remaining in the simplicity of his divine nature without the Word being made flesh and being as it were unmade himself as the Apostle warrants us to say by taking that flesh upon him which was become as it were mans prison so far was it from being worthy to be the receptacle of God When we consider then how God chose this way of commiserating our nature not to purg it by his power but by the very infirmity thereof by taking the passibleness of it upon him we cannot deny the suffering part to be the most beneficial property of it since God made use of that onely for the restauration of it wherefore the feeling that portion of human nature upon us which is the most ennobled by Gods election and preference cannot rightly be accounted a prejudiced condition whereupon we may conclude that the blessing of being Christians may easily reconcile us to the Obligation of being sufferers for what can be the reason why Christ when by his pains he took away the sting of sin could not also take off the points of suffering in this life which are but thorns of that plant but because his passions had infused such a quality into our pains as might produce this strange effect in our nature to make our root the less capable of bearing fruit by the excrescense and growth of these sprigs out of it for temporal afflictions spring out of sin as out of the root thereof and nothing drieth up and infecundateth so much the radicall fructifying vigor of this root as the springing up of temporal miseries and distresses so as the fruit of sin which is death is killed the soonest by the fertility of sufferings in this life Since Christ hath then by the virtue of his Crown of thorns imparted this faculty of the asperities of our life of taking off the growth as his did the guilt of sin we need not wonder why he hath left all these temporal bitternesses upon our nature which he himself took expresly to taste in our nature so as we may be said to become the more Christians the more we are called to be patients Which position we shall finde the more clearly demonstrated to us the farther we advance into the principles of Christianity Saint Paul when he wrot to the Romans in those times when in a paralel of our cases the Christians were partly immured up in prisons and partly expelled to the adjoyning fields thought it seemeth to sweeten their condition to them by representing that mortification and sufferance was their calling and profession for he asketh them as of a notorious thing whither they know not this to be the constitution of christianity saying Rom 6. 3. Are you ignorant that all we who are baptised in Christ Jesus in his death we are baptised Intimating that our first incorporation into the bodie of Christ is in effect an expiration of this world and a translation by the virtue of the death of Christ into such a sort of life as he hath patterned to us by the inception progress and consummation of his life And the Apostle presseth thus the proof of this assertion Rom. 6. 4. For we are buriâ—d together with him in baptism into death to evince this position that our mundanity is drowned and buried in our Christning and that the life of Christ which was a continued part of mortification is to be as it were our breath and animation And while we are in this spiritual manner buried in the life of Christ that is covered and inclosed with indignities and oppressions we are acting that part we took upon us in baptism where we isted our selves into that militia which was erected by him who killed death by dying and hath left the same discipline to all his souldiers to destroy death by dying to the world mortifications therefore must needs be the proper duties of that service a christian is upon and his pay is conditioned rather upon his suffering than his acting as the Apostle proceedeth to testifie For if we become complanted to the similitude of his death we shall be also of his resurrection So in a Christians case the wages of death is life for if he die here by a privatioÌ„ of the carnal life of this world he performeth the condition of life everlasting For which reason S. Paul who was the great commander of the Gentiles in this militancy wherby this kinde of dying death is swallowed up in Victory hath left us his discipline in 1 Cor. 15. I die dayly and he giveth us those orders To be the followers of him as he was of Christ whom he began not to follow untill he was overthrown in the command he had in this world and was as it were resuscitated by the same hand that had killed him We may remember he was revived by what is destructive to this life by being almost famished and illuminated by this worlds darkness and restored to corporal light onely to see how much he vvas to suffer for that Name for which all the sufferings he had in his head were to be imployed but in a manner far differing from this design for they were assigned to be enjoyed by himself not to be dispensed to others by his hand so as this seemeth the gratification of his Christianity the having of all that treasure of crosses he had prepared for other Christians appropriated to his own use whereof he grew so sensible as in gratitude to this his preference he returned his I do exceedingly abound in joy in all our tribulation But let us look upon his master and ours Christ Jesus in his own time of tribulation and we may represent him to our selves in the first instant of his conception accepting this Order from his father which he gave to his follower S. Paul of Acts 9. 