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 confidence 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 luke warmnesse 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 Ulla si juris tibi pejerati Poena Barine nocuisset unquant Dente si nigro fieret vel unto 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 are 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 prae 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 discourse 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 is safe where the word 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 implyes that he is safe but by intermedial 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 were as 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 an 〈◊〉 faith is his foundation
potion And most certainly it is the greatest of evils to destroy a soul for whom the Lord Jesus dyed and to undoe that grace which our Lord purchased with so much sweat and bloud pains and a mighty charity And because very many sins are sins of society and confederation such are fornication drunkennesse bribery simony rebellion schisme and many others it is a hard and a weighty consideration what shall become of any one of us who have tempted our Brother or Sister to sin and death for though God hath spar'd our life and they are dead and their debt-books are sealed up till the day of account yet the mischief of our sin is gone before us and it is like a murther but more execrable the soul is dead in trespasses and sins and sealed up to an eternall sorrow and thou shalt see at Dooms-day what damnable uncharitablenesse thou hast done That soul that cryes to those rocks to cover her if it had not been for thy perpetuall temptations might have followed the Lamb in a white robe and that poor man that is cloathed with shame and flames of fire would have shin'd in glory but that thou didst force him to be partner of thy basenesse And who shall pay for this losse a soul is lost by thy means thou hast defeated the holy purposes of the Lord 's bitter passion by thy impurities and what shall happen to thee by whom thy Brother dies eternally Of all the considerations that concern this part of the horrors of Dooms-day nothing can be more formidable then this to such whom it does concern and truly it concerns so many and amongst so many perhaps some persons are so tender that it might affright their hopes and discompose their industries and spritefull labours of repentance but that our most mercifull Lord hath in the midst of all the fearfull circumstances of his second coming interwoven this one comfort relating to this which to my sense seems the most fearfull and killing circumstance Two shall be grinding at one mill the one shall be taken and the other left Two shall be in a bed the one shall be taken and the other left that is those who are confederate in the same fortunes and interests and actions may yet have a different sentence for an early and an active repentance will wash off this account and put it upon the tables of the Crosse and though it ought to make us diligent and carefull charitable and penitent hugely penitent even so long as we live yet when we shall appear together there is a mercy that shall there separate us who sometimes had blended each other in a common crime Blessed be the mercies of of God who hath so carefully provided a fruitfull shower of grace to refresh the miseries and dangers of the greatest part of mankind Thomas Aquinas was used to beg of God that he might never be tempted from his low fortune to Prelacies and dignities Ecclesiasticall and that his minde might never be discomposed or polluted with the love of any creature and that he might by some instrument or other understand the state of his deceased Brother and the story sayes that he was heard in all In him it was a great curiosity or the passion and impertinencies of a uselesse charity to search after him unlesse he had some other personall concernment then his relation of kindred But truly it would concern very many to be solicitous concerning the event of those souls with whom we have mingled death and sin for many of those sentences which have passed and decreed concerning our departed relatives will concern us dearly and we are bound in the same bundles and shall be thrown into the same fires unlesse we repent for our own sins and double our sorrows for their damnation 5. We may consider that this infinite multitude of men and women Angels and Devils is not ineffective as a number in Pythagoras Tables but must needs have influence upon every spirit that shall there appear For the transactions of that court are not like Orations spoken by a Grecian Orator in the circles of his people heard by them that croud nearest him or that sound limited by the circles of aire or the inclosure of a wall but every thing is represented to every person and then let it be considered when thy shame and secret turpitude thy midnight revels and secret hypocrisies thy lustfull thoughts and treacherous designes thy falshood to God and startings from thy holy promises thy follies and impieties shall be laid open before all the world and that then shall be spoken by the trumpet of an Archangell upon the house top the highest battlements of Heaven all those filthy words and lewd circumstances which thou didst act secretly thou wilt find that thou wilt have reason strangely to be ashamed All the wise men in the world shall know how vile thou hast been and then consider with what confusion of face wouldst thou stand in the presence of a good man and a severe if peradventure he should suddenly draw thy curtain and finde thee in the sins of shame and lust it must be infinitely more when God and all the Angels of heaven and earth all his holy myriads and all his redeemed Saints shall stare and wonder at thy impurities and follies I have read a story that a young Gentleman being passionately by his mother disswaded from entring into the severe courses of a religious and single life broke from her importunity by saying Volo servare animam meam I am resolved by all means to save my soul. But when he had undertaken a rule with passion he performed it carelesly and remifly and was but lukewarm in his Religion and quickly proceeded to a melancholy and wearied spirit and from thence to a sicknesse and the neighbourhood of death but falling into an agony and a phantastick vision dream'd that he saw himself summon'd before Gods angry throne and from thence hurryed into a place of torments where espying his Mother full of scorn she upbraided him with his former answer and asked him Why he did not save his soul by all means according as he undertook But when the sick man awaked and recovered he made his words good indeed and prayed frequently and fasted severely and laboured humbly and conversed charitably and mortified himself severely and refused such secular solaces which other good men received to refresh and sustain their infirmities and gave no other account to them that asked him but this If I could not in my extasie or dream endure my Mothers upbraiding my follies and weak Religion how shall I be able to suffer that God should redargue me at Dooms-day and the Angels reproach my lukewarmnesse and the Devils aggravate my sins and all the Saints of God deride my follies and hypocrisies The effect of that mans consideration may serve to actuate a meditation in every one of us for we shall all be at that passe that unlesse our shame and sorrowes
shall escape for being secret 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 And all prejudices being laid aside it shall be considered concerning our evill rules and false principles Cum cepero tempus ego justitias judicabo when I shall receive the people I shall judge according unto right so we read When we shall receive time I will judge justices and judgements so the vulgar Latin reads it that is in the day of the Lord when time is put into his hand and time shall be no more he shall judge concerning those judgements when men here make of things below and the fighting man shall perceive the noises of drunkards and fools that cryed him up for daring to kill his Brother to have been evill principles and then it will be declared by strange effects that wealth is not the greatest fortune and ambition was not but an ill counsellor and to lye for a good cause was no piety and to do evill for the glory of God was but an ill worshipping him and that good nature was not well imploy'd when it spent it self in vicious company and evill compliances and that piety was not softnesse and want of courage and that poverty ought not to have been contemptible and that cause that is unsuccessefull is not therefore evill and what is folly here shall be wisdome there then shall men curse their evill guides and their accursed superinduced necessities and the evill guises of the world and then when silence shall be found innocence and eloquence in many instances condemned as criminall when the poor shall reign and Generals and Tyrants shall lye low in horrible regions when he that lost all shall finde a treasure and he that spoil'd him shall be found naked and spoil'd by the destroyer then we shall finde it true that we ought here to have done what our Judge our blessed Lord shall do there that is take our measures of good and evill by the severities of the word of God by the Sermons of Christ and the four Gospels and by the Epistles of S. Paul by Justice and charity by the Lawes of God and the lawes of wise Princes and Republicks by the rules of Nature and the just proportions of Reason by the examples of good men and the proverbs of wise men by severity and the rules of Discipline for then it shall be that truth shall ride in triumph and the holinesse of Christs Sermons shall be manifest to all the world that the Word of God shall be advanced over all the discourses of men and Wisdome shall be justified by all her children Then shall be heard those words of an evill and tardy repentance and the just rewards of folly We fools thought their life madnesse but behold they are justified before the throne of God and we are miserable for ever Here men think it strange if others will not run into the same excesse of riot but there they will wonder how themselves should be so mad and infinitely unsafe by being strangely and inexcusably unreasonable The summe is this The Judge shall appear cloathed with wisdome and power and justice and knowledge and an impartiall Spirit making no separations by the proportions of this world but by the measures of God not giving sentence by the principles of our folly and evill customes but by the severity of his own Laws and measures of the Spirit Non est judicium Dei sicut hominum God does not judge as Man judges 6. Now that the Judge is come thus arrayed thus prepared so instructed let us next consider the circumstances of our appearing and his sentence and first I consider that men at the day of Judgement that belong not to the portion of life shall have three sorts of accusers 1. Christ himself who is their Judge 2. Their own conscience whom they have injured and blotted with characters of death and foul dishonour 3. The Devill their enemy whom they served 1. Christ shall be their accuser not only upon the stock of those direct injuries which I before reckoned of crucifying the Lord of life once and again c. But upon the titles of contempt and unworthinesse of unkindnesse and ingratitude and the accusation will be nothing else but a plain representation of those artifices and assistances those bonds and invitations those constrainings and importunities which our dear Lord used to us to make it almost impossible to lye in sin and necessary to be sav'd For it will it must needs be a fearfull exprobration of our unworthinesse when the Judge himself shall bear witnesse against us that the wisdome of God himself was strangely imployed in bringing us safely to felicity I shall draw a short Scheme which although it must needs be infinitely short of what God hath done for us yet it will be enough to shame us * God did not only give his Son for an example and the Son gave himself for a price for us but both gave the holy Spirit to assist us in mighty graces for the verifications of Faith and the entertainments of Hope and the increase and perseverance of Charity * God gave to us a new nature he put another principle into us a third part of a perfective constitution we have the Spirit put into us to be a part of us as properly to produce actions of a holy life as the soul of man in the body does produce the naturall * God hath exalted humane nature and made it in the person of Jesus Christ to sit above the highest seat of Angels and the Angels are made ministring spirits ever since their Lord became our Brother * Christ hath by a miraculous Sacrament given us his body to eat and his bloud to drink he made waies that we may become all one with him * He hath given us an easie religion and hath established our future felicity upon naturall and pleasant conditions and we are to be happy hereafter if we suffer God to make us happy here and things are so ordered that a man must take more pains to perish then to be happy * God hath found out rare wayes to make our prayers acceptable our weak petitions the desires of our imperfect souls to prevail mightily with God and to lay a holy violence and an undeniable necessity upon himself and God will deny us nothing but when we aske of him to do us ill offices to give us poisons and dangers and evill nourishment and temptations and he that hath given such mighty power to the prayers of his servants yet will not be moved by those potent and mighty prayers to do any good man an evill turn or to grant him one mischief in that only God can deny us * But in all things else God hath made all the excellent things in heaven and earth to joyn towards holy and fortunate effects for he hath appointed an Angell to present the prayers of Saints and Christ makes intercession for us and the holy Spirit
others and to pray for them with probable effect I say with probable effect for when the event principally depends upon that which is not within our own election such as are the lives and actions of others all that we can consider in this affair is whether wee be persons fit to pray in the behalf of others that hinder not but are persons within the limit and possibilities of the present mercy When the Emperour Maximinus was smitten with the wrath of God and a sore disease for his cruell persecuting the Christian cause and putting so many thousand innocent and holy persons to death and he understood the voice of God and the accents of thunder and discerned that cruelty was the cause he revoked their decrees made against the Christians recall'd them from their caves and deserts their sanctuaries and retirements and enjoyned them to pray for the life and health of their Prince They did so and they who could command mountaines to remove and were obeyed they who could doe miracles they who with the key of prayer could open Gods four closets of the wombe and the grave of providence and rain could not obtain for their bloudy Emperour one drop of mercy but he must die miserable for ever God would not be intreated for him and though he loved the prayer because he loved the Advocates yet Maximinus was not worthy to receive the blessing And it was threatned to the rebellious people of Israel and by them to all people that should sin grievously against the Lord God would break their staffe of bread and even the righteous should not be prevailing intercessors Though Noah Job or Daniel were there they should deliver but their own souls by their righteousnesse saith the Lord God and when Abraham prevailed very far with God in the behalf of Sodome and the five Cities of the Plain it had its period If there had been ten righteous in Sodom it should have been spared for their sakes but four onely were found and they onely delivered their own souls too but neither their righteousnesse nor Abrahams prayer prevailed any further and we have this case also mentioned in the New Testament If any man see his brother sin a sin which is not unto death he shall aske and he shall give him life for them that sin not unto death At his prayer the sinner shall receive pardon God shall give him life for them to him that prays in their behalf that sin provided it be not a sin unto death For there is a sin unto death but I doe not say that he shall pray for it There his Commission expires and his power is confin'd For there are some sins of that state and greatnesse that God will not pardon S. Austin in his books de sermone Domini in monte affirms it concerning some one single sin of a perfect malice It was also the opinion of Origen and Athanasius and is followed by venerable Bede and whether the Apostle means a peculiar state of sin or some one single great crime which also supposes a precedent and a present state of criminall condition it is such a thing as will hinder our prayers from prevailing in their behalf we are therefore not encouraged to pray because they cannot receive the benefit of Christs intercession and therefore much lesse of our Advocation which onely can prevail by vertue and participation of his mediation For whomsoever Christ prays for them wee pray that is for all them that are within the covenant of repentance for all whose actions have not destroyed the very being of Religion who have not renounc'd their faith nor voluntarily quit their hopes nor openly opposed the Spirit of grace nor grown by a long progresse to a resolute and finall impiety nor done injustices