the fittest Engine to get into Power by which by the way when they are once possessed of they generally manage with as little Tenderness as they do with Conscience Of which we have had but too much Experience already and it would be but ill venturing upon more In a word Conscience not acting by and under a Law is a boundless daring and presumptuous thing and for any one by vertue thereof to challenge to himself a Privilege of doing what he will and of being unaccountable for what he does is in all Reason too much either for Man or Angel to pretend to 3 ly The third and last Property of Conscience which I shall mention and which makes the Verdict of it so Authentick is its great and rigorous Impartiality For as its wonderfull Apprehensiveness made that it could not easily be deceived so this makes that it will by no means deceive A Iudge you know may be skilfull in understanding a Cause and yet partial in giving Sentence But it is much otherwise with Conscience no Artifice can induce it to accuse the Innocent or to absolve the Guilty No we may as well bribe the Light and the Day to represent White things Black or Black White What pitifull things are Power Rhetorick or Riches when they would terrifie disswade or buy off Conscience from pronouncing Sentence according to the Merit of a Man's Actions For still as we have shewn Conscience is a Copy of the Divine Law and though Iudges may be bribed or frightened yet Laws cannot The Law is Impartial and Inflexible it has no Passions or Affections and consequently never accepts Persons nor dispenses with it self For let the most potent Sinner upon Earth speak out and tell us whether he can command down the Clamours and Revilings of a guilty Conscience and impose silence upon that bold Reprover He may perhaps for a while put on an high and a big Look but can he for all that look Conscience out of Countenance And he may also dissemble a little forced Jollity that is he may Court his Mistress and quaff his Cups and perhaps sprinkle them now and then with a few Dammees but who in the mean time besides his own wretched miserable self knows of those secret bitter Infusions which that terrible thing called Conscience makes into all his Draughts Believe it most of the appearing Mirth in the World is not Mirth but Art The wounded Spirit is not seen but walks under a disguise and still the less you see of it the better it looks On the contrary if we consider the vertuous Person let him declare freely whether ever his Conscience checked him for his Innocence or upbraided him for an Action of Duty did it ever bestow any of its hidden Lashes or concealed Bites on a mind severely Pure Chaste and Religious But when Conscience shall complain cry out and recoyl let a Man descend into himself with too just a Suspicion that all is not right within For surely that Hue and cry was not raised upon him for nothing The spoils of a rifled Innocence are born away and the Man has stoln something from his own Soul for which he ought to be pursued and will at last certainly be over-took Let every one therefore attend the Sentence of his Conscience For he may be sure it will not dawb nor flatter It is as severe as Law as impartial as Truth It will neither conceal nor pervert what it knows And thus I have done with the Third of those four Particulars at first proposed and shewn whence and upon what account it is that the Testimony of Conscience concerning our spiritual Estate comes to be so Authentick and so much to be relyed upon Namely For that it is fully empowered and commissioned to this great Office by God himself and withall that it is extremely Quick-sighted to apprehend and discern and moreover very Tender and Sensible of every thing that concerns the Soul And lastly That it is most exactly and severely Impartial in judging of whatsoever comes before it Every one of which Qualifications justly contributes to the Credit and Authority of the Sentence which shall be passed by it And so we are at length arrived at the Fourth and last Thing proposed from the words Which was to assign some particular Cases or Instances in which this Confidence towards God suggested by a rightly informed Conscience does most eminently shew and exert it self I shall mention Three 1. In our Addresses to God by Prayer When a Man shall presume to come and place himself in the Presence of the Great Searcher of Hearts and to ask something of him while his Conscience is all the while smiting him on the Face and telling him what a Rebel and a Traitour he is to the Majesty which he supplicates surely such an one should think with himself that the God whom he prays to is greater than his Conscience and pierces into all the filth and baseness of his Heart with a much clearer and more severe Inspection And if so will he not likewise resent the Provocation more deeply and revenge it upon him more terribly if Repentance does not divert the Blow Every such Prayer is big with Impiety and Contradiction and makes as odious a noise in the Ears of God as the Harangues of one of those Rebel Fasts or Humiliations in the year Forty One invoking the Blessings of Heaven upon such Actions and Designs as nothing but Hell could reward One of the most peculiar Qualifications of an Heart rightly disposed for Prayer is a well grounded Confidence of a Man's fitness for that Duty In Heb. 10. 