15. I will shew him how great things he must suffer for my Name before the Gentiles and Kings and the children of Israel In which commission he laboured three and thirty years wherein all we are acquainted with of his life is either laborious or incommodious or in extremity dolorous and painfull It seems the holy Ghost did not think any thing worthy to stand upon record for Christ that was not eminently suffering and therefore passed over in silence those parts of his life which we may suppose to have been the least distressfull If we look upon his way that is drawn out to us from his cradle to his Cross we shall finde that he fore-saw in all ages more than the persons themselves who are under them can do He truly bore all our labours and our griefs All the anxieties and contristations that now oppress you were in a sharper degree pressing upon his heart and since he was content to aggravat all his sufferings by taking on him the sense of your grievances may not you very easily alleviate all your heavinesses by taking into your minde the resentment of sufferings which were designed for your succor in your
to die and thus he was made his own torturer by the ignorance of the evil of life and of the good of death which he had so much demerited the knowing of for his brothers goodness was thought worthy to be quickly relieved by death and his malice was adjudged to the pain of apprehending it and to the supplice of a long life With good cause then may this be well reflected on that the first virtuous and godly Abel man was quickly removed out of this hedg of thorns his father had set and reconveyed towards Paradise and the first impious murtherer was sentenced to live in the pungencie and asperity of these pricks and bryars of the earth But such is Gods wisdom as he can extract medicines out of all the Brambles and Thistles our earth is over-run with and minister them to our infirmity for he applieth even those griefs and sorrows which sin introduced to the expulsion of sin in it self so as this is an operation worthy of Gods invention by the labour and exercising of the bodie to enlarg the freedom of the soul even by this unfortifying of her prison in which she is kept the closer the stronger the delectation of our senses groweth upon us Therefore the distancing of the conveniencie of the flesh dilateth the commodities and freedoms of the spirits so as it is a divine artifice which God useth by hanging weights of sufferings and pressures upon our senses to winde up rather than to clog our spirits which are the motions and resorts of the whole frame and in probation of of this experiment David saith Psal. 4. 1 In tribulation thou hast enlarged me And it is most observeable that God ministred this receipt drawn out of thorns to all those Sons of Adam whose mindes he meant to purge and clarifie for all the holy Patriarks took this detersive potion of bitterness and affliction in this life and it deserveth our attention to note how the nearer the time drew to the manifestation of the Son of God who was designed the man of sorrow the passions of gods children grew the bitterer and the sharper for the Patriarks were exercised by divers mortifications which were not capital they staid upon the distresses of their life some of the Prophets as they approached to this fulness of the time of passion tasted by anticipation of the cup of death in which they were all but figures of Christs cup-bearers as Esay Jeremy Zachary and others and so those sufferings which in time were the least distant from Christ as those we finde recorded in the Maccabees came also the nearest to the horror and acerbity of the passions of Christ and Christians for they went not straight to death but turned about to take a compass of tortures to make death bitter to those they could not make it terrible as you may reade in the execution of the mother and her seven children the very dawning of the day of passion which was coming on gave them this light of fortitude It seemeth this weight of sufferance and sorrow was always in so natural a motion upon the children of God that it moved the faster the nearer it came to the centre the man of sorrow who being the Son of God by nature was the centre of all the Sons by grace and adoption and therefore all the bloudy sacrifices of the Law of nature and ceremonial tended and pointed to him as their last term and direction in order whereunto S. Paulinus sticketh not to say that Christ from the begining of all ages suffereth and triumpheth in all the Churches persecutions in Abel he is killed by a brother in Noah he is derided by a Son in Abraham he is a Pilgrim in Isaac a Victim and in Jacob a Servant in Joseph he is sold in Moses left a Derelict in the Prophets he is stoned starved and vilefied So as all the lines of holy passions drawn from the circumference of all ages tend and resort to this centre of the man of sorrow the Lamb of God slain from the beginning of the world These evidences may prove unto us clearly enough the first bond