greater then sorrow or restitution or recompense or acknowledgment However though it may be uncertain and disputed concerning the number of sins unto death and therefore to pray or not to pray is not matter of duty yet it is all one as to the effect whether we know them or no for though we intend charity when we pray for the worst of men yet concerning the event God will take care and will certainly return thy prayer upon thy own head though thou didst desire it should water and refresh thy neighbors drynesse and St. John so expresses it as if he had left the matter of duty undetermin'd because the instances are uncertain yet the event is certainly none at all therefore because we are not encouraged to pray and because it is a sin unto death that is such a sin that hath no portion in the promises of life and the state of repentance But now suppose the man for whom wee pray to be capable of mercy within the covenant of repentance and not farre from the Kingdome of heaven yet 2ly No prayers of others can further prevail then to remove this person to the next stage in order to felicity When S. Monica prayed for her son she did not pray to God to save him but to cōvert him and when God intended to reward the prayers and almes of Cornelius he did not do it by giving him a Crown but by sending an Apostle to him to make him a Christian the meaning of which observation is that we may understand that as in the person prayed for there ought to be the great disposition of being in a saveable condition so there ought also to be all the intermediall aptnesses for just as he is disposed so can we prevail and the prayers of a good man first prevail in behalf of a sinner that he shall be invited that he shall be reproved and then that he shall attend to it then that he shall have his heart open'd and then that he shall repent And still a good mans prayers follow him thorough the severall stages of pardon of sanctification of restraining graces of a mighty providence of great assistance of perseverance and a holy death No prayers can prevaile upon an undisposed person For the Sun himself cannot enlighten a blind eye nor the soule move a body whose silver cord is loosed and whose joints are untyed by the rudenesse and dissolutions of a pertinacious sicknesse But then suppose an eye quick and healthfull or apt to be refreshed with light and a friendly prospect yet a glow-worm or a diamond the shels of pearl or a dead mans candle are not enough to make him discern the beauties of the world and to admire the glories of creation Therefore 2. As the persons must be capable for whom we pray so they that pray for others must be persons extraordinary in something 1. If persons be of an extraordinary piety they are apt to be intercessors for others This appeares in the case of Job When the wrath of God was kindled against Eliphaz and his two friends God commanded them to offer a sacrifice but my servant Job shall prey for you for him will I accept and it
of David died for his father David as well as he did for us he was the Lambe slain from the beginning of the world and yet that death and that relation and all the heap of the Divine favours which crown'd David with a circle richer then the royall diadem could not exempt him from the portion of sinners when he descended into their pollutions I pray God we may find the sure mercies of David and may have our portion in the redemption wrought by the Son of David but we are to expect it upon such terms as are revealed such which include time and labour and uncertainty and watchfulnesse and fear and holy living But it is a sad observation that the case of pardon of sins is so administred that they that are most sure of it have the greatest fears concerning it and they to whom it doth not belong at all are as confident as children and fooles who believe every thing they have a mind to not because they have reason so to doe but because without it they are presently miserable The godly and holy persons of the Church work out their salvation with fear and trembling and the wicked goe to destruction with gayety and confidence these men think all is well while they are in the gall of bitternesse and good men are tossed in a tempest crying and praying for a safe conduct and the sighs of their feares and the wind of their prayers waft them safely to their port Pardon of sins is not easily obtain'd because they who onely certainly can receive it find difficulty and danger and fears in the obtaining it and therefore their case is pityable and deplorable who when they have least reason to expect pardon yet are most confident and carelesse But because there are sorrows on one side and dangers on the other and temptations on both sides it will concern all sorts of men to know when their sins are pardoned For then when they can perceive their signes certain and evident they may rest in their expectations of the Divine mercies when they cannot see the signes they may leave their confidence and change it into repentance and watchfulnesse and stricter observation and in order to this I shall tell you that which shall never faile you a certaine signe that you may know whether or no and when and in what degree your persons are pardoned 1. I shall not consider the evils of sin by any Metaphysicall and abstracted effects but by sensible reall and materiall Hee that revenges himself of another does something that will make his enemy grieve something that shall displease the offender as much as sin did the offended and therefore all the evills of sin are such as relate to us and are to bee estimated by our apprehensions Sin makes God angry and Gods anger if it be turned aside will make us miserable and accursed and therefore in proportion to this we are to reckon the proportions of Gods mercy in forgivenesse or his anger in retaining 2. Sin hath obliged us to suffer many evills even whatsoever the anger of God is pleased to inflict sicknesse and dishonour poverty and shame a caytive spirit and a guilty conscience famine and war plague and pestilence sudden death and a short life temporall death or death eternall according as God in the severall covenants of the Law and Gospel hath expressed 3. For in the law of Moses sin bound them to nothing but temporall evills but they were sore and heavy and many but these only there were threatned in the Gospel Christ added the menaces of evills spirituall and eternall 4. The great evill of the Jews was their abscission and cutting off from being Gods people to which eternall damnation answers amongst us and as sicknesse and war and other intermediall evills were lesser strokes in order to the finall anger of God against their Nation so are these and spirituall evills intermediall in order to the Eternall destruction of sinning and unrepenting Christians 5. When God had visited any of the sinners of Israel with a grievous sicknesse then they lay under the evill of their sin and were not pardoned till God took away the sicknesse but the taking the evill away the evill of the punishment was the pardon of the sin to pardon the sin is to spare the sinner and this appears For when Christ had said to the man sick of the palsey Son thy sins are forgiven thee the Pharisees accused him of blasphemy because none had power to forgive sins but God onely Christ to vindicate himselfe gives them an ocular demonstration and proves his words that yee may know the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins he saith to the man sick of the palsey Arise and walk then he pardoned the sin when he took away the sicknesse and proved the power by reducing it to act for if pardon of sins be any thing else it must be easier or harder if it be easier then sin hath not so much evill in it as a sicknesse which no Religion as yet ever taught If it be harder then Christs power to doe that which was harder could not be proved by doing that which was easier It remaines therefore that it is the same thing to take the punishment away as to procure or give the pardon because as the retaining the sin was an obligation to the evill of punishment so the remitting the sin is the disobliging to its penalty So farre then the case is manifest 6. The next step is this that although in the Gospel God punishes sinners with temporall judgements and sicknesses and deaths with sad accidents and evill Angels and messengers of wrath yet besides these lesser strokes he hath scorpions to chastise and loads of worse evils to oppresse the disobedient he punishes one sin with another vile acts with evill habits these with a hard heart and this with obstinacy and obstinacy with impenitence and impenitence with damnation Now because the worst of evills which are threatned to us are such which consign to hell by persevering in sin as God takes off our love and our affections our relations and bondage under sin just in the same degree he pardons us because the punishment of sin being taken off and pardoned there can remaine no guilt Guiltinesse is an unsignificant word if there be no obligation to punishment Since therefore spirituall evils and progressions in sin and the spirit of reprobation and impenitence and accursed habits and perseverance in iniquity are the worst of evils when these are taken off the sin hath lost its venome and appendant curse for sin passes on to eternall death onely by the line of impenitence and it can never carry us to hell if we repent timely and effectually in the same degree therefore that any man leaves his sin just in the same degree he is pardoned and he is sure of it For although curing the temporall evill was the pardon of sins
among the Jews yet wee must reckon our pardon by curing the spirituall If I have sinned against God in the shamefull crime of Lust then God hath pardoned my sins when upon my repentance and prayers he hath given me the grace of Chastity My Drunkennesse is forgiven when I have acquir'd the grace of Temperance and a sober spirit My Covetousnesse shall no more be a damning sin when I have a loving and charitable spirit loving to do good and despising the world for every further degree of sin being a neerer step to hell and by consequence the worst punishment of sin it follows inevitably that according as we are put into a contrary state so are our degrees of pardon and the worst punishment is already taken off And therefore we shall find that the great blessing and pardon and redemption which Christ wrought for us is called sanctification holinesse and turning us away from our sins So St. Peter Yee know that you were not redeemed with corruptible things as silver and gold from your vain conversation that 's your redemption that 's your deliverance you were taken from your sinfull state that was the state of death this of life and pardon and therefore they are made Synonyma by the same Apostle According as his divine power hath given us all things that pertain to life and godlinesse to live and to be godly is all one to remain in sin and abide in death is all one to redeem us from sin is to snatch us from hell he that gives us godlinesse gives us life and that supposes pardon or the abolition of the rites of eternall death and this was the conclusion of St. Peter's Sermon and the summe totall of our redemption and of our pardon God having raised up his Son sent him to blesse us in turning away every one of you from your iniquity this is the end of Christs passion and bitter death the purpose of all his and all our preaching the effect of baptisme purging washing sanctifying the work of the Sacrament of the Lords Supper the same body that was broken and the same blood that was shed for our redemption is to conform us into his image and likenesse of living and dying of doing and suffering The case is plain just as we leave our sins so Gods wrath shall be taken from us as we get the graces contrary to our former vices so infallibly we are consign'd to pardon If therefore you are in contestation against sin while you dwell in difficulty and sometimes yeeld to sin and sometimes overcome it your pardon is uncertain and is not discernible in its progresse but when sin is mortified and your lusts are dead and under the power of grace and you are led by the Spirit all your fears concerning your state of pardon are causelesse and afflictive without reason but so long as you live at the old rate of lust or intemperance of covetousnesse or vanity of tyranny or oppression of carelesnesse or irreligion flatter not your selves you have no more reason to hope for pardon then a begger for a Crown or a condemned criminall to be made Heir apparent to that Prince whom he would traiterously have slain 4. They have great reason to fear concerning their condition who having been in the state of grace who having begun to lead a good life and give their names to God by solemne deliberate acts of will and understanding and made some progresse in the way of Godlinesse if they shall retire to folly and unravell all their holy vows and commit those evils from which they formerly run as from a fire or inundation their case hath in it so many evills that they have great reason to fear the anger of God and concerning the finall issue of their souls For return to folly hath in it many evils beyond the common state of sin and death and such evils which are most contrary to the hopes of pardon 1. He that falls back into those sins he hath repented of does grieve the holy Spirit of God by which he was sealed to the day of redemption For so the Antithesis is plain and obvious If at the conversion of a sinner there is joy before the beatified Spirits the Angels of God and that is the consummation of our pardon and our consignation to felicity then we may imagine how great an evill it is to grieve the Spirit of God who is greater then the Angels The Children of Israel were carefully warned that they should not offend the Angel Behold I send an Angel before thee beware of him and obey his voyce provoke him not for he will not pardon your transgressions that is he will not spare to punish you if you grieve him Much greater is the evill if we grieve him who sits upon the throne of God who is the Prince of all the Spirits and besides grieving the Spirit of God is an affection that is as contrary to his felicity as lust is to his holinesse both which are essentiall to him Tristitia enim omnium spirituum nequissima est pessima servis Dei omnium spiritus exterminat cruciat Spiritum sanctum said Hennas Sadnesse is the greatest enemy to Gods servants if you grieve Gods Spirit you cast him out for he cannot dwell with sorrow and grieving unlesse it be such a sorrow which by the way of vertue passes on to joy and never ceasing felicity Now by grieving the holy Spirit is meant those things which displease him doing unkindnesse to him and then the grief which cannot in proper sense seise upon him will in certain effects return upon us Ita enim dica said Seneca sacer intra nos Spiritus sedet bonorum malorúmque nostrorum observator custos hic prout à nobis tractatus est ita nos ipse tractat There is a holy spirit dwels in every good man who is the observer and guardian of all our actions and as we treat him so will he treat us Now we ought to treat him sweetly and tenderly thankfully and with observation Deus praecepit Spiritum sanctum utpote pro naturae suae bono tenerum delicatum tranquillitate lenitate quiete pace tractare said Tertullian de Spectaculis The Spirit of God is a loving and a kind Spirit gentle and easy chast and pure righteous and peaceable and when he hath done so much for us as to wash us from our impurities and to cleanse us from our stains and streighten our obliquities and to instruct our ignorances and to snatch us from an intolerable death and to consign us to the day of redemption that is to the resurrection of our bodies from death corruption and the dishonors of the grave and to appease all the storms and uneasynesse and to make us free as the Sons of God and furnished with the riches of the Kingdome and all this with innumerable arts with difficulty and in despite of our lusts