22. Let us draw near with a true Heart in full assurance of faith says the Apostle But whence must this Assurance spring Why we are told in the very next Words of the same Verse Having our Hearts sprinkled from an evil Conscience Otherwise the voice of an impure Conscience will cry much louder than our Prayers and speak more effectually against us than these can intercede for us And now if Prayer be the great Conduit of mercy by which the Blessings of Heaven are derived upon the Creature and the noble Instrument of Converse between God and the Soul then surely that which renders it ineffectual and loathsome to God must needs be of the most mischievous and destructive Consequence to Mankind imaginable and consequently to be removed with all that Earnestness and Concern with which a Man would rid himself of a Plague or a moral Infection For it taints and pollutes every Prayer it turns an Oblation into an Affront and the Odours of a Sacrifice into the Exhalations of a Carcass And in a word makes the Heavens over us Brass denying all Passage either to descending Mercies or ascending Petitions But on the other side when a Man's Breast is clear and the same Heart which endites does also encourage his Prayer when his Innocence pushes on the Attempt and vouches the Success Such an one goes boldly to
who per fas nefas gets as much as He can But for all this let Atheists and Sensualists satisfie themselves as they are able The former of which will find that as long as Reason keeps Her ground Religion neither can nor will lose Hers. And for the Sensual Epicure he also will find That there is a certain living spark within him which all the Drink he can pour in will never be able to quench or put out nor will his rotten abused Body have it in it's power to convey any putrefying consuming rotting Quality to the Soul No there is no Drinking or Swearing or Ranting or Fluxing a Soul out of its Immortality But that must and will survive and abide in spight of Death and the Grave and live for ever to convince such wretches to their eternal Woe That the so much repeated ornament and flourish of their former speeches God damn 'em was commonly the truest word they spoke though least believed by them while they spoke it 2dly The other thing deducible from the foregoing particulars shall be to inform us of the way of attaining to that excellent Privilege so justly valued by those who have it and so much talked of by those who have it not which is Assurance Assurance is properly that perswasion or Confidence which a man takes up of the pardon of his sins and his interest in God's favour upon such Grounds and Terms as the Scripture lays down But now since the Scripture promises eternal Happiness and Pardon of sin upon the sole condition of Faith and sincere Obedience it is evident that he onely can plead a Title to such a Pardon whose conscience impartially tells him that he has performed the required Condition And this is the only rational Assurance which a man can with any safety rely or rest himself upon He who in this Case would believe surely must first walk surely and to do so is to walk uprightly And what that is we have sufficiently marked out to us in those plain and legible lines of Duty requiring us to Demean our selves to God humbly and devoutly to our Governours obediently and to our Neighbours justly and to our selves soberly and temperately All other Pretences being infinitely vain in themselves and fatal in their Consequences It was indeed the way of many in the late times to bolster up their Crazy doating Consciences with I know not what odd Confidences founded upon inward whispers of the Spirit stories of something which they called conversion and marks of Predestination All of them as they understood them mere delusions Trifles and Fig leaves and such as would be sure to fall off and leave them naked before that fiery Tribunal which knows no other way of Iudging men but according to their works Obedience and Upright Walking are such Substantial Vital parts of Religion as if they be wanting can never be made up or commuted for by any formalities of Phantastick looks or language And the great Question when we come hereafter to be judged will not be How demurely have you looked or How boldly have you believed With what length have you prayed and With what loudness and vehemence have you preached But How holily have you lived and How uprightly have you walked For this and this only with the Merits of Christ's Righteousness will come into Account before that great Iudge who will pass Sentence upon every man according to what he has done here in