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A56628
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Christs counsel to his church in two sermons preached at the two last fasts : one April xi. MDCLXXX, the other December xxi. MDCLXXX / by Symon Patrick ...
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Patrick, Simon, 1626-1707.
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1681
(1681)
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Wing P770; ESTC R22417
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50,470
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126
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abstinence from all meats whatsoever and that for an exercise of humility and other Christian Vertues without any opinion of merit or satifaction And it may be added That it is a Religion to which the very Papists themselves are indebted several ways for their ease from many burthens For it is our Religion which hath quite spoiled the Trade that was driven by Indulgences which was so shamelesly exercised before the Reformation that Sellers of Pardons went like Pedlars from house to house and for half a Crown offered to let any man have a remission of all his sins and the delivery of a Soul out of Purgatory Which was the thing that first stirred up the just indignation of Luther to whose honest zeal they are beholden for deliverance from that imposture They are not abused neither as formerly with new lying Miracles and Apparitions which are seldom pretended now thanks be to our Religion for it in comparison with the many illusions of this kind in former times They are free also from being perpetually pillaged by divers grievous exactions which their Forefathers in this Kingdom I could shew you complained of as insupportable Nor do their people run with Offerings from one Image to another so fast as they did before our Religion let them see their follies To say nothing of their Crusado's and other things which it is not easie for the Pope himself now to gull them withal Which is to be put intirely upon the account of our Religion which hath opened many of their eyes to see more errours among them than they are willing to confess Have we not reason then to hold fast such a Religion as this so as neither to part with it nor to depart from it If truth had the same power over the will that it hath over the understanding we could never suffer our selves to be guilty of either Nay the Papists themselves would condemn their own madness for endeavouring to disturb this Religion and to bring back that authority hither which made such Fools of them But alas it is too notorious how little hold our Religion hath taken on our hearts There being so many who have revolted if not openly yet in their hearts and affections we have too much reason to fear unto the Romish delusion And others I am afraid the most who have retained what they received only in part but let go a great deal of it to the open disgrace manifest damage and almost undoing of our Religion Which is the thing I must now admonish you of in the last part of my Discourse upon these words wherein our Saviour calls upon the Church of Sardis to REPENT of their not holding fast that is what they had received And so must I now call upon you with all earnestness it being the particular business of this Day and the only thing that can save us from perishing in the Pit which is digged for us by our Romish Adversaries who have been long plotting and now have almost effected our destruction Yet I shall not expatiate through the whole Doctrin of repentance but confine my self only to such things as relate to what hath been already spoken III. You are not now to learn what it is to repent but only what it is you should repent of that is be heartily sorry for and amend And this also is soon known if in obedience to this admonition you will but reflect upon what you have received and heard and then consider what conformity your practice holds therewith And here let me deal as plainly with you as becomes my Office and the solemn business of this Day and the present distress of this Church and Kingdom which should awaken all men of sense to examine themselves upon these three Heads First What esteem is remaining among us of the holy Scriptures in which are contained as you have heard all our Religion Secondly What fruits our Faith hath brought forth which the holy Scriptures tell us God expects from us and are so necessary that we cannot be saved without them Thirdly more particularly What the behaviour of the people of this Church hath been and is towards the Pastors and Guides of their souls with whom God hath principally intrusted his holy Oracles If all the Members of this Church would thoroughly examine themselves upon these Heads they would find I fear too much matter for Repentance I. For the first of these I shall omit the disrespect to use no harder word of one whole Sect of men to the holy Scriptures which they have in a manner laid aside and only accommodated the Phrases of it to that which they call the light within them and touch upon such things only as are common to all Parties among us In which 1. We cannot but fear and with grief of heart it ought to be spoken and considered there are great numbers who have no value for the holy Scriptures at all but have quite forsaken even Christianity it self which is therein delivered some the very belief of it and others the profession This is one of the fearful sins of this Age which cries for vengeance against us and hath encouraged this Plot to bring in Popery that is Idolatry and Tyranny among us Which durst never have shown their heads here again if they had not been emboldned by our Irreligion And though now we seem to be stirred up to oppose them yet no Religion will be found an unequal match for some Religion which though a very bad one is better than none at all 2. And secondly It cannot be denied that abundance of those who still blessed be God believe the holy Scriptures yet have lost that high esteem and affection which our pious Ancestors had for them Or if they have any it doth not appear by their diligent reading of them which many have laid aside Time was when they were read and studied with great care and fervent desire in the beginning of the Reformation when every Body that could read had them in their hands and some had a great deal of them by heart as the Jew now generally have the principal things in the Old Testament But alas this ardour soon remitted and now is in a manner extinct Musculus I remember complains heavily of it in his Preface to the Book of Genesis many years ago and we are not grown better but much worse I fear since his days And what other cause saith he can we give for it but this That the greatest part of those who seemed to have given up themselves to the Truth of God busied themselves in the Scriptures not that they might be better by framing their lives according to that rule but that they might be able to dispute and to carp at the old errours and superstitions And so some ran into all manner of wickedness others lickt up their old vomit others leaving the manifest Truth turned to new Sects which sprang up and others became neutral and fell into perfect indifference