under the eye of heaven that many Nations are marked for intemperance and that it is lesse noted because it is so popular and universall and that even in the midst of the glories of Christianity there are so many persons drunk or too full with meat or greedy of lust even now that the Spirit of God is given to us to make us sober and temperate and chaste we may well imagine since all men have flesh and all men have nor the spirit the flesh is the parent of sin and death and it can be nothing else And it is no otherwise when we are tempted with pain We are so impatient of pain that nothing can reconcile us to it not the laws of God not the necessities of nature not the society of all our kindred and of all the world not the interest of vertue not the hopes of heaven we will submit to pain upon no terms but the basest and most dishonorable for if sin bring us to pain or affront or sicknesse we choose that so it be in the retinue of a lust and a base desire but we accuse Nature and blaspheme God we murmur and are impatient when pain is sent to us from him that ought to send it and intends it as a mercy when it comes But in the matter of afflictions and bodily sicknesse we are so weak and broken so uneasie and unapt to sufferance that this alone is beyond the cure of the old Philosophy Many can endure poverty and many can retire from shame and laugh at home and very many can endure to be slaves but when pain and sharpnesse are to be endured for the interests of vertue we finde but few Martyrs and they that are suffer more within themselves by their fears and their temptations by their uncertain purposes and violences to Nature then by the Hang-mans sword the Martyrdome is within and then he hath won his Crown not when he hath suffered the blow but when he hath overcome his fears and made his spirit conqueror It was a sad instance of our infirmity when of the 40 Martyrs of Cappadocia set in a freezing lake almost consummate and an Angell was reaching the Crowne and placing it upon their brows the flesh fail'd one of them and drew the spirit after it and the man was called off from his Scene of noble contention and dyed in warm water Odi artus fragilémque hunc corporis usum Desertorem animi We carry about us the body of death and we bring evils upon our selves by our follies and then know not how to bear them and the flesh forsakes the spirit And indeed in sicknesse the infirmity is so very great that God in a manner at that time hath reduced all Religion into one vertue Patience with its appendages is the summe totall of almost all our duty that is proper to the days of sorrow and we shall find it enough to entertain all our powers and to imploy all our aids the counsels of wise men and the comforts of our friends the advices of Scripture and the results of experience the graces of God and the strength of our own resolutions are all then full of imployments and find it work enough to secure that one grace For then it is that a could is wrapped about our heads and our reason stoops under sorrow the soul is sad and its instrument is out of tune the auxiliaries are disorder'd and every thought sits heavily then a comfort cannot make the body feel it and the soule is not so abstracted to rejoyce much without its partner so that the proper joyes of the soul such as are hope and wise discourses and satisfactions of reason and the offices of Religion are felt just as we now perceive the joyes of heaven with so little relish that it comes as news of a victory to a man upon the Rack or the birth of an heir to one condemned to dye he hears a story which was made to delight him but it came when he was dead to joy and all its capacities and therefore sicknesse though it be a good Monitor yet it is an ill stage to act some vertues in and a good man cannot then doe much and therefore he that is in the state of flesh and blood can doe nothing at all 4. But in these considerations we find our nature in disadvantages and a strong man may be overcome when a stronger comes to disarme him and pleasure and pain are the violences of choice and chance but it is no better in any thing else for nature is weak in all its strengths and in its fights at home and abroad in its actions and passions we love some things violently and hate others unreasonably any thing can fright us when we should be confident and nothing can scare us when we ought to feare the breaking of a glasse puts us into a supreme anger and we are dull and indifferent as a Stoick when we see God dishonour'd we passionately desire our preservation and yet we violently destroy our selves and will not be hindred we cannot deny a friend when he tempts us to sin and death and yet we daily deny God when he passionately invites us to life and health we are greedy after money and yet spend it vainly upon our lusts we hate to see any man flatter'd but our selves and we can endure folly if it be on our side and a sin for our interest we desire health and yet we exchange it for wine and madnesse we sink when a persecution comes and yet cease not daily to persecute our selves doing mischiefs worse then the sword of Tyrants and great as the malice of a Devill 5. But to summe up all the evills that can be spoken of the infirmities of the flesh the proper nature and habitudes of men are so foolish and impotent so averse and peevish to all good that a mans will is of it self onely free to choose evils Neither is it a contradiction to say liberty and yet suppose it determin'd to one object onely because that one object is the thing we choose For although God hath set life and death before us fire and water good and evill and hath primarily put man into the hands of his owne counsell that he might have chosen good as well as evill yet because he did not but fell into an evill condition and corrupted manners and grew in love with it and infected all his children with vicious examples and all nations of the world have contracted some universall stains and the thoughts of mans hearts are onely evill and that continually and there is not one that doth good no not one that sinneth not since I say all the world have sinned we cannot suppose a liberty of indifferency to good and bad it is impossible in such a liberty that there should be no variety that all should choose the same thing but a liberty of complacency or delight we may suppose that is so that though naturally he might
hath the same constitution that a man hath without the act of both it is as imperfect as a dead man the soul cannot produce the body of some actions any more then the body can put life into it and therefore an ineffective pity and a lazie counsell an empty blessing and gay words are but deceitfull charity Quod peto da Caï non peto consiliam He that gave his friend counsell to study the Law when he desired to borrow 20 l. was not so friendly in his counsell as he was uselesse in his charity spirituall acts can cure a spirituall malady but if my body needs relief because you cannot feed me with Diagrams or cloath me with Euclids elements you must minister a reall supply by a corporall charity to my corporall necessity This proposition is not only usefull in the doctrine of charity and the vertue of religion but in the professions of faith and requires that it be publick open and ingenuous In matters of necessary duty it is not sufficient to have it to our selves but we must also have it to God and all the world and as in the heart we beleeve so by the mouth we confesse unto salvation he is an ill man that is only a Christian in his heart and is not so in his professions and publications and as your heart must not be wanting in any good profession and pretences so neither must publick profession be wanting in every good and necessary perswasion The faith and the cause of God must be owned publiquely for if it be the cause of God it will never bring us to shame I do not say what ever we think we must tell it to all the world much lesse at all times and in all circumstances but we must never deny that which we beleeve to be the cause of God in such circumstances in which we can and ought to glorifie him But this extends also to other instances He that swears a false oath with his lips and unswears it with his heart hath deceived one more then he thinks for himself is the most abused person and when my action is contrary to men they will reprove me but when it is against my own perswasion I cannot but reprove my self and am witnesse and accuser and party and guilty and then God is the Judge and his anger will be a fierce executioner because we do the Lords work deceitfully 3. They are deceitfull in the Lords work that reserve one faculty for sin or one sin for themselves or one action to please their appetite and many for Religion Rabbt Kimchi taught his Scholars Cogitationem pravam Deus non habet vice facti nisi concepta fuerit in Dei sidem Religionem that God is never angry with an evill thought unlesse it be a thought of Apostasie from the Jewes religion and therefore provided that men be severe and close in their sect and party they might roll in lustfull thoughts and the torches they light up in the Temple might smoke with anger at one end and lust at the other so they did not flame out in egressions of violence and injustice in adulteries and fouler complications nay they would give leave to some degrees of evill actions for R. Moses and Selomoh taught that if the most part of a mans actions were holy and just though in one he sinned often yet the greater ingredient should prevail and the number of good works should outweigh the lesser account of evill things and this Pharisaicall righteousnesse is too frequent even amongst Christians For who almost is there that does not count fairly concerning himself if he reckons many vertues upon the stock of his Religion and but one vice upon the stock of his infirmity half a dozen to God and one for his company or his friend his education or his appetite and if he hath parted from his folly yet he will remember the fleshpots and please himself with a phantastick sin and call it home through the gates of his memory and place it at the door of fancy that there he may behold it and consider concerning what he hath parted withall out of the fears and terrors of religion and a necessary unavoidable conscience Do not many men go from sin to sin even in their repentance they go backward from sin to sin and change their crime as a man changes his uneasie load and shakes it off from one shoulder to support it with the other How many severe persons virgins and widows are so pleased with their chastity and their abstinence even from lawfull mixtures that by this means they fall into a worse pride insomuch that I remember St. Austin said Audco dicere superbis continentibus expedit cadere they that are chaste and proud it is sometimes a remedy for them to fall into sin and by the shame of lust to cure the devill of pride and by the sin of the body to cure the worser evils of the spirit and therefore he addes that he did beleeve God in a severe mercy did permit the barbarous nations breaking in upon the Roman Empire to violate many virgins professed in Cloisters and religious Families to be as a mortification of their pride lest the accidentall advantages of a continent life should bring them into the certain miseries of a spirituall death by taking away their humility which was more necessary then their virgin state It is not a cure that men may use but God permits it sometimes with greater safety through his wise conduct and over-ruling providence St. Peter was safer by his fall as it fell out in the event of things then by his former confidence Man must never cure a sin by a sin but he that brings good out of our evill he can when he please But I speak it to represent how deceitfully many times we do the work of the Lord. We reprove a sinning Brother but do it with a pompous spirit we separate from scandall and do it with glory and a gaudy heart we are charitable to the poor but will not forgive our unkinde enemies or we powre relief into their bags but we please our selves and drink drunk and hope to commute with God giving the fruit of our labours or effluxes of money for the sin of our souls And upon this account it is that two of the noblest graces of a Christian are to very many persons made a savour of death though they were intended for the beginning and the promotion of an eternal life and those are faith and charity some men think if they have faith it is enough to answer all the accusations of sin which our consciences or the Devils make against us If I be a wanton person yet my faith shall hide it and faith shall cover the follies of drunkennesse and I may all my life relye upon faith at last to quit my scores For he that is most carefull is not innocent but must be saved by faith and he that is least carefull may
temperate to have got a habit of sobriety or chastity or humility is the work of a life And if we do but consider that he that lives well from his younger yeers or takes up at the end of his youthfull heats and enters into the courses of a sober life early diligently and vigorously shall finde himself after the studies and labours of 20. or 30. yeers piety but a very imperfect person many degrees of pride left unrooted up many inroads of intemperance or beginnings of excesse much indevotion and backwardnesse in religion many temptations to contest against and some infirmities which he shall never say he hath master'd we shall finde the work of a holy life is not to be deferred till our dayes are almost done till our strengths are decayed our spirits are weak and our lust strong our habits confirmed and our longings after sin many and impotent for what is very hard to be done and is alwayes done imperfectly when there is length of time and a lesse work to do and more abilities to do it withall when the time is short and almost expired and the work made difficult and vast and the strengths weaker and the faculties are disabled will seem little lesse then absolutely impossible * I shall end this generall consideration with the question of the Apostle If the righteous scarcely be saved if it be so difficult to overcome our sins and obtain vertuous habits difficult I say to a righteous a sober and well living person where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear What shall become of him who by his evil life hath not onely removed himself from the affections but even from the possibilities of vertue He that hath lived in sin will die in sorrow The Invalidity of a death-bed Repentance Part. II. BUt I shall pursue this great and necessary truth first by shewing what parts and ingredients of repentance are assigned when it is described in holy Scripture Secondly by shewing the necessities the absolute necessities of a holy life and what it means in Scripture to live holily Thirdly by considering what directions or intimations we have concerning the last time of beginning to repent and what is the longest period that any man may venture with safety And in the prosecution of these particulars we shall remove the objections those aprons of fig-leaves which men use for their shelter to palliate their sin and to hide themselves from that from which no rocks or mountains shall protect them though they fall upon them that is the wrath of God First That repentance is not onely an abolition and extinction of the body of sin a bringing it to the altar and slaying it before God and all the people but that we must also 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 mingle gold and rich presents the oblation of good works and holy habits with the sacrifice I have already proved but now if we will see repentance in its stature and integrity of constitution described we shall finde it to be the one half of all that which God requires of Christians Faith and Repentance are the whole duty of a Christian. Faith is a sacrifice of the understanding to God Repentance sacrifices the whole will That gives the knowing this gives up all the desiring faculties That makes us Disciples this makes us servants of the Holy Jesus Nothing else was preached by the Apostles nothing was enjoyned as the duty of man nothing else did build up the body of Christian religion So that as faith contains all that knowledge which is necessary to salvation So repentance comprehends in it all the whole practise and working duty of a returning Christian And this was the sum totall of all that Saint Paul preached to the Gentiles when in his farewell Sermon to the Bishops and Priests of Ephesus he professed that he kept back nothing that was profitable to them and yet it was all nothing but this Repentance towards God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ so that whosoever believes in Jesus Christ and repents towards God must make his accounts according to this standard that is to believe all that Christ taught him and to do all that Christ commanded and this is remarked in Saint Pauls Catechisme where he gives a more particular Catalogue of fundamentals he reckons nothing but Sacraments and faith of which he enumerates two principal articles resurrection of the dead and eternal judgement whatsoever is practical all the whole duty of man the practice of all obedience is called repentance from dead works which if we observe the singularity of the phrase does not mean sorrow For sorrow from dead works is not sense but it must mean mutationem status a conversion from dead works which as in all motions supposes two terms from dead works to living works from the death of sin to the life of righteousnesse I will adde but two places more out of each Testament one in which I suppose you may see every lineament of this great duty described that you may no longer mistake a grashopper for an Eagle Sorrow and holy purposes for the intire duty of repentance In the 18. of Ezek. 21. you shall finde it thus described But if the wicked will turne from all his sins that he hath committed and keep all my statutes and do that which is lawful and right he shall surely live he shall not die or as it is more fully described in Ezek. 33. 14. When I say unto the wicked Thou shalt surely die If he turn from his sin and do that which is lawful and right if the wicked restore the pledge give again that he had robbed walk in the statutes of life without committing iniquity he shall surely live he shall not die Here onely is the condition of pardon to leave all your sins to keep all Gods statutes to walk in them to abide to proceed and make progresse in them and this without the interruption by a deadly sin without committing iniquity to make restitution of all the wrongs he hath done all the unjust money he hath taken all the oppressions he hath committed all that must be satisfied for and repayed according to our ability we must make satisfaction for all injury to our Neighbours fame all wrongs done to his soul he must be restored to that condition of good things thou didst in any sense remove him from when this is done according to thy utmost power then thou hast repented truely then thou hast a title to the promise thou shalt surely live thou shalt not die for thy old sins thou hast formerly committed Onely be pleased to observe this one thing that this place of Ezekiel is it which is so often mistaken for that common saying At what time soever a sinner repents him of his sins from the bottom of his heart I will put all his wickednesse out of my remembrance saith the Lord For although at what time soever a sinner does repent as repentance is now explained