the Flesh whether it be good or whether it be evil and there is no respect of Persons with Him To whom therefore be rendred and ascribed as is most due all Praise Might Majesty and Dominion both now and for evermore Amen A SERMON PREACHED Before the University AT Christ-Church Oxon. 1664. JOHN XV. 15. Henceforth I call you not Servants for the Servant knows not what his Lord doth But I have called you Friends for all things that I have heard of my father have I made known unto you WE have here an Account of Christ's friendship to his Disciples that is we have the best of things represented in the greatest of Examples In other men we see the Excellency but in Christ the Divinity of Friendship By our Baptism and Church-Communion we are made one Body with Christ but by This we become one soul. Love is the greatest of Humane Affections and Friendship is the Noblest and most Refined Improvement of Love a quality of the largest Compass And it is here admirable to observe the ascending gradation of the Love which Christ bore to his Disciples The strange and superlative greatness of which will appear from those several degrees of kindness that it has manifested to man in the several Periods of His Condition As 1 st If we consider him antecedently to his Creation while he yet lay in the barren Womb of Nothing and only in the Number of Possibilities and consequently could have nothing to recommend him to Christ's affection nor shew any thing lovely but what he should afterwards receive from the stamp of a preventing Love Yet even then did the Love of Christ begin to work and to commence in the first Emanations and purposes of goodness towards Man designing to provide matter for it self to work upon to create its own object and like the Sun in the production of some Animals first to give a being and then to shine upon it 2dly Let us take the Love of Christ as directing it self to Man actually Created and brought into the World and so all those glorious Endowments of Humane Nature in its Original State and Innocence were so many Demonstrations of the munificent goodness of Him by whom God first made as well as afterwards redeemed the world There was a Consult of the whole Trinity for the making of Man that so He might shine as a Master-piece not only of the Art but also of the kindness of his Creator with a noble and a clear understanding a rightly disposed Will and a Train of Affections regular and obsequious and perfectly conformable to the Dictates of that high and divine Principle Right Reason So that upon the whole matter he stept forth not only the work of God's hands but also the Copy of his perfections a kind of Image or representation of the Deity in small Infinity contracted into flesh and blood and as I may so speak the Preludium and first Essay towards the Incarnation of the Divine Nature But 3dly and Lastly Let us look upon man not only as created and brought into the World with all these great Advantages superadded to his Being but also as depraved and faln from them as an Out-law and a Rebel and one that could plead a Title to nothing but to the highest Severities of a Sin-revenging Justice Yet even in this estate also the Boundless Love of Christ began to have warm thoughts and actings towards so wretched a Creature at this time not onely not Amiable but highly Odious While indeed man was yet uncreated and
a man such a faithfull Account of himself as shall never shame nor lurch the Confidence which he shall take up from it Nevertheless to prevent all mistakes in so critical a Case and so high a Concern I shall close up the foregoing Particulars with this twofold Caution First Let no man think that every Doubting or Mis-giving about the Safety of his Spiritual Estate over-throws the Confidence hitherto spoken of For as I shew before the Confidence mentioned in the Text is not properly Assurance but only a Rational well-grounded Hope And therefore may very well consist with some Returns of Doubting For we know in that Pious and Excellent Confession and Prayer made by the poor Man to our Saviour in Mark 9. 24. how in the very same Breath in which he says Lord I believe He says also Lord help my unbelief So that we see here that the Sincerity of our Faith or Confidence will not secure us against all Vicissitudes of Wavering or Distrust indeed no more than a strong Athletick Constitution of Body will secure a man always against Heats and Colds and Rheums and such-like Indispositions And one great Reason of this is Because such a Faith or Confidence as we have been treating of resides in the Soul or Conscience as an Habit. And Habits we know are by no means either inconsistent with or destroyed by every contrary Act. But especially in the Case now before us where the Truth and Strength of our Confidence towards God does not consist so much in the present Act by which it exerts it self no nor yet in the Habit producing this Act as it does in the Ground or Reason which this Confidence is built upon