or covenant of sufferances we are entered into as men and even in that notion we seem to be implicit christians since he who suffered sufficiently for us all maketh all virtuous afflictions referraable to him it had been very easie for me to have exhibited a more precise manifest of this our first designation to sufferings under the notion of men there are so many excellent draughts of it stamped by the moralists or naturalists of all ages but I chose to deflect a little from the letter of the Text that I might make the inferences rather stongly usefull than critically uniform and therefore as I have already stepped beyond the out court of the Gentiles into part of the temple I will not call back to Philosophy to borrow any demonstrations of this principle wherein the proofs are so acumulate as all Sects of Philosophers which differ so much concerning the point of the good mans life concur in the confession of the multiplicity of the ills thereof but I shall not as I said walk aside into the gardens and flowry beds of the Gentiles because I conceive it more proper for your state to have some wholesome confection to take than a nosegay of the flowers of Philosophy to smell to onely in these unhealthful times for the larg contemplations of of the miseries of human nature is not a receipt direct and express enough for your present exigencies for that is but as a good air of meditation that may be sufficient for such as are but in light ordinary indispositions of fortune but your distempers require some more forceable application of comfort by taking into your mindes the strongest obligations to patience and longanimity I will therefore pass on to the other two assignments of suffering which are upon you as Christians and leave this our single humanity sealed with Jobs signature Job 14. 22. His flesh while he lives shall have sorrow and his soul shall mourn upon himself Of the covenant of suffering as Christians the Sons of Christ WHat we have said of our first obligation may well extenuate all we are bound to suffer by the second for when we behold the infelicity of of our condition as we are men we may well wonder more that we are preferred to be Christians than that we are continued to be sufferers for sure if God had consulted with Adam after he saw his own nakedness and the anexture of all the miseries thereunto whither he would have bowed the heavens have come down to repair this his ruinous condition by his investing his miserable human nature he would have answered with the humble Centurion Matth. 8. 8. Lord I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof but onely say the word and I shall be healed Seeing he who made all by one word could have redintegrated Adam with a word
A MISSION OF CONSOLATION Usefull For all afflicted Persons By W. S LONDON Printed by W. B. for John Williams and are to be sold at the sign of the Crown in Paul's Church-yard 1653. To the READER Reader LEt the Author of this small Volume who hath practised some years in the most exact in prison school of patience invite thee unto a serious perusual hereof that you may thereby partake in some measure of the benefit of his sufferings he esteeming it a great glorie in a Christian under persecution for his conscience sake to impart to others the good uses he makes in time of his affliction that they may by such example apprehend the Cross to be the lighter and so take it up with more alacrity and chearfulness and also conceive the miseries assigned us here on earth the less insupportable This Mission of Consolation this small first born child for so it is will after you have well view'd it smile upon you like a pleasant Infant full of health and tell you that it is no Paradox to say there is virtue in a prison which indeed hath a Sympathy onely with virtue for untill a Person so richly endued enters the grate it lies clouded and obscured but then breaks forth and shews its splendour A prison is in my observation one of the narrow and troublesome passages which a Christian findes in the straigt way that leads to heaven Let not the spurious issue of the now adulterated press discourage you in reading for that is become an ambodexter in this age Printing with one hand Truth with another error be satisfied that this relishes not of any upstart or unsound opinion but will well become thy pocket or thy chamber if thou art afflicted or persecuted for preserveing to thy self a good conscience It shews thee in the enterance thy first estate as man the Sons of Adam full of impuritie and pollution and born in a capacitie of onely bearing sorrow and travail But in the second part it doth most admirably repair thy condition leading thee into a covenant with thy Redeemer And in the third it instructs thee how to fit and prepare thy self for so divine and heavenly society If thou findest content in reading requite the Authour with thy good wishes not further inquiring after him but let the effect of thy prayers onely finde him out W S. A MISSION OF CONSOLATION Of the covenant of sufferings as men the Sons of Adam TO the first covenant of sufferance you know we all give our voice by a natural instinct before we have scarce enjoyed so much as light for it and our eys may be said to set their mark to it before