God will forgive him and that repentance as it is now stated cannot be done At what time soever not upon a mans deathbed yet there are no such words in the whole Bible nor any neerer to the sense of them then the words I have now read to you out of the Prophet Ezekiel Let that therefore no more deceive you or be made a colour to countenance a persevering sinner or a deathbed penitent Neither is the duty of Repentance to be bought at an easier rate in the New Testament You may see it described in the 2 Cor. 7. 11. Godly sorrow worketh repentance Well but what is that repentance which is so wrought This it is Behold the self same thing that ye sorrowed after a godly sort what carefulnesse it wrought in you yea what clearing of your selves yea what indignation yea what fear ye what vehement desire yea what zeal yea what revenge These are the fruits of that sorrow that is effectual these are the parts of repentance clearing our selves of all that is past and great carefulnesse for the future anger at our selves for our old sins and fear lest we commit the like again vehement desires of pleasing God and zeal of holy actions and a revenge upon our selves for our sins called by Saint Paul in another place a judging our selves lest we be judged of the Lord. And in pursuance of this truth the primitive Church did not admit a sinning person to the publike communions with the faithfull till besides their sorrow they had spent some years in an 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 in doing good works and holy living and especially in such actions which did contradict that wicked inclination which led them into those sins whereof they were now admitted to repent And therefore we find that they stood in the station of penitents seven years 13 years and somtimes till their death before they could be reconciled to the peace of God and his Holy Church Scelerum si bene poenitet eradenda cupidinis pravi sunt elementa tenerae nimis mentes asperioribus Formandae studijs Horat. Repentance is the institution of a philosophical and severe life an utter extirpation of all unreasonablenesse and impiety and an addresse to and a finall passing through all the parts of holy living Now Consider whether this be imaginable or possible to be done upon our deathbed when a man is frighted into an involuntary a sudden and unchosen piety 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 saith Hierocles He that never repents till a violent fear be upon him till he apprehend himself to be in the jawes of death ready to give up his unready and unprepared accounts till he sees the Judge sitting in all the addresses of dreadfulnesse and Majesty just now as he beleeves ready to pronounce that fearfull and intolerable sentence of Go ye cursed into everlasting fire this man does nothing for the love of God nothing for the love of vertue It is just as a condemned man repents that he was a Traytor but repented not till he was arrested and sure to die Such a repentance as this may still consist with as great an affection to sin as ever he had and it is no thanks to him if when the knife is at his throat then he gives good words and flatters But suppose this man in his health and the middest of all his lust it is evident that there are some circumstances of action in which the man would have refused to commit his most pleasing sin Would not the son of Tarquin have refused to ravish Lucrece if Junius Brutus had been by him Would the impurest person in the world act his lust in the market place or drink off an intemperate goblet if a dagger were placed at his throat In these circumstances their fear would make them declare against the present acting their impurities But does this cure the intemperance of their affections Let the impure person retire to his closet and Junius Brutus be ingaged in a far distant war and the dagger be taken from the drunkards throat and the fear of shame or death or judgement be taken from them all and they shall no more resist their temptation then they could before remove their fear and you may as well judge the other persons holy and haters of their sin as the man upon his death-bed to be penitent and rather they then he by how much this mans fear the fear of death and of the infinite pains of hell the fear of a provoked God and an angry eternall Judge are far greater then the apprehensions of publike shame or an abused husband or the poniard of an angry person These men then sin not because they dare not they are frighted from the act but not from the affection which is not to be cured but by discourse and reasonable acts and humane considerations of which that man is not naturally capable who is possessed with the greatest fear the fear of death and damnation If there had been time to cure his sin and to live the life of grace I deny not but God might have begun his conversion with so great a fear that he should never have wiped off its impression but if the man dies then dies when he onely declaims against and curses his sin as being the authour of his present fear and apprehended calamity It is very far from reconciling him to God or hopes of pardon because it proceeds from a violent unnaturall and intolerable cause no act of choice or vertue but of sorrow a deserved sorrow and a miserable unchosen unavoidable fear moriensque recepit Quas nollet victurus aquas He curses sin upon his deathbed and makes a Panegyrick of vertue which in his life time he accounted folly and trouble and a needlesse vexation Quae mens est hodie cur eadem non puero fuit vel cur his animis incolumes non redeunt genae I shall end this first Consideration with a plain exhortation that since repentance is a duty of so great and giant-like bulk let no man croud it up into so narrow room as that it be strangled in its birth for want of time and aire to breath in Let it not be put off to that time when a man hath scarce time enough to reckon all those particular duties which make up the integrity of its constitution Will any man hunt the wild boare in his garden or bait a bull in his closet will a woman wrap her childe in her handkerchiefe or a Father send his son to school when he is 50 yeers old These are undecencies of providence and the instrument contradicts the end And this is our case There is no roome for the repentance no time to act all its essentiall parts and a childe who hath a great way to go before he be wise may defer his studies and hope to become very learned in his old age and upon his deathbed as well as a vitious person may think to
infliction he strikes more gently and whereas God had designed it may be the death of thy self or thy neerest relative he is content to take the life of a childe and so he did to David when he forbore him the Lord hath taken away thy sin thou shalt not die neverthelesse the childe that is born unto thee that shall die sometimes he puts the evil off to a further day as he did in the case of Ahab and Hezekiah to the first he brought the evil upon his house and to the second he brought the evil upon his kingdom in his sons dayes God forgiving onely so as to respite the evil that they should have peace in their own dayes And thus when we have committed a sin against God which hath highly provoked him to anger even upon our repentance we are not sure to be forgiven so as we understand forgivenes that is to hear no more of it never to be called to an account but we are happy if God so forgives us as not to throw us into the insufferable flames of hell though he smite us still we groan for our misery till we chatter like a swallow as Davide expression is and though David was an excellent penitent yet after he had lost the childe begotten of Bathsheba and God had told him he had forgiven him yet he raised up his darling son against him and forced him to an inglorious flight and his son lay with his Fathers concubins in the face of all Israel so that when we are forgiven yet it is ten to one but GOD will make us to smart and roar for our sinnes for the very disquietnesse of our souls For if we sin and ask God forgivenesse and then are quiet we feele so little inconvenience in the trade that we may more easily be tempted to make a trade of it indeed I wish to God that for every sin we have committed we should heartily cry God mercy and leave it and judge our selves for it to prevent Gods anger but when we have done all that we commonly call repentance and when possibly God hath forgiven us to some purposes yet it may be he punishes our sin when we least think of it that sin which we have long since forgotten It may be for the lust of thy youth thou had a healthlesse old age an old religious person long agoe complained it was his case Quos nimis effraenes habui nunc vapulo renes Sic luitur juvellis culpa dolore senis It may be thy sore eyes are the punishment of thy intemperance seven years ago or God cuts thy dayes shorter and thou shalt die in a florid age or he raises up afflictions to thee in thine own house in thine own bowels or hath sent a gangren into thy estate or with any arrow out of his quiver he can wound thee and the arrow shall stick fast in thy flesh although God hath forgiven thy sin to many purposes Our blessed Saviour was heard in all that he prayed for said the Apostle and he prayed for the Jews that crucified him Father forgive them for they know not what they do and God did forgive that great sin but how far whereas it was just in God to deprive them of all possibility of receiving benefit from the death of Christ yet God admitted them to it he gave them time and possibilities and helps and great advantages to bring them to repentance he did not presently shut them up in his final and eternal anger and yet he had finally resolved to destroy their city and nation and did so but forbore them forty years gave them al the helps of miracles and sermons apostolical to shame them and force them into sorrow for their fault And before any man can repent God hath forgiven the man in one degree of forgivenesse for he hath given him grace of repentance and taken from him that final anger of the spirit of reprobation and when a man hath repented no man can say that God hath forgiven him to all purposes but he hath reserves of anger to punish the sin to make the man affraid to sin any more and to represent that when any man hath sinned what ever he does afterwards he shall be miserable as long as he lives vexed with its adherencies and its neighbour-hood and evil consequence For as no man that hath sinned can during his life ever returne to an integral and perfect innocence so neither shall he be restored to a perfect peace but must alwayes watch and strive against his sinne and alwayes mourn and pray for its pardon and alwayes finde cause to hate it by knowing himself to be for ever in danger of enduring some grievous calamity even for those sinnes for which he hath truely repented him for which God hath in many gracious degrees passed his pardon this is the manner of the dispensation of the divine mercy in respect of particular persons and nations too But sometimes we finde a severer judgement happening upon a people and yet in that sad story Gods mercy sings the triumph which although it be much to Gods glory yet it is a sad story to sinning people 600000. fighting men besides women and children and decrepit persons came out of Egypt and God destroyed them all in the wildernesse except Caleb and Joshuah and there it was that Gods mercy prevailed over his justice that he did not destroy the nation but still preserved a succession to Jacob to possesse the promise God drowned all the world except eight persons his mercy there also prevailed over his justice that he preserved a remnant to mankinde his justice devoured all the world and his mercy which preserved but eight had the honour of the prevailing attribute God destroyed Sodom and the five cities of the plain and rescued but four from the flames of that sad burning and of the four lost one in the flight and yet his mercy prevailed over his justice because he did not destroy all And in these senses we are to understand the excellency of the divine mercy even when he smites when he rebukes us for sin when he makes our beauty to fail and our flesh to consume away like a moth fretting a garment yet then his mercy is the prevailing ingredient If his judgements be but fines set upon our heads accord-to the mercy of our old lawes Salvo contenemento so as to preserve our estates to continue our hopes and possibilities of heaven and all the other judgements can be nothing but mercies excellent instruments of grace arts to make us sober and wise to take off from our vanity to restrain our wildnesses which if they were left unbridled would set all the world on fire Gods judgements ars like the censures of the Church in which a sinner is delivered over to Satan to be buffetted that the spirit may be saved the result of all this is that Gods mercies are not ought not cannot be instruments of confidence to sin because the
many stages of a good life to prevent his being tempted to a single sin must be very careful that he never entertain his spirit with the remembrances of his past sin nor amuse it with the phantastick apprehensions of the present When the Israelites fancied the sapidnesse and relish of the flesh pots they longed to tast and to return So when a Libian Tiger drawn from his wilder forragings is shut up and taught to eat civil meat and suffer the authority of a man he sits down tamely in his prison and payes to his keeper fear and reverence for his meat But if he chance to come again and taste a draught of warm blood he presently leaps into his naturall cruelty Admonitae tument gustato sanguine fauces Feruet à trepido vix abstinet ira Magistro He scarce abstains from eating those hands that brought him discipline and food so is the nature of a man made tame and gentle by the grace of God and reduced to reason and kept in awe by religion and lawes and by an awfull vertue is taught to forget those alluring and sottish relishes of sin but if he diverts from his path and snatches handfuls from the wanton vineyards and remembers the lasciviousnesse of his unwholesome food that pleased his childish palate then he grows sick again and hungry after unwholesome diet and longs for the apples of Sodom A man must walk thorow the world without eyes or ears fancy or appetite but such as are created and sanctified by the grace of God and being once made a new man he must serve all the needs of nature by the appetite and faculties of grace nature must be wholly a servant and we must so look towards the deliciousnesse of our religion and the ravishments of heaven that our memory must be for ever uselesse to the affairs and perceptions of sin we cannot stand wee cannot live unlesse we be curious and watchfull in this particular By these and all other arts of the Spirit if we stand upon our guard never indulging to our selves one sin because it is but one as knowing that one sin brought in death upon all the world and one sin brought slavery upon the posterity of Cham and alwayes fearing lest death surprize us in that one sin we shall by the grace of God either not need or else easily perceive the effects and blessings of that compassion which God reserves in the secrets of his mercy for such persons whom his grace hath ordained and disposed with excellent dispositions unto life eternall These are the sorts of men which are to be used with compassion concerning whom we are to make a difference making a difference so sayes the Text and it is of high concernment that we should do so that we may relieve the infirmities of the men and relieve their sicknesses and transcribe the copy of the Divine mercy who loves not to quench the smoaking flax nor break the bruised reed For although all sins are against Gods Commandements directly or by certain consequents by line or by analogy yet they are not all of the same tincture and mortality Nec vincit ratio tantundem ut peccet idemque Qui teneros caules alieni fregerit horti Ut qui nocturnus Diuûm sacra legerit He that robs a garden of Coleworts and carries away an armfull of Spinage does not deserve hell as he that steals the Chalice from the Church or betrayes a Prince and therefore men are distinguished accordingly Est inter Tanaim quiddam socerunique Viselli The Poet that Sejanus condemned for dishonouring the memory of Agamemnon was not an equall criminall with Cataline or Graechus and Simon Magus and the Nicolaitans committed crimes which God hated more then the complying of S. Barnabas or the dissimulation of S. Peter and therefore God does treat these persons severally Some of these are restrained with a fit of sicknesse some with a great losse and in these there are degrees and some arrive at death And in this manner God scourged the Corinthians for their irreverent and disorderly receiving the Holy Sacrament For although even the least of the sins that I have discoursed of will lead to death eternall if their course be not interrupted and the disorder chastised yet because we do not stop their progresse instantly God many times does and visits us with proportionable judgements and so not onely checks the rivulet from swelling into rivers and a vastnesse but plainly tells us that although smaller crimes shall not be punished with equall severity as the greatest yet even in hell there are eternal rods as well as eternal scorpions and the smallest crime that we act with an infant-malice and manly deliberation shall be revenged with the lesser stroaks of wrath but yet with the infliction of a sad eternity But then that we also should make a difference is a precept concerning Church discipline and therefore not here proper to be considered but onely as it may concern our own particulars in the actions of repentance and our brethren in internal correction assit Regula quae poenas peccatis irroget aequas Nec seuticâ dignum horribili sectere flagello Let us be sure that we neglect no sin but repent for every one and judge our selves for every one according to the proportion of the malice or the scandall or the danger And although in this there is no fear that we would be excessive yet when we are to reprove a brother we are sharp enough and either by pride or by animosity by the itch of government or the indignation of an angry minde we run beyond the gentlenesse of a Christian Monitor we must remember that by Christs law some are to be admonished privately some to be shamed and corrected publikely and beyond these there is an abscission or a cutting off from the communion of faithfull people A delivering over to Sathan And to this purpose is that old reading of the words of my Text which is still in some Copies 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Reprove them sharply when they are convinced or separate by sentence But because this also is a designe of mercy acted with an instance of discipline it is a punishment of the flesh that the soul may be saved in the day of the Lord it means the same with the usuall reading and with the last words of the Text and teaches us our usage towards the worst of recoverable sinners Others save with fear pulling them out of the fire Some sins there are which in their own nature are damnable and some are such as will certainly bring a man to damnation the first are curable but with much danger the second are desperate and irrecoverable when a man is violently tempted and allured with an object that is proportionable and pleasant to his vigorous appetite and his unabated unmortified nature this man falls into death but yet we pity him as we pity a thief that robs for his necessity this man did not tempt