which being the standing sincerity of a man's Heart though the present Act be interrupted as no doubt through Infirmity or Temptation it may be very often yet so long as that sincerity upon which this Confidence was first founded does continue as soon as the Temptation is removed and gone the fore-mentioned Faith or Affiance will by renewed vigorous and fresh Acts recover and exert it self and with great comfort and satisfaction of mind give a man confidence towards God Which though it be indeed a lower and a lesser thing than Assurance yet as to all the Purposes of a Pious Life may for ought I see prove much more usefull as both affording a man due comfort and yet leaving room for due caution too which are Two of the principal Uses that Religion serves for in this World 2. The other Caution with reference to the foregoing Discourse is this Let no man from what has been said reckon a bare silence of Conscience in not accusing or disturbing him a sufficient Argument for Confidence towards God For such a Silence is so far from being always so that it is usually worse than the fiercest and loudest Accusations since it may and for the most part does proceed from a kind of numbness or stupidity of Conscience and an absolute Dominion obtained by Sin over the Soul so that it shall not so much as dare to complain or make a stir For as our Saviour says Luke 11. 21. while the strong Man armed keeps his Palace his Goods are in peace So while Sin rules and governs with a strong Hand and has wholly subdued the Conscience to a slavish Subjection to its Tyrannical Yoke the Soul shall be at Peace such a false Peace as it is but for that very Cause worse a great deal and more destructive than when by continual Alarms and Assaults it gives a man neither Peace nor Truce Quiet nor Intermission And therefore it is very remarkable that the Text expresses the sound Estate of the Heart or the Conscience here spoken of not barely by its not accusing but by it s not condemning us which word imports properly an Acquitment or Discharge of a man upon some precedent Accusation and a full Trial and Cognizance of his Cause had thereupon For as Condemnation being a Law Term and so relating to the Judicial Proceedings of Law Courts must still pre-suppose an Hearing of the Cause before any Sentence can pass so likewise in the Court of Conscience there must be a strict and impartial Enquiry into all a man's Actions and a through heaving of all that can be pleaded for and against him before Conscience can rationally either condemn or discharge him And if indeed upon such a fair and full Trial he can come off he is then Rectus in curiâ clear and innocent and consequently may reap all that satisfaction from himself which it is Natural for Innocence to afford the person who has it I do not here speak of a Legal Innocence none but Sots and Quakers dream of such things For as St. Paul says Galat. 2. 16. By the Works of the Law shall no flesh living be justified But I speak of an Evangelical Innocence such an one as the Oeconomy of the Gospel accepts whatsoever the Law enjoyns and though mingled with several Infirmities and Defects yet amounts to such a pitch of Righteousness as we call Sincerity And whosoever has this shall never be Damned for want of the other And now how vastly does it concern all those who shall think it worth their while to be in earnest with their Immortal Souls not to abuse and delude themselves with a false Confidence a thing so easily taken up and so hardly laid down Let no man conclude because his Conscience says nothing to him that therefore it has nothing to say Possibly some never so much as doubted of the safety of their Spiritual Estate in all their Lives and if so let them not flatter themselves but rest assured that they have so much the more reason a great deal to doubt of it now For the Causes of such a profound stillness are generally gross Ignorance or long Custom of Sinning or both and these are very dreadfull Symptoms indeed to such as are not Hell and Damnation-proof When a man's Wounds cease to smart only because he has lost his feeling they are never the less mortal for his not seeing his Need of a Chirurgeon It is not meer actual present Ease but Ease after Pain which brings the most durable and solid Comfort Acquitment before Trial can be no security Great and strange Calms usually portend and go before the most violent Storms And therefore since Storms and Calms especially with reference to the State of the Soul doe always follow one another Certainly of the Two it is much more Eligible to have the Storm first and the Calm afterwards Since a Calm before a Storm is commonly a Peace of a man 's own making but a Calm after a Storm a Peace of God's To which God who only can speak such Peace to us as neither the World not the Devil shall be able to take from us be rendred and ascribed as is most due all Praise Might Majesty and Dominion both now and for ever-more Amen A Further ACCOUNT OF THE Nature