister this rare personage we cannot chuse but have many vertues to learn many to imitate and some to exercise I chose not to declare her extraction and genealogy It was indeed fair and Honorable but having the blessing to be descended from worthy and Honoured Ancestors and her self to be adopted and ingraffed into a more Noble family yet she felt such outward appendages to be none of hers because not of her choice but the purchase of the vertues of others which although they did ingage her to do noble things yet they would upbraid all degenerate and lesse honourable lives then were those which began and increased the honour of the families She did not love her fortune for making her noble but thought it would be a dishonour to her if she did not continue her Noblenesse and excellency of vertue fit to be owned by persons relating to such Ancestors It is fit for all us to honour the Noblenesse of a family but it is also fit for them that are Noble to despise it and to establish their honour upon the foundation of doing excellent things and suffering in good causes and despising dishonourable actions and in communicating good things to others For this is the rule in Nature Those creatures are most Honourable which have the greatest power and do the greatest good And accordingly my self have been a witnesse of it how this excellent Lady would by an act of humility and Christian abstraction strip her self of all that fair appendage of exteriour honour which decked her person and her fortune and desired to be owned by nothing but what was her own that she might onely be esteemed Honourable according to that which is the honour of a Christian and a wise person 2. She had a strict and severe education and it was one of Gods graces and favours to her For being the Heiresse of a great fortune and living amongst the throng of persons in the sight of vanities and empty temptations that is in that part of the Kingdom where greatnesse is too often expressed in great follies and great vices God had provided a severe and angry education to chastise the forwardnesses of a young spirit and a fair fortune
that she might for ever be so far distant from a vice that she might onely see it and loath it but never tast of it so much as to be put to her choice whether she would be vertuous or no. God intending to secure this soul to himself would not suffer the follies of the world to seize upon her by way of too neer a trial or busie temptation 3. She was married young and besides her businesses of religion seemed to be ordained in the providence of God to bring to this Honourable family a part of a fair fortune and to leave behinde her a fairer issue worth ten thousand times her portion and as if this had been all the publick businesse of her life when she had so far served Gods ends God in mercy would also serve hers and take her to an early blessednesse 4. In passing through which line of providence she had the art to secure her eternal interest by turning her condition into duty expressing her duty in the greatest eminency of a vertuous prudâ—nt and rare affection that hath been known in any example I will not give her so low a testimony as to say onely that she was chast She was a person of that severity modesty and close religion as to that particular that she was not capable of uncivil temptation and you might as well have suspected the sun to smell of the poppy that he looks on as that she could have been a person apt to be sullyed by the breath of a foul question 5. But that which I shall note in her is that which I would have exemplar to all Ladies and to all women She had a love so great for her Lord so intirely given up to a dear affection that she thought the same things and loved the same loves and hated according to the same enmities and breathed in his soul and lived in his presence and languished in his absence and all that she was or did was onely for and to her Dearest Lord Si gaudet si flet si tacit hunc loquitur Coenat propinat poscit negat innuit unus Naevius est and although this was a great enamel to the beauty of her soul yet it might in some degrees be also a reward to the vertue of her Lord For she would often discourse it to them that conversed with her that he would improve that interest which he had in her affection to the advantages of God and of religion and she would delight to say that he called her to her devotions he encouraged her good inclinations he directed her piety he invited her with good books and then she loved religion which she saw was not onely pleasing to God and an act or state of duty but pleasing to her Lord and an act also of affection and conjugal obedience and what at first she loved the more forwardly for his sake in the using of religion left such relishes upon her spirit that she found in it amability enough to make her love it for its own So God usually brings us to him by instruments of nature and affections and then incorporates us into his inheritance by the more immediate relishes of Heaven and the secret things of the Spirit He only was under God the light of her eyes and the cordiall of her spirits and the guide of her actions and the measure of her affections till her affections swelled up into a religion and then it could go no higher but was confederate with those other duties which made her dear to God Which rare combination of duty and religion I choose to expresse in the words of Solomon She forsook not the guide of her youth nor brake the Covenant of her God 6. As she was a rare wife so she was an excellent Mother For in so tender a constitution of spirit as hers was and in so great a kindnesse towards her children there hath seldom been seen a stricter and more curious care of their persons their deportment their nature their disposition their learning and their customs And if ever kindnesse and care did contest and make parties in her yet her care and her severity was ever victorious and she knew not how to do an ill turn to their severer part by her more tender and forward kindnesse And as her custome was she turned this also into love to her Lord. For she was not onely diligent to have them bred nobly and religiously but also was carefull and solicitous that they should be taught to observe all the circumstances inclinations the desires and wishes of their Father as thinking that vertue to have no good circumstances which was not dressed by his copy and ruled by his lines and his affections And her prudence in the managing her children was so singular and rare that when ever you mean to blesse this family and pray a hearty and a profitable prayer for it beg of God that the children may have those excellent things which she designed to them and provided for them in her heart and wishes that they may live by her purposes and may grow thither whither she would fain have brought them All these were great parts of an excellent religion as they concerned her greatest temporal relations 7. But if we examine how she demeaned her self towards God there also you will finde her not of a common but of an exemplar piety She was a great reader of Scripture confining her self to great portions every day which she read not to the purposes of vanity and impertinent curiosities not to seem knowing or to become talking not to expound and Rule but to teach her all her duty to instruct her in the knowledge and love of God and of her Neighbours to make her more humble and to teach her to despise the world and all its gilded vanities and that she might entertain passions wholly in designe and order to heaven I have seen a female religion that wholly dwelt upon the face and tongue that like a wanton and an undressed tree spends all its juice in suckers and irregular branches in leafs and gumme and after all such goodly outsides you should never eat an apple or be delighted with the beauties or the perfumes of a hopefull blossome But the religion of this excellent Lady was of another constitution It took root downward in humility and brought forth fruit upward in the substantiall graces of a Christian in charity and justice in chastity and modesty in fair friendships and sweetnesse of society She had not very much of the forms and outsides of godlinesse but she was hugely carefull for the power of it for the morall essentiall and usefull parts such which would make her be not seem to be religious 8. She was a very constant person at her prayers and spent all her time which Nature did permit to her choice in her devotions and reading and meditating and the necessary offices of houshold government every one of which is an action of religion