shall be rent into threds of light and scatter like the beards of comets Then shall bee fearfull earthquakes and the rocks shall rend in pieces the trees shall distill bloud and the mountains and fairest structures shall returne unto their primitive dust the wild beasts shall leave their dens and come into the companies of men so that you shall hardly tell how to call them herds of Men or congregations of Beasts Then shall the Graves open and give up their dead and those which are alive in nature and dead in fear shall be forc'd from the rocks whither they went to hide them and from caverns of the earth where they would fain have been concealed because their retirements are dismantled and their rocks are broken into wider ruptures and admit a strange light into their secret bowels and the men being forc'd abroad into the theatre of mighty horrors shall run up and downe distracted and at their wits end and then some shall die and some shall bee changed and by this time the Elect shall bee gathered together from the foure quarters of the world and Christ shall come along with them to judgment These signes although the Jewish Doctors reckon them by order and a method concerning which they had no revelation that appeares nor sufficiently credible tradition yet for the main parts of the things themselves the holy Scripture records Christs own words and concerning the most terrible of them the summe of which as Christ related them and his Apostles recorded and explicated is this The earth shall tremble and the powers of the heavens shall bee shaken the sun shall bee turned into darknesse and the moon into bloud that is there shall bee strange eclipses of the Sun and fearfull aspects in the Moon who when she is troubled looks red like bloud The rocks shall rend and the elements shall melt with fervent heat The heavens shall bee rolled up like a parchment the earth shall bee burned with fire the hils shall be like wax for there shall goe a fire before him and a mighty tempest shall be stirred round about him Dies irae Dies illa Solvet sêclum in favillâ Teste David cum Sibyllâ The Trumpet of God shall sound and the voice of the Archangell that is of him who is the Prince of all that great army of Spirits which shall then attend their Lord and wait upon and illustrate his glory and this also is part of that which is called the signe of the Son of Man for the fulfilling of all these praedictions and the preaching the Gospel to all Nations and the Conversion of the Jews and these prodigies and the Addresse of Majesty make up that signe The notice of which things some way or other came to the very Heathen themselves who were alarum'd into caution and sobriety by these dreadfull remembrances Sic cum compage solutâ Saecula tot mundt suprema coëgerit hora Antiquum repetens iterum chaos omnia mistis Sidera sideribus concurrent ignea pontum Astra petent tellus extendere littora nolet Excutietque fretum fratri contraria Phoebe Ibit Totaque discors Machina divulsi turbabit foedera Mundi Which things when they are come to passe it will be no wonder if mens hearts shall faile them for feare and their wits bee lost with guilt and their fond hopes destroyed by prodigie and amazement but it will bee an extreme wonder if the consideration and certain expectation of these things shall not awake our sleeping spirits and raise us from the death of Sin and the basenesse of vice and dishonorable actions to live soberly and temperately chastly and justly humbly and obediently that is like persons that believe all this and such who are not mad men or fools but will order their actions according to these notices For if they doe not believe these things where is their Faith If they doe believe them and sin on and doe as if there were no such thing to come to passe where is their Prudence and what is their hopes and where their Charity how doe they differ from beasts save that they are more foolish for beasts goe on and consider not because they cannot but we can consider and will not we know that strange terrors shall affright us all and strange deaths and torments shall seise upon the wicked and that we cannot escape and the rocks themselves will not bee able to hide us from the fears of those prodigies which shall come before the day of Judgement and that the mountains though when they are broken in pieces we call upon them to fall upon us shall not be able to secure us one minute from the present vengeance and yet we proceed with confidence or carelesnesse and consider not that there is no greater folly in the world then for a man to neglect his greatest interest and to die for trifles and little regards and to become miserable for such interests which are not excusable in a Childe He that is youngest hath not long to live Hee that is thirty forty or fifty yeares old hath spent most of his life and his dream is almost done and in a very few moneths hee must be cast into his eternall portion that is hee must be in an unalterable condition his finall Sentence shall passe according as hee shall then bee found and that will be an intolerable condition when he shall have reason to cry out in the bitternesse of his soule Eternall woe is to mee who refus'd to consider when I might have been saved and secured from this intolerable calamity But I must descend to consider the particulars and circumstances of the great consideration Christ shall be our Judge at Doomes-day SERMON II. Part II. 1. IF we consider the person of the Judge we first perceive that he is interested in the injury of the crimes he is to sentence Videbunt quem crucifixerunt and they shal look on him whom they have pierced It was for thy sins that the Judge did suffer such unspeakable pains as were enough to reconcile all the world to God The summe and spirit of which pains could not be better understood then by the consequence of his own words My God my God why hast thou forsaken me meaning that he felt such horrible pure unmingled sorrowes that although his humane nature was personally united to the Godhead yet at that instant he felt no comfortable emanations by sensible perception from the Divinity but he was so drenched in sorrow that the Godhead seemed to have forsaken him Beyond this nothing can be added but then that thou hast for thy own particular made all this in vain and ineffective that Christ thy Lord and Judge should be tormented for nothing that thou wouldst not accept felicity and pardon when he purchased them at so dear a price must needs be an infinite condemnation to such persons How shalt thou look upon him that fainted and dyed for love of thee and thou didst
scorn his miraculous mercies How shall we dare to behold that holy face that brought salvation to us and we turned away and fell in love with death and kissed deformity and sins and yet in the beholding that face consists much of the glories of eternity All the pains and passions the sorrowes and the groans the humility and poverty the labours and the watchings the Prayers and the Sermons the miracles and the prophecies the whip and the nails the death and the buriall the shame and the smart the Crosse and the grave of Jesus shall be laid upon thy score if thou hast refused the mercies and design of all their holy ends and purposes And if we remember what a calamity that was which broke the Jewish Nation in pieces when Christ came to judge them for their murdering him who was their King and the Prince of life and consider that this was but a dark image of the terrors of the day of Judgement we may then apprehend that there is some strange unspeakable evill that attends them that are guilty of this death and of so much evill to their Lord. Now it is certain if thou wilt not be saved by his death you are guilty of his death if thou wilt not suffer him to save thee thou art guilty of destroying him and then let it be considered what is to be expected from that Judge before whom you stand as his murtherer and betrayer * But this is but half of this consideration 2. Christ may be crucified again and upon a new account put to an open shame For after that Christ had done all this by the direct actions of his Priestly Office of sacrificing himself for us he hath also done very many things for us which are also the fruits of his first love and prosecutions of our redemption I will not instance in the strange arts of mercy that our Lord uses to bring us to live holy lives But I consider that things are so ordered and so great a value set upon our souls since they are the images of God and redeemed by the Bloud of the holy Lamb that the salvation of our souls is reckoned as a part of Christs reward a part of the glorification of his humanity Every sinner that repents causes joy to Christ and the joy is so great that it runs over and wets the fair brows and beauteous locks of Cherubims and Seraphims and all the Angels have a part of that banquet Then it is that our blessed Lord feels the fruits of his holy death the acceptation of his holy sacrifice the graciousnesse of his person the return of his prayers For all that Christ did or suffer'd and all that he now does as a Priest in heaven is to glorifie his Father by bringing souls to God For this it was that he was born and dyed that he descended from heaven to earth from life to death from the crosse to the grave this was the purpose of his resurrection and ascension of the end and design of all the miracles and graces of God manifested to all the world by him and now what man is so vile such a malicious fool that will refuse to bring joy to his Lord by doing himself the greatest good in the world They who refuse to do this are said to crucifie the Lord of life again and put him to an open shame that is they as much as in them lies bring Christ from his glorious joyes to the labours of his life and the shame of his death they advance his enemies and refuse to advance the Kingdome of their Lord they put themselves in that state in which they were when Christ came to dye for them and now that he is in a state that he may rejoyce over them for he hath done all his share towards it every wicked man takes his head from the blessing and rather chuses that the Devill should rejoyce in his destruction then that his Lord should triumph in his felicity And now upon the supposition of these premises we may imagine that it will be an infinite amazement to meet that Lord to be our Judge whose person we have murdered whose honour we have disparaged whose purposes we have destroyed whose joyes we have lessened whose passion we have made ineffectuall and whose love we have trampled under our profane and impious feet 3. But there is yet a third part of this consideration As it will be inquir'd at the day of Judgement concerning the dishonours to the person of Christ so also concerning the profession and institution of Christ and concerning his poor Members for by these also we make sad reflexions upon our Lord. Every man that lives wickedly disgraces the religion and institution of Jesus he discourages strangers from entring into it he weakens the hands of them that are in already and makes that the adversaries speak reproachfully of the Name of Christ but although it is certain our Lord and Judge will deeply resent all these things yet there is one thing which he takes more tenderly and that is the uncharitablenesse of men towards his poor It shall then be upbraided to them by the Judge that himself was hungry and they refused to give meat to him that gave them his body and heart-bloud to feed them and quench their thirst that they denyed a robe to cover his nakednesse and yet he would have cloathed their souls with the robe of his righteousnesse lest their souls should be found naked in the day of the Lords visitation and all this unkindnesse is nothing but that evill men were uncharitable to their Brethren they would not feed the hungry nor give drink to the thirsty nor cloath the naked nor relieve their Brothers needs nor forgive his follies nor cover their shame nor turn their eyes from delighting in their affronts and evill accidents this is it which our Lord will take so tenderly that his Brethren for whom he died who suck'd the paps of his Mother that fed on his Body and are nourished with his Bloud whom he hath lodg'd in his heart and entertains in his bosome the partners of his Spirit and co-heirs of his inheritance that these should be deny'd relief and suffered to go away ashamed and unpitied this our blessed Lord will take so ill that all those who are guilty of this unkindnesse have no reason to expect the favour of the Court. 4. To this if we adde the almightinesse of the Judge his infinite wisdome and knowledge of all causes and all persons and all circumstances that he is infinitely just inflexibly angry and impartiall in his sentence there can be nothing added either to the greatness or the requisites of a terrible and an Almighty Judge For who can resist him who is Almighty Who can evade his scrutiny that knows all things Who can hope for pity of him that is inflexible Who can think to be exempted when the Judge is righteous and impartial But in all these annexes of the great