we are able to set our hands to this Article of eating in the sweat of our brows for our eys pay their sweat which is their tears for what we taste even before we be able to receive bread for it and as we grow into a state to set our hands to the covenant of labour we know there is scarce any thing we relish much that doth not cost us sweat and contention nay we are of such a constitution that we can have no kinde of delectation the which some want and suffering must not precede to affect us with the gust of it so as we are sentenced to pay a great fine of pain before hand for all those fleeting and transitory pleasures which at best do but run over our senses and so pass away and leave them again in their drouth and privation And most commonly the advance of all our pain and passion rendreth us nothing of what they negotiate So as a man when he looketh upon himself in the best reflexes his temporary wishes can make him shall finde this brand and stigmate of Adam upon on his forehead Gen. 3. 19. Thou shalt eat in the sweat of thy brows And this is a mark which God stamped upon Adam of another kinde of signification than that he set upon Cain for this directeth to all things that occur to man in this life to strike him and wound his temporal estate in some kinde or other in so much as all the Creatures do in their several manners execute this sentence upon the Sons of Adam not alowing themselves to be enjoyed by them without stinging them in some sort either with the anxietie of their appetite to them preceding fruition or the distaste of satiety following it or with vexation of a deprivement of them during the Order of their affections to them So as we may well say that every thing we finde now assaults our felicity in this life in some sort to kill it and to revive to us the memory of our covenant of sufferance we entered into as soon as we entered into light For which reason the wise man proclaimeth elegantly the tenour of it saying Eccles. 40. 1. Great travel is created for all men and a heavie yoak upon the children of Adam from the day of their coming forth of their mothers womb until the day of their burying in the mother of all their cogitations and fears of the heart imaginations of things to come and the day of their ending from him that sitteth upon the glorious state unto him that is humbled in earth and ashes Neither need we look back upon the defaced images of all conditions in the dead prints of History we have such living figures of them before our eys as must needs imprint upon our thoughts a lively character of the deplorable estate of all mortals whereby out of the ruines of houses whereof you lament the demolishments you may pick up some materials to build in your mindes this frame of the instable constructure of the greatest strength of humane happiness and thus your friends may in their fall some way support your virtue and your patience when you consider how incident it is to the vicissitudes of the world to expose unto us that changeable scene whereof Solomon reporteth this to us Eccles. 10 and 7. I have seen servants upon horses and Princes walking upon the ground as servants And in such capital letters as these you may now reade the articles of the covenant of sufferance which man is engaged in whereof Job maketh a manifest is signed even by all the Princes of the earth for we finde this under their hands in all records of them in some part of their lives Job 14 1. Man born of a woman and living a short time is replenished with many miseries In so much that after man by sin had made miserie for himself in this life it seemeth a mercie of God to have joyned death with it before which even the light of nature is sufficient to shew the Philosophers that none can be counted happy And in order to this proof we mark that Cain he who first abused death by imploying it to make sin was thought worthy of no less a punishment than the protraction of life which he had made so afflicting by his fearing
temptations by the reflection upon his precedent so that his example is not a simple injunction on you to suffer but a conferment of an abilitie to sustain it and a means to improve and ameliorate your estate in your coinheritance with him for the Apostle inforceth this Doctrine with this Energy of A fathfull saying 2 Tim. 2. 12. For if we be dead with him we shall live also together if we sustain we shall also reign together This deserves well our contēplation that the fulness of the divinity did inhabit in Christ and the clear vision of God did always illuminate him notwithstanding this it was miraculously disposed by God that the affluence of joy springing from the deity should not overflow his body and possess the inferior portions of his soul that there might be left room for pain and anguish the which was manifest in his passion in so much as stupendious miracles were requisite for an admittance of so much sorrow into his most sacred minde If God were pleased thus to multiply miracles that affliction might have access to his beloved Son in whom he was so well pleased shall we with whom he hath so much cause to be displeased wonder at any calamity or tribulation whereby he is pleased to correct us especially when it is a mark of our filiation and fraternity