her spirit she had a strange secret perswasion that the bringing this Childe should be her last scene of life and we have known that the soul when she is about to disrobe her self of her upper garment sometimes speaks rarely Magnifica verba mors propè admota excutit sometimes it is prophetical sometimes God by a superinduced perswasion wrought by instruments or accidents of his own serves the ends of his own providence and the salvation of the soul But so it was that the thought of death dwelt long with her and grew from the first steps of fancy and fear to a consent from thence to a strange credulity and expectation of it and without the violence of sicknesse she died as if she had done it voluntarily and by designe and for fear her expectation should have been deceived or that she should seem to have had an unreasonable fear or apprehension or rather as one said of Cato sic abiit è vitâ ut causam moriendi nactam se esse gauderet she died as if she had been glad of the opportunity And in this I cannot but adore the providence and admire the wisdom and infinite mercies of God For having a tender and soft a delicate and fine constitution and breeding she was tender to pain and apprehensive of it as a childs shoulder is of a load and burden Grave est tenerae cervici jugum and in her often discourses of death which she would renew willingly and frequently she would tell that she feared not death but she feared the sharp pains of death Emori nolo me esse mortuam non curo The being dead and being freed from the troubles and dangers of this world she hoped would be for her advantage and therefore that was no part of her fear But she believing the pangs of death were great and the use and aids of reason little had reason to fear lest they should do violence to her spirit and the decency of her resolution But God that knew her fears and her jealousie concerning her self fitted her with a death so easie so harmlesse so painlesse that it did not put her patience to a severe trial It was not in all appearance of so much trouble as two fits of a common ague so carefull was God to remonstrate to all that stood in that sad attendance that this soul was dear to him and that since she had done so much of her duty towards it he that began would also finish her redemption by an act of a rare providence and a singular mercy Blessed he that goodnesse of God who does so careful actions of mercy for the ease and security of his servants But this one instance was a great demonstration that the apprehension of death is worse then the pains of death and that God loves to reprove the unreasonablenesse of our fears by the mightiness and by the arts of his mercy She had in her sickness if I may so cal it or rather in the solemnities and graver preparations towards death some curious and well-becoming fears concerning the final state of her soul. But from thence she passed into a deliquium or a kinde of trance and as soon as she came forth of it as if it had been a vision or that she had conversed with an Angel and from his hand had received a label or scroll of the book of life and there seen her name enrolled she cried out aloud Glory be to God on high Now I am sure I shall be saved Concerning which manner of discoursing we are wholy ignorant what judgement can be made but certainly there are strange things in the other world and so there are in all the immediate preparation to it and a little glimps of heaven a minutes conversing with an Angel any ray of God any communication extraordinary from the spirit of comfort which God gives to his servants in strange and unknown manners are infinitely far from illusions and they shall then be understood by us when we feel them and when our new and strange needs shall be refreshed by such unusual visitation But I must be forced to use summaries and arts of abbreviature in the enumerating those things in which this rare Personage was dear to God and to all her Relatives If we consider her Person she was in the flower of her age Jucundum cum aetas florida ver ageret of a temperate plain and natural diet without curiosity or an intemperate palate she spent lesse time in dressing then many servants her recreations were little and seldom her prayers often her reading much she was of a most noble and charitable soul a great lover of honourable actions and as great a despiser of base things hugely loving to oblige others and very unwilling to be in arrear to any upon the stock of courtesies and liberality so free in all acts of favour that she would not stay to hear her self thanked as being unwilling that what good went from her to a needful or an obliged person should ever return to her again she was an excellent friend and hugely dear to very many especially to the best and most discerning persons to all that conversed with her and could understand her great worth and sweetnesse she was of an Honourable a nice and tender reputation and of the pleasures of this world which were laid before her in heaps she took a very small and inconsiderable share as not loving to glut her self with vanity or to take her portion of good things here below If we look on her as a Wife she was chast and loving fruitful and discreet humble and pleasant witty and complyant rich and fair wanted nothing to the making her a principal and a precedent to the best Wives of the world but a long life and a full age If we remember her as a Mother she was kinde and severe careful and prudent very tender not at al fond a greater lover of her childrens souls then of their bodies and one that would value them more by the strict rules of honour and proper worth then by their relation to her self Her servants found her prudent and fit to Govern and yet open-handed and apt to reward a just Exactor of their duty and a great Rewarder of their diligence She was in her house a comfort to her dearest Lord a guide to her children a Rule to her Servants an example to all But as she related to God in the offices of Religion she was even and constant silent and devout prudent and material she loved what she now enjoyes and she feared what she never felt and God did for her what she never did expect Her fears went beyond all her evil and yet the good which she hath received was and is and ever shall be beyond all her hopes She lived as we al should live and she died as I fain would die Et cum supremos Lachesis perneverit annos Non aliter cineres mando jacere meos I pray