to hope to have amends made to their condition by the sentence of the day of Judgement Evill and sad is their condition who cannot be contented here nor blessed hereafter whose life is their misery and their conscience is their enemy whose grave is their prison and death their undoing and the sentence of Dooms-day the beginning of an intolerable condition 3. The third sort of accusers are the Devils and they will do it with malicious and evill purposes The Prince of the Devils hath 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 for one of his chiefest appellatives The accuser of the Brethren he is by his professed malice and imployment and therefore God who delights that his mercy should triumph and his goodnesse prevail over all the malice of men and Devils hath appointed one whose office is 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 to reprove the accuser and to resist the enemy and to be a defender of their cause who belong to God The holy Spirit is 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 a defender the evill spirit is 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the accuser and they that in this life belong to one or the other shall in the same proportion be treated at the day of Judgement The Devill shall accuse the Brethren that is the Saints and servants of God and shall tell concerning their follies and infirmities the sins of their youth and the weaknesse of their age the imperfect grace and the long schedule of omissions of duty their scruples and their fears their diffidences and pusillanimity and all those things which themselves by strict examination finde themselves guilty of and have confessed all their shame and the matter of their sorrowes their evill intentions and their little plots their carnall confidences and too fond adherences to the things of this world their indulgence and easinesse of government their wilder joyes and freer meals their losse of time and their too forward and apt compliances their trifling arrests and little peevishnesses the mixtures of the world with the things of the Spirit and all the incidences of humanity he will bring forth and aggravate them by the circumstance of ingratitude and the breach of promise and the evacuating all their holy purposes and breaking their resolutions and rifling their vowes and all these things being drawn into an intire representment and the bils clog'd by numbers will make the best man in the world seem foul and unhandsome and stained with the characters of death and evill dishonour But for these there is appointed a defender The holy Spirit that maketh intercession for us shall then also interpose and against all these things shall oppose the passion of our blessed Lord and upon all their defects shall cast the robe of his righteousnesse and the sins of their youth shall not prevail so much as the repentance of their age and their omissions be excused by probable intervening causes and their little escapes shall appear single and in disunion because they were alwaies kept asunder by penitentiall prayers and sighings and their seldome returns of sin by their daily watchfulnesse and their often infirmities by the sincerity of their souls and their scruples by their zeal and their passions by their love and all by the mercies of God and the sacrifice which their Judge offer'd and the holy Spirit made effective by daily graces and assistances These therefore infallibly go to the portion of the right hand because the Lord our God shall answer for them But as for the wicked it is not so with them for although the plain story of their life be to them a sad condemnation yet what will be answered when it shall be told concerning them that they despised Gods mercies and feared not his angry judgements that they regarded not his word and loved not his excellencies that they were not perswaded by the promises nor afrighted by his threatnings that they neither would accept his government nor his blessings that all the sad stories that ever hapned in both the worlds in all which himself did escape till the day of his death and was not concerned in them save only that he was called upon by every one of them which he ever heard or saw or was told of to repentance that all these were sent to him in vain But cannot the Accuser truly say to the Judge concerning such persons They were thine by creation but mine by their own choice Thou didst redeem them indeed but they sold themselves to me for a trifle or for an unsatisfying interest Thou diedst for them but they obeyed my commandements I gave them nothing I promised them nothing but the filthy pleasures of a night or the joyes of madnesse or the delights of a disease I never hanged upon the Crosse three long hours for them nor endured the labours of a poor life 33 years together for their interest only when they were thine by the merit of thy death they quickly became mine by the demerit of their ingratitude and when thou hadst cloathed their soul with thy robe and adorned them by thy graces we strip'd them naked as their shame and only put on a robe of darknesse and they thought themselves secure and went dancing to their grave like a drunkard to a fight or a flie unto a candle and therefore they that did partake with us in our faults must divide with us in our portion and fearfull interest This is a sad story because it ends in death and there is nothing to abate or lessen the calamity It concerns us therefore to consider in time that he that tempts us will accuse us and what he cals pleasant now he shall then say was nothing and all the gains that now invite earthly souls and mean persons to vanity was nothing but the seeds of folly and the harvest is pain and sorrow and shame eternall * But then since this horror proceeds upon the account of so many accusers God hath put it into our power by a timely accusation of our selves in the tribunall of the court Christian to prevent all the arts of aggravation which at Dooms-day shall load foolish and undiscerning souls He that accuses himself of his crimes here means to forsake them and looks upon them on all sides and spies out his deformity and is taught to hate them he is instructed and prayed for he prevents the anger of God and defeats the Devils malice and by making shame the instrument of repentance he takes away the sting and makes that to be his medicine which otherwise would be his death and concerning this exercise I shall only adde what the Patriarch of Alexandria told an old religious person in his hermitage having asked him what he found in that desert he was answered only this Indesinenter culpare judicare meipsum to judge and condemn my self perpetually that is the imployment of my solitude The Patriarch answered Non est alia via There is no other way By accusing our selves we shall make the Devils malice uselesse
aut ulla Maria purificent said Lactantius they come to their prayers dressed round about with wickednesse ut quercus hederâ and think God will accept their offering if their skin be wash'd as if a river could purifie their lustfull souls or a sea take off their guilt But David reconciles the ceremony with the mysterie I will wash my hands I will wash them in innocency and so will I goe to thine altar Hae sunt verae munditiae saies Tertullian non quas plerique superstitione curant ad omnem orationem etiam cum lavacro totius corporis aquam sumentes This is the true purification not that which most men doe superstitiously cleansing their hands and washing when they go to prayers but cleansing the soul from all impiety and leaving every affection to sin then they come pure to God And this is it which the Apostle also signifies having translated the Gentile and Jewish ceremony into the spirituality of the Gospell I will therefore that men pray every where levantes puras manus lifting up cleane hands so it is in the Vulgar Latine 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 so it is in the Greek holy hands That 's the purity that God looks for upon them that lift up their hands to him in prayer and this very thing is founded upon the Naturall constitution of things and their essentiall proportion to each other 1. It is an act of profanation for any unholy person to handle holy things and holy offices For if God was ever carefull to put all holy things into cancels and immure them with acts and laws and cautions of separation and the very sanctification of them was nothing else but the solemn separating them from common usages that himself might bee distinguished from men by actions of propriety it is naturally certain he that would be differenc'd from common things would be infinitely divided from things that are wicked If things that are lawfull may yet be unholy in this sense much more are unlawfull things most unholy in all senses If God will not admit of that which is beside Religion he will lesse endure that which is against Religion And therefore if a common man must not serve at the altar how shall he abide a wicked man to stand there No he will not indure him but he will cast him and his prayer into the separation of an infinite and eternall distance Sic profanatis sacris peritura Troja perdidit primùm Deos So Troy entred into ruine when their prayers became unholy and they profan'd the rites of their Religion 2. A wicked person while he remains in that condition is not the naturall object of pity 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 said Zeno Mercy is a sorrow or a trouble at that misery which falls upon a person which deserv'd it not And so Aristotle defines it it is 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 When we see the person deserves a better fortune or is dispos'd to a fairer intreaty then wee naturally pity him and Sinon pleaded for pity to the Trojans saying Miserere animi non digna serentis For who pityeth the tears of a base man who hath treacherously murthered his friend or who will lend a friendly sigh when he sees a traitor to his country passe forth through the execrable gates of cities and when any circumstance of basenesse that is any thing that takes off the excuse of infirmity does accompany a sin such as are ingratitude perjury perseverance delight malice treachery then every man scorns the criminall and God delights and rejoyces in and laughs at the calamity of such a person When Vitellius with his hands bound behind him his Imperiall robe rent and with a dejected countenance and an ill name was led to execution every man cursed him but no man wept Deformitas exitus misericordiam abstulerat saith Tacitus The filthinesse of his life and death took away pity So it is with us in our prayers while we love our sin we must nurse all its children and when we roare in our lustfull beds and groane with the whips of an exterminating Angell chastising those 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 as Aretas calls them the lusts of the lower belly wantonnesse and its mother intemperance we feel the price of our sin that which God foretold to be their issues that which he threatned us withall and that which is the naturall consequent and its certaine expectation that which we delighted in and chose even then when we refused God and threw away felicity and hated vertue For punishment is but the latter part of sin it is not a new thing and distinct from it or if we will kisse the Hyaena or clip the Lamia about the neck we have as certainly chosen the taile and its venemous embraces as the face and lip Every man that sins against God and loves it or which is all one continues in it for by interpretation that is love hath all the circumstances of unworthinesse towards God hee is unthankfull and a breaker of his vowes and a despiser of his mercies and impudent against his judgments he is false to his profession false to his faith hee is an unfriendly person and useth him barbarously who hath treated him with an affection not lesse then infinite and if any man does half so much evill and so unhandsomely to a man we stone him with stones and curses with reproach and an unrelenting scorn And how then shall such a person hope that God should pity him for God better understands and deeper resents and more essentially hates and more severely exacts the circumstances and degrees of basenesse then we can doe and therefore proportionably scorns the person and derides the calamity Is not unthankfulnesse to God a greater basenesse and unworthinesse then unthanfulnesse to our Patron And is not hee as sensible of it and more then wee These things are more then words and therefore if no man pities a base person let us remember that no man is so base in any thing as in his unhandsome demeanour towards God Doe wee not professe our selves his servants and yet serve the Devill Doe we not live upon Gods provision and yet stand or work at the command of lust or avarice humane regards and little interests of the world We call him Father when we desire our portion and yet spend it in the society of all his enemies In short Let our actions to God and their circumstances be supposed to be done towards men and we should scorn our selves and how then can we expect God should not scorne us and reject our prayer when we have done all the dishonour to him and with all the unhandsomnesse in the world Take heed lest we fall into a condition of evill in which it shall be said You may thank your selves and be infinitely afraid lest at the same time we be in a condition of person in which God will upbraid our unworthinesse and scorne our persons and rejoyce in our calamity The first is intolerable
as they would avoid death But certainly they have great cause to fear who are sure to be sick when the weather changes or can no longer retain their possession but till an enemy please to take it away or will preserve their honour but till some smiling temptation aske them to forgoe it 2ly They also have great reason to fear whose repentance is broken into fragments and is never a whole or entire change of life I mean those that resolve against a sin and pray against it and hate it in all the resolutions of their understanding till that unlucky period comes in which they use to act it but then they sin as certainly as they will infallibly repent it when they have done these are a very great many Christians who are esteemed of the better sort of penitents yet feel this feaverish repentance to be their best state of health they fall certainly in the returns of the same circumstances or at a certain distance of time but God knows they doe not get the victory over their sin but are within its power For this is certain they who sin and repent and sin again in the same or the like circumstances are in some degree under the power and dominion of sin when their actions can be reduc'd to an order or a method to a rule or a certainty that oftner hits then fails that sin is habituall though it be the least habit yet a habit it is every course or order or method of sin every constant or periodicall return every return that can be regularly observed or which a man can foresee or probably foretell even then when he does not intend it but prays against it every such sin is to be reckoned not for a single action or upon the accounts of a pardonable infirmity but it is a combination an evill state such a thing as the man ought to feare concerning himselfe lest he be surpriz'd and call'd from this world before this evill state be altered for if he be his securities are but slender and his hopes will deceive him It was a severe doctrine that was maintain'd by some great Clerks and holy men in the Primitive Church That Repentance was to be but once after Baptism One Faith one Lord one Baptisme one Repentance all these the Scripture saith and it is true if by repentance we mean the entire change of our condition for he that returns willingly to the state of an unbeleeving or a heathen profane person intirely and choosingly in defiance of and apostasie from his Religion cannot be renew'd againe as the Apostle twice affirms in his Epistle to the Hebrews But then concerning this state of Apostasie when it hapned in the case not of Faith but of Charity and obedience there were many fears and jealousies they were therefore very severe in their doctrines lest men should fall into so evill a condition they enlarged their fear that they might be stricter in their duty and generally this they did beleeve that every second repentance was worse then the first and the third worse then the second and still as the sin returned the Spirit of God did the lesse love to inhabit and if he were provoked too often would so withdraw his aides and comfortable cohabitation that the Church had little comfort in such children so said Clemens Alexandr stromat 2. 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Those frequent and alternate repentances that is repentances and sinnings interchangeably differ not from the conditions of men that are not within the covenant of grace from them that are not beleevers 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 save onely says he that these men perceive that they sin they doe it more against their conscience then infidels and unbeleevers and therefore they doe it with lesse honesty and excuse 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 I know not which is worse either to sin knowingly or wilfully or to repent of our sin and sin it over again And the same severe doctrine is delivered by Theodoret in his 12 book against the Greeks and is hugely agreeable to the discipline of the Primitive Church And it is a truth of so great severity that it ought to quicken the repentance and sowre the gayeties of easy people and make them fear whose repentance is therefore ineffectuall because it is not integrall or united but broken in pieces by the intervention of new crimes so that the repentance is every time to begin anew and then let it be considered what growth that repentance can make that is never above a week old that is for ever in its infancy that is still in its birth that never gets the dominion over sin These men I say ought to fear lest God reject their persons and deride the folly of their new begun repentances and at last be weary of giving them more opportunities since they approve all and make use of none their understanding is right and their will a slave their reason is for God and their affections for sin these men as the Apostles expression is walk not as wise but as fools for we deride the folly of those men that resolve upon the same thing a thousand times and never keep one of those resolutions These men are vaine and light easy and effeminate childish and abused these are they of whom our blessed Saviour said those sad decretory words Many shall strive to enter in and shall not be able SERMON VIII Part II. 3. THey have great reason to feare whose sins are not yet remitted for they are within the dominion of sin within the Kingdome of darknesse and the regions of feare Light makes us confident and Sin checks the spirit of a man into the pusillanimity and cowardize of a girle or a conscious boy and they doe their work in the days of peace and a wealthy fortune and come to pay their symbole in a warre or in a plague then they spend of their treasure of wrath which they laid up in their vessels of dishonour And indeed want of feare brought them to it for if they had known how to have accounted concerning the changes of mortality if they could have reckoned right concerning Gods judgements falling upon sinners and remembred that themselves are no more to God then that Brother of theirs that died in a drunken surfeit or was kill'd in a Rebell warre or was before his grave corrupted by the shames of lust if they could have told the minutes of their life and passed on towards their grave at least in religious and sober thoughts and consider'd that there must come a time for them to die and after death comes judgement a fearfull and an intolerable judgement it would not have come to this passe in which their present condition of affairs doe amaze them and their sin hath made them lyable unto death and that death is the beginning of an eternall evill In this case it is naturall to fear and if men consider their condition and know that all the felicity