with Christ We who cannot be exempt from sufferings without a miracle as we are Sons of Adam shall we be astonished at any imposition under this notion of brothers nay even Members of Christ in which respect S. Bernard saith excellently that Delicate and tender Members are not decent and becoming a head stuck full of thorns Therefore the pressures and pungencies of this life make the Symmetry and proportion of the body of Christianity to the head Christ Jesus who since he did not so much as speak one idle vvord all his praises and Beautifications of the poor and the afflicted must needs verifie the good of adversity And Surely Christ did much less do any idle deed and if the exemplarie life of his labours and one-rations had not been directed to our conformity therein there might seem some supervacuousness and redundancy in his continual hardness and asperitie of life Would God have afflicted his onely Son so if it were indifferent to do or not to do as he did or that it did not concern those vvhom he had fore-knovvn and predestinated to be conformable to the image of his Son in this point that he might be the first born of many brethren Our fraternity therefore is derived to us by this similitude Our sins might have been effaced not onely by a drop of Christs bloud but even by a drop of his svveat vvherefore this seemeth one of the chief reasons that did induce the atrocity of his passion and the austeritie of his life the necessity of such a patern for our imitation since our nature vvas grown so degenerous and effeminate as no less than gods participation of all the sorts of grievances and injuries thereof would serve to form in us a chearfull disposition to the sufferings and infelicities of this life God did not therefore intend to vex us when he placed our salvation in difficulties and in our natures aversions for to sweeten the bitterness of this strong necessity which was to work upon our nature to purg us from the love of this world he was so gratious as to infuse the company of Christ into this receipt that the taste of his society might make more pleasant to us the ill savour and acerbity of the remedy Well therefore may we say A greater than Elisha is here who hath amended these waters by but tasting of them and hath left neither death nor bitterness in them for they are become rather waters springing up to life everlasting And we may observe that in conformity to Gods method with his Son Christ continued the same stile to his Mother for she whom all Generations were to call blessed was not allowed any of what this world calls Blessings for she who had born the Redeemer of the whole world was not able to go to the highest rate of the Temple for his Redemption her poor estate did not reach to pay so much as a Lambe for the Son of God and the Lamb who was to take away the sins of the world had not so much as a Lamb for his Ransom The lowest price that was set for any of the children of Israel was the rate her low condition was taxed at none was set at less than a pair of Pidgeons or a pair of Turtles and the Mother of God was in this inferiour form of the Daughters of Men This may serve to sweeten the bitterest water of poverty when we ponder this that Christ would not allow his Mother to taste of any other spring and though he would not let her taste of the sowreness of the forbidden fruit yet he fed her more than any other with these bitter Leaves which grew out of the same root that is though he was pleased to exempt her from sin yet he would not dispense with her in sufferings which we know are but the productions of sin and so she whom we may suppose to have been excepted out of the rule of sinners was exalted above any in the state of sufferers And this seems to be very consonant that as she was Mother to the man of sorrow and of no sin so she should be a bearer of all griefs without any guiltiness but howsoever this point is accorded by all parties that being the purest of all creatures Luke 2. 29 35. she was never the less the greatest of all Patients when she came to redeem her own Redeemer by the legal ransom and was to enter into possession of her Son we may note that the joys that we represaged her by Simeon in him were very dark and mystical but her own sorrows very clear and manifest For this mystery of her having a light to the revelation of the Gentiles in her arms and the glory of thy people Israel was hard to be understood of one that was in the lowest rank of the people but this part was easie to be conceived of his being a mark of contradiction and that a sword should pierce through her own soul Nature it self evidenceth the miseries which mothers are liable to from children and thus she had here her sorrows and her sufferings writ to her in the common Alphabet of nature and her joys and consolations cyphered out onely to her in the figures and characters of grace which are so hard to be decyphered though it may be she had the key of them but howsoever her faith was to be exercised by a tedious and very sudden triall in affliction She quickly found the sword in her soul for we may easily conceive what a wound her sudden flight into Egypt was how many fears distresses and anxieties pierced her tender heart in that laborious flight And sure the