in humane reason they can by no other means be remedied than by the special hand of Heaven Which we come therefore here to implore in a particular blessing upon the consultations and endeavours of the great Council of the Kingdom and in defeating the wicked counsels and devices of our enemies and uniting the hearts of all his Majesties loyal Protestant Subjects But these great Blessings we cannot reasonably hope to obtain no not by our Fasting and Humiliation and Prayers unless we endeavour a true reconciliation with God by being unfeignedly penitent and resolving to forsake those sins which we our selves confess have brought us into such distresses and perplexities as nothing else can remedy Now in order unto this As I excited you on the last Day of solemn Fasting and Prayer to a serious and speedy Repentance by such Arguments as I found in those words of our Saviour to another of the seven Churches of Asia ii 16. Repent or else I will come unto thee quickly and fight against thee with the sword of my mouth so at this time I shall direct you a little in the way and method of repentance and point at some things of which you are to repent from these words which I have read out of our Saviour's Letter to the Church of Sardis with whom we of this Church have too manifest a resemblance For as our blessed Lord complains ver 1. we have a name that we live i. e. are good Christians but alas in deed and truth are dead for we produce not the fruits of Christian vertue There is a great deal of bustle and stir about Religion for which we seem to be mightily concerned but the inward life and power of it is generally wanting which we do not love to be troubled withal Nay we can scarce say so much of our people as God doth of Judah in the first Lesson for Evening Prayer lviii Isai 2. They seek me daily and delight to know my ways as a Nation that did righteousness and forsook not the Ordinances of their God c. which alas we have most openly deserted though this was far short we find in that Chapter of making them an acceptable Nation to him At the best we must confess we are fallen asleep and grown very slothful as our Saviour here supposes ver 2. them of Sardis to have been and there is so great and universal a decay of true piety and goodness among us that we are in apparent danger to lose the small remainders of it Something good there is still left in this Church as there was in that but far from that intire and compleat obedience which our Lord expects from us as will appear by considering what is to be done by us for our recovery to a better condition And there are three things which our Lord here requires of them in my Text and are incumbent upon every one of us as our necessary Duty if we would be saved from our present danger First To remember what they had received and heard Secondly To hold it fast Thirdly To repent of their forgetfulness I suppose their looseness and indifferency in their Religion I shall treat of them all in the order wherein they stand and consider them both with respect to the condition of that Church to whom they were first delivered and then with respect to ours who have no less need of such admonitions I. The first of them supposes That they had been taught some Doctrin which they had received and entertained with belief and had heard it also often since inculcated and pressed so I understand the words by those Pastors who were set over them by the Apostle or those who first delivered the Truth unto them Which was nothing else but the Christian Religion of which I must not here speak at large but only tell you It is that way of serving God which is prescribed by Christ and his Apostles in the Books of the New Testament Wherein we now read what they then received by word of mouth from the Apostles and understand fully what we must believe and do to be saved Now as there is no cause to which God more frequently ascribes the sins and particularly the Idolatry of the Children of Israel than their forgetfulness of Him and of his Law and of what He had done for them so this very thing stupid forgetfulness and neglect of what Christ and his Apostles delivered by Signs and wonders and mighty deeds introduced that deadness in Religion of which our Saviour complains in the beginning of this Chapter and He foresaw would bring in all the corruptions which afterwards followed in the Church and began very early to appear in the Christian World For there arose false Apostles and false Prophets nay direct Antichrists as this very Apostle Sr John tells us men who denied the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ that brought in damnable Heresies sleighted the authority of the Apostles turned the Grace of God into lasciviousness nay brought back the old Idolatry as you read in the foregoing Chapter of this Book vers 14.20 And though this Church of Sardis is not charged with so deep a degree of Apostasie as those of Pergamus and Thyatira yet there was great danger of falling into it unless they took this advice of our Saviour to remember better than they had done what they had received and heard Which is the very same with that which God himself had given of old to the Israelites to prevent their defection from Him in many places of the Book of Deuteronomy viii 1 2 18 c. and which his Prophets were wont to give in after times as the first step to their recovery when they had revolted from God their Saviour xlvi Isai 8 9. vi Mic. 5. Who here calls upon his Church in like manner to bring to remembrance and think again and again till they had fixed it in their mind what they had received and with what affection also they had embraced the Gospel of God's Grace for that may be implied in the Particle 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 how you have received and heard as the only means to preserve them from lapsing farther into a worse condition and losing that good which was still remaining but ready to dye among them This the Apostles afterward endeavoured with great care and diligence and promised as we read in St. Peter 2. i. 12 13 15. to endeavour that after their decease they might have those things in remembrance always which they had been taught But for want of the like diligence and watchfulness in the people who did not take such heed as they ought to have done to these admonitions the Christian Religion in process of time was so adulterated that a great part of the Church fell into that lamentable apostasie which is foretold and described in this Book of the Revelation and which we see now fulfilled too plainly in the Church of Rome and those of its