and all the security they can have depends upon Gods mercy pardoning their sins they cannot choose but fear infinitely if they have not reason to hope that their sins are pardoned * Now concerning this men indeed have generally taken a course to put this affair to a very speedy issue God is mercifull and God forgive mee and all is done or it may be a few sighs like the deep sobbings of a man that is almost dead with laughter that is a trifling sorrow returning upon a man after he is full of sin and hath pleased himselfe with violence and revolving onely by a naturall change from sin to sorrow from laughter to a groan from sunshine to a cloudy day or it may be the good man hath left some one sin quite or some degrees of all sin and then the conclusion is firm he is rectus in Curâ—â his sins are pardoned he was indeed in an evill condition but now he is purged he is sanctified and clean These things are very bad but it is much worse that men should continue in their sin and grow old in it and arrive at consirmation and the strength of habituall wickednesse and grow fond of it and yet think if they die their account stands as fair in the eyes of Gods mercy as St. Peter's after his tears and sorrow Our sins are not pardoned easily and quickly and the longer and the greater hath been the iniquity the harder and more difficult and uncertain is the pardon it is a great progresse to return from all the degrees of death to life to motion to quicknesse to purity to acceptation to grace to contention and growth in grace to perseverance and so to pardon For pardon stands no where but at the gates of heaven It is a great mercy that signifies a finall and universall acquittance God sends it out in little scroles and excuses you from falling by the sword of the enemy or the secret stroke of an Angell in the days of the plague but these are but little entertainments and inticings of our hopes to work on towards the great pardon which is registred in the leaves of the Book of Life And it is a mighty folly to think that every little line of mercy signifies glory and absolution from the eternall wrath of God and therefore it is not to be wondred at that wicked men are unwilling to dye it is a greater wonder that many of them dye with so little resentment of their danger and their evill There is reason for them to tremble when the Judge summons them to appear When his messenger is clothed with horror and speaks in thunder when their conscience is their accuser and their accusation is great and their bills uncancell'd and they have no title to the crosse of Christ no advocate no excuse when God is their enemy and Christ is the injur'd person and the Spirit is grieved and sicknesse and death come to plead Gods cause against the man then there is reason that the naturall fears of death should be high and pungent and those naturall fears encreased by the reasonable and certain expectations of that anger which God hath laid up in heaven for ever to consume and destroy his enemies And indeed if we consider upon how trifling and inconsiderable grounds most men hope for pardon if at least that may be call'd hope which is nothing but a carelesse boldnesse and an unreasonable wilfull confidence we shall see much cause to pity very many who are going merrily to a sad and intolerable death Pardon of sins is a mercy which Christ purchased with his dearest blood which he ministers to us upon conditions of an infinite kindnesse but yet of great holinesse and obedience and an active living faith it is a grace that the most holy persons beg of God with mighty passion and labour for with a great diligence and expect with trembling fears and concerning it many times suffer sadnesses with uncertain soules and receive it by degrees and it enters upon them by little portions and it is broken as their sighs and sleeps But so have I seen the returning sea enter upon the strand and the waters rolling towards the shore throw up little portions of the tide and retire as if nature meant to play and not to change the abode of waters but still the floud crept by little steppings and invaded more by his progressions then he lost by his retreat and having told the number of its steps it possesses its new portion till the Angell calls it back that it may leave its unfaithfull dwelling of the sand so is the pardon of our sins it comes by slow motions and first quits a present death and turnes it may be into a sharp sicknesse and if that sicknesse prove not health to the soul it washes off and it may be will dash against the rock again and proceed to take off the severall instances of anger and the periods of wrath but all this while it is uncertain concerning our finall interest whether it be ebbe or floud and every hearty prayer and every bountifull almes still enlarges the pardon or addes a degree of probability and hope and then a drunken meeting or a covetous desire or an act of lust or looser swearing idle talk or neglect of Religion makes the pardon retire and while it is disputed between Christ and Christs enemy who shall be Lord the pardon fluctuates like the wave striving to climbe the rock and is wash'd off like its own retinue and it gets possession by time and uncertainty by difficulty and the degrees of a hard progression When David had sinned but in one instance interrupting the course of a holy life by one sad calamity it pleased God to pardon him but see upon what hard terms He prayed long and violently he wept sorely he was humbled in sackcloth and ashes he eat the bread of affliction and drank of his bottle of tears he lost his Princely spirit and had an amazing conscience he suffer'd the wrath of God and the sword never did depart from his house his Son rebell'd and his Kingdome revolted he fled on foot and maintained Spies against his childe hee was forc'd to send an army against him that was dearer then his owne eyes and to fight against him whom he would not hurt for all the riches of Syria and Egypt his concubines were desir'd by an incestuous mixture in the face of the sun before all Israel and his childe that was the fruit of his sin after a 7 days feaver dyed and left him nothing of his sin to show but sorrow and the scourges of the Divine vengeance and after all this God pardoned him finally because he was for ever sorrowfull and never did the sin againe He that hath sinned a thousand times for David's once is too confident if he thinks that all his shall be pardoned at a lesse rate then was used to expiate that one mischief of the religious King The son
and reluctancies with parts and interrupted steps with waitings and expectations with watchfulnesse and stratagems with inspirations and collaterall assistances after all this grace and bounty and diligence that we should despite this grace and trample upon the blessings and scorn to receive life at so great an expence and love of God this is so great a basenesse and unworthynesse that by troubling the tenderest passions it turns into the most bitter hostilities by abusing Gods love it turns into jealousie and rage and indignation Goe and sin no more lest a worse thing happen to thee 2. Falling away after we have begun to live well is a great cause of fear because there is added to it the circumstance of inexcuseablenesse The man hath been taught the secrets of the Kingdome and therefore his understanding hath been instructed he hath tasted the pleasures of the Kingdome and therefore his will hath been sufficiently entertain'd He was entred into the state of life and renounced the ways of death his sin began to be pardoned and his lusts to be crucified he felt the pleasures of victory and the blessings of peace and therefore fell away not onely against his reason but also against his interest and to such a person the Questions of his soul have been so perfectly stated and his prejudices and inevitable abuses so cleerly taken off and he was so made to view the paths of life and death that if he chooses the way of sin again it must be not by weaknesse or the infelicity of his breeding or the weaknesse of his understanding but a direct preference or prelation a preferring sin before grace the spirit of lust before the purities of the soul the madnesse of drunkennesse before the fulnesse of the Spirit money before our friend and above our Religion and Heaven and God himself This man is not to be pityed upon pretence that he is betrayed or to be relieved because he is oppressed with potent enemies or to be pardoned because he could not help it for he once did help it he did overcome his temptation and choose God and delight in vertue and was an heir of heaven and was a conqueror over sin and delivered from death and he may do so still and Gods grace is upon him more plentifully and the lust does not tempt so strongly and if it did he hath more power to resist it and therefore if this man fals it is because he wilfully chooses death it is the portion that he loves and descends into with willing and unpityed steps Quà m vilis facta es nimis iterans vias tuas said God to Judah 3. He that returns from vertue to his old vices is forced to doe violence to his own reason to make his conscience quiet he does it so unreasonably so against all his fair inducements so against his reputation and the principles of his society so against his honour and his promises and his former discourses and his doctrines his censuring of men for the same crimes and the bitter invectives and reproofs which in the dayes of his health and reason he used against his erring Brethren that he is now constrained to answer his own arguments he is intangled in his own discourses he is shamed with his former conversation and it will be remembred against him how severely he reproved and how reasonably he chastised the lust which now he runs to in despite of himself and all his friends And because this is his condition he hath no way left him but either to be impudent which is hard for him at first it being too big a naturall change to passe suddenly from grace to immodest circumstances and hardnesses of face and heart or else therefore he must entertain new principles and apply his minde to beleeve a lye and then begins to argue There is no necessity of being so severe in my life greater sinners then I have been saved Gods mercies are greater then all the sins of man Christ dyed for us and if I may not be allowed to sin this sin what ease have I by his death or this sin is necessary and I cannot avoid it or it is questionable whether this sin is of so deep a die as is pretended or flesh and bloud is alwaies with me and I cannot shake it off or there are some Sects of Christians that do allow it or if they do not yet they declare it easily pardonable upon no hard terms and very reconcileable with the hopes of heaven or the Scriptures are not rightly understood in their pretended condemnations or else other men do as bad as this and there is not one in ten thousand but hath his private retirements from vertue or else when I am old this sin will leave me and God is very pityfull to mankinde But while the man like an intangled bird flutters in the net and wildly discomposes that which should support him and that which holds him the net and his own wings that is the Lawes of God and his own conscience and perswasion he is resolved to do the thing and seeks excuses afterwards and when he hath found out a fig-leav'd apron that he could put on or a cover for his eyes that he may not see his own deformity then he fortifies his error with irresolution and inconsideration and he beleeves it because he will and he will because it serves his turn then he is entred upon his state of fear and if he does not fear concerning himself yet his condition is fearfull and the man haih 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 a reprobate minde that is a judgement corrupted by lust vice hath abused his reasoning and if God proceeds in the mans method and lets him alone in his course and gives him over to beleeve a lye so that he shall call good evill and evill good and come to be heartily perswaded that his excuses are reasonable and his pretences fair then the man is desperately undone through the ignorance that is in him as St. Paul describes his condition his heart is blinde he is past feeling his understanding is darkned then he may walk in the vanity of his minde and give himself over to lasciviousnesse and shall work all uncleannesse with greedinesse then he needs no greater misery this is the state of evill which his fear ought to have prevented but now it is past fear and is to be recovered with sorrow or else to be run through till death and hell are become his portion fiunt novissima illus pejora pejoribus his latter end is worse then his begining 4. Besides all this it might easily be added that he that fals from vertue to vice again addes the circumstance of ingratitude to his load of sins he sins against Gods mercy and puts out his own eyes he strives to unlearn what with labour he hath purchased and despises the trabell of his holy daies and throws away the reward of vertue for an interest which himself despised the
forbidden When God bade the Isaaelites rise and goe up against the Canaanites and possesse the Land they would not stirre the men were Anakims and the Cities were impregnable and there was a Lyon in the way but presently after when God forbad them to goe they would and did goe though they died for it I shall not need to instance in particulars when the whole life of man is a perpetuall contradiction and the state of Disobedience is called the contradiction of Sinners even the man in the Gospell that had two sons they both crossed him even he that obeyed him and he that obeyed him not for the one said he would and did not the other said he would not and did and so doe we we promise faire and doe nothing and they that doe best are such as come out of darknesse into light such as said they would not and at last have better bethought themselves And who can guesse at any other reason why men should refuse to be temperate for he that refuses the commandement first does violence to the commandement and puts on a praeternaturall appetite he spoils his health and he spoils his understanding he brings to himself a world of diseases and a healthlesse constitution smart and sickly nights a loathing stomach and a staring eye a giddy brain and a swell'd belly gouts and dropsies catarrhes and oppilations If God should enjoyne man to suffer all this heaven and earth should have heard our complaints against unjust laws and impossible commandements for we complain already even when God commands us to drink so long as it is good for us this is one of his impossible laws it is impossible for us to know when we are dry or when we need drink for if we doe know I am sure it is possible enough not to lift up the wine to our heads And when our blessed Saviour hath commanded us to love our enemies we think we have so much reason against it that God will easily excuse our disobedience in this case and yet there are some enemies whom God hath commanded us not to love and those we dote on we cherish and feast them and as S. Paul in another case upon our uncomely parts we bestow more abundant comelinesse For whereas our body it self is a servant to our soule we make it the heir of all things and treat it here already as if it were in Majority and make that which at the best was but a weak friend to become a strong enemy and hence proceed the vices of the worst and the follies and imperfections of the best the spirit is either in slavery or in weaknesse and when the flesh is not strong to mischief it is weak to goodnesse and even to the Apostles our blessed Lord said the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak The spirit that is 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the inward man or the reasonable part of man especially as helped by the Spirit of Grace that is willing for it is the principle of all good actions the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the power of working is from the spirit but the flesh is but a dull instrument and a broken arme in which there is a principle of life but it moves uneasily and the flesh is so weak that in Scripture to be in the flesh signifies a state of weaknesse and infirmity so the humiliation of Christ is expressed by being in the flesh 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 God manifested in the flesh and what S. Peter calls put to death in the flesh St. Paul calls crucified through weaknesse and yee know that through the infirmity of the flesh I preached unto you said S. Paul but here flesh is not opposed to the spirit as a direct enemy but as a weak servant for if the flesh be powerfull and opposite the spirit stays not there veniunt ad candida tecta columbae The old man and the new cannot dwell together and therefore here where the spirit inclining to good well disposed and apt to holy counsels does inhabit in society with the flesh it means onely a weak and unapt nature or a state of infant-grace for in both these and in these onely the text is verified 1. Therefore we are to consider the infirmities of the flesh naturally 2. It s weaknesse in the first beginnings of the state of grace its daily pretensions and temptations its excuses and lessenings of duty 3. What remedies there are in the spirit to cure the evils of nature 4. How far the weaknesses of the flesh can consist with the Spirit of grace in well grown Christians This is the summe of what I intend upon these words 1. Our nature is too weak in order to our duty and finall interest that at first it cannot move one step towards God unlesse God by his preventing grace puts into it a new possibility 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 There is nothing that creeps upon the earth nothing that ever God made weaker then Man for God fitted Horses and Mules with strength Bees and Pismires with sagacity Harts and Hares with swiftnesse Birds with feathers and a light a\l = e \ry body and they all know their times and are fitted for their work and regularly acquire the proper end of their creation but man that was designed to an immortall duration and the fruition of God for ever knows not how to obtain it he is made upright to look up to heaven but he knows no more how to purchase it then to climbe it Once man went to make an ambitious tower to outreach the clouds or the praeternaturall risings of the water but could not do it he cannot promise himself the daily bread of his necessity upon the stock of his own wit or industry and for going to heaven he was so far from doing that naturally that as soon as ever he was made he became the son of death and he knew not how to get a pardon for eating of an apple against the Divine commandement 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 said the Apostle By nature we were the sons of wrath that is we were born heirs of death which death came upon us from Gods anger for the sin of our first Parents or by nature that is 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 really not by the help of fancy and fiction of law for so Oecumenius and Theophylact expound it but because it does not relate to the sin of Adam in its first intention but to the evill state of sin in which the Ephesians walked before their conversion it signifies that our nature of it self is a state of opposition to the spirit of grace it is privatively opposed that is that there is nothing in it that can bring us to felicity nothing but an obedientiall capacity our flesh can become sanctified as the stones can become children unto Abraham or as dead seed can become living corn and so it is with us that it is necessary God should make us a new
be impossible to doe our duty we weep for our sins but we weep more for the death of our dearest friends or other temporall sadnesses we say we had rather die then lose our saith and yet we doe not live according to it we lose our estates and are impatient we lose our vertue and bear it well enough and what vertue is so great as more to be troubled for having sin'd then for being asham'd and begger'd and condemn'd to die Here we are forced to a distinction there is a valuation of price and a valuation of sense or the spirit hath one rate of things and the flesh hath another and what we beleeve the greatest evill does not alwayes cause to us the greatest trouble which shews plainly that we are imperfect carnall persons and the flesh will in some measure prevaile over the spirit because we will suffer it in too many instances and cannot help it in all 9. The spirit is abated and interrupted by the flesh because the flesh pretends it is not able to doe those ministeries which are appointed in order to Religion we are not able to fast or if we watch it breeds gouts and catarrhes or charity is a grace too expensive our necessities are too big to do it or we cannot suffer pain and sorrow breeds death and therefore our repentances must be more gentle and we must support our selves in all our calamities for we cannot beare our crosses without a freer refreshment and this freedome passes on to licence and many melancholy persons drowne their sorrows in sin and forgetfulnesse as if sin were more tolerable then sorrow and the anger of God an easier load then a temporall care here the flesh betrayes its weaknesse and its follies For the flesh complains too soon and the spirit of some men like Adam being too fond of his Eve attends to all its murmurs and temptations and yet the flesh is able to bear farre more then is required of it in usuall duties Custome of suffering will make us endure much and feare will make us suffer more and necessity makes us suffer any thing and lust and desire makes us to endure more then God is willing we should and yet we are nice and tender and indulgent to our weaknesses till our weaknesses grow too strong for us And what shall we doe to secure our duty and to be delivered of our selves that the body of death which we bear about us may not destroy the life of the spirit I have all this while complain'd and you see not without cause I shall afterwards tell you the remedies for all this evill In the mean time let us have but mean opinions of our selves let us watch every thing of our selves as of suspected persons and magnifie the grace of God and be humbled for our stock and spring of follies and let us look up to him who is the fountaine of grace and spirituall strengths 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 And pray that God would give us what we ask and what we ask not for we want more helps then we understand and we are neerer to evill then we perceive and we bear sin and death about us and are in love with it and nothing comes from us but false principles and silly propositions and weak discourses and startings from our holy purposes and care of our bodies and of our palates and the lust of the lower belly these are the imployment of our lives but if wee design to live happily and in a better place it must be otherwise with us we must become new creatures and have another definition and have new strengths which we can onely derive from God whose grace is sufficient for us and strong enough to prevail over all our follies and infirmities SERMON XI Part II. IF it be possible to cure an evill nature we must inquire after remedies for all this mischief In order to which I shall consider 1. That since it is our flesh and bloud that is the principle of mischief we must not think to have it cured by washings and light medicaments the Physitian that went to cure the Hectick with quick-silver and fasting spittle did his Patient no good but himself became a proverb and he that by easie prayers and a seldome fast by the scattering of a little almes and the issues of some more naturall vertue thinks to cure his evill nature does fortifie his indisposition as a stick is hardened by a little fire which by a great one is devoured Quanto satius est mentem potius eluere quae malis cupiditatibus sordidatur uno virtutis ac fidei lavacro universa vitia depellere Better it is by an intire body of vertue by a living and active faith to cleanse the minde from every vice and to take off all superinduced habits of sin Quod qui fecerit quamlibet inquinatum ac sordidum corpus gerat satis purus est If we take this course although our body is foul and our affections unquiet and our rest discomposed yet we shall be masters of our resolution and clean from habituall sins and so cure our evill nature For our nature was not made evill but by our selves but yet we are naturally evill that is by a superinduced nature just as drunkards and intemperate persons have made it necessary to drink extremely and their nature requires it and it is health to them they dye without it because they have made to themselves a new constitution and another nature but much worse then that which God made their sin made this new nature and this new nature makes sin necessary and unavoidable so it is in all other instances Our nature is evill because we have spoil'd it and therefore the removing the sin which we have brought in is the way to cure our nature for this evill nature is not a thing which we cannot avoid we made it and therefore we must help it but as in the superinducing this evill nature we were thrust forward by the world and the Devill by all objects from without and weaknesse from within so in the curing it we are to be helped by God and his most holy Spirit 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 We must have a new nature put into us which must be the principle of new counsels and better purposes of holy actions and great devotion and this nature is deriv'd from God and is a grace and a favour of heaven The same Spirit that caused the holy Jesus to be born after a new and strange manner must also descend upon us and cause us to be born again and to begin a new life upon the stock of a new nature 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 said Origen From him it first began that a divine and humane nature were weaved together that the humane nature by communication with the celestiall may also become divine 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Not only in Jesus but in all that first
and all is well till the next generation but if the evill of his death and the change of his present prosperity for an intolerable danger of an uncertain eternity does not sowre his full chalice yet if his children prove vicious or degenerous cursed or unprosperous we account the man miserable and his grave to be strewed with sorrowes and dishonours The wise and valiant Chabrias grew miserable by the folly of his son Ctesippus and the reputation of brave Germanicus began to be ashamed when the base Caligula entred upon his scene of dishonourable crimes Commodus the wanton and feminine son of wise Antoninus gave a check to the great name of his Father and when the son of Hortensius Corbius was prostitute and the heir of Q. Fabius Maximus was disinherited by the sentence of the city Praetor as being unworthy to enter into the fields of his glorious Father and young Scipio the son of Africanus was a fool and a prodigall posterity did weep afresh over the monuments of their brave progenitors and found that infelicity can pursue a man and overtake him in his grave This is a great calamity when it fals upon innocent persons and that Moses died upon Mount Nebo in the sight of Canaan was not so great an evill as that his sons Eliezer and Gersom were unworthy to succeed him but that Priesthood was devolv'd to his Brother and the Principality to his servant And to Samuel that his sons prov'd corrupt and were exauthorated for their unworthinesse was an allay to his honour and his joyes and such as proclaims to all the world that the measures of our felicity are not to be taken by the lines of our own person but of our relations too and he that is cursed in his children cannot be reckoned among the fortunate This which I have discoursed concerning families in generall is most remarkable in the retinue and family of sin for it keeps a good house and is full of company and servants it is served by the possessions of the world it is courted by the unhappy flatter'd by fools taken into the bosome by the effeminate made the end of humane designs and feasted all the way of its progresse wars are made for its interest and men give or venture their lives that their sin may be prosperous all the outward senses are its handmaids and the inward senses are of its privie chamber the understanding is its counsellour the will its friend riches are its ministers nature holds up its train and art is its emissary to promote its interest and affairs abroad and upon this account all the world is inrolled in its taxing tables and are subjects or friends of its kingdome or are so kinde to it as to make too often visits and to lodge in its borders because all men stare upon its pleasures and are intic'd to tast of its wanton delicacies But then if we look what are the children of this splendid family and see what issue sinne produces 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 it may help to unite the charme Sin and concupiscence marry together and riot and feast it high but their fruits the children and production of their filthy union are ugly and deform'd foolish and ill natur'd and the Apostles cals them by their names shame and death These are the fruits of Sin the apples of Sodom fair outsides but if you touch them they turn to ashes and a stink and if you will nurse these children and give them whatsoever is dear to you then you may be admitted into the house of feasting and chambers of riot where sin dwels but if you will have the mother you must have the daughters the tree and the fruits go together and there is none of you all that ever enter'd into this house of pleasure but he left the skirts of his garment in the hands of shame and had his name roll'd in the chambers of death What fruit had ye then That 's the Question In answer to which question we are to consider 1. What is the summe totall of the pleasure of sin 2. What fruits and relishes it leaves behinde by its naturall efficiency 3. What are its consequents by its demerit and the infliction of the superadded wrath of God which it hath deserved Of the first St. Paul gives no account but by way of upbraiding asks what they had that is nothing that they dare own nothing that remains and where is it shew it what 's become of it Of the second he gives the summe totall all its naturall effects are shame and its appendages The third or the superinduc'd evils by the just wrath of God he cals death the worst name in it self and the greatest of evils that can happen 1. Let us consider what pleasures there are in sin most of them are very punishments I will not reckon nor consider concerning envie which one in Stobaeus cals 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the basest spirit and yet very just because it punishes the delinquent in the very act of sin doing as Aelian saies of the Polypus 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 when he wants his prey he devours his own armes and the leannesse and the secret pangs and the perpetuall restlesnesse of an envious man feed upon his own heart and drink down his spirits unlesse he can ruine or observe the fall of the fairest fortunes of his neighbour The fruit of this tree are mingled and sowre and not to be indured in the very eating Neither will I reck on the horrid afrightments and amazements of murder nor the uneasinesse of impatience which doubles every evill that it feels and makes it a sin and makes it intolerable nor the secret grievings and continuall troubles of peevishnesse which makes a man uncapable of receiving good or delighting in beauties and fair intreaties in the mercies of God and charities of men It were easie to make a catalogue of sins every one of which is a disease a trouble in it's very constitution and its nature such are loathing of spirituall things bitternesse of spirit rage greedinesse confusion of minde and irresolution cruelty and despite slothfulnesse and distrust unquietnesse and anger effeminacy and nicenesse prating and sloth ignorance and inconstancy incogitancy and cursing malignity and fear forgetfulnesse and rashnesse pusillanimity and despair rancour and superstition if a man were to curse his enemy he could not wish him a greater evill then these and yet these are severall kinds of sin which men choose and give all their hopes of heaven in exchange for one of these diseases Is it not a fearfull consideration that a man should rather choose eternally to perish then to say his prayers heartily and affectionately But so it is with very many men they are driven to their devotions by custome and shame and reputation and civill compliances they sigh and look sowre when they are called to it and abide there as a man under the Chirurgeons hands smarting and fretting all the while or else he
obsence is a torment and the enjoyment does not satisfie but disables the instrument and tires the faculty and when a man hath but a little of what his sense covets he is not contented but impatient for more and when he hath loads of it he does not feel it for he that swallowes a full goblet does not taste his wine and this is the pleasure of the sense nothing contents it but that which he cannot perceive and it is alwaies restlesse till he be weary and all the way unpleased till it can feel no pleasure and that which is the instrument of sense is the means of its torment by the faculty by which it tasts by the same it is afflicted for so long as it can taste it is tormented with desire and when it can desire no longer it cannot feel pleasure 7. Sin hath little or no pleasure in its very injoyment because its very manner of entry and production is by a curse and a contradiction it comes into the world like a viper through the sides of its mother by means unnaturall violent and monstrous Men love sin only because it is forbidden Sin took occasion by the Law saith St. Paul it could not come in upon its own pretences but men rather suspect a secret pleasure in it because there are guards kept upon it Sed quia caecus inest vitiis amor omne futurum Despicitur suadéntque brevem praesentia fructum Et ruit in vetitum damni secura libido Men run into sin with blinde affections and against all reason despise the future hoping for some little pleasure for the present and all this is only because they are forbidden Do not many men sin out of spight some out of the spirit of disobedience some by wildenesse and indetermination some by impudence and because they are taken in a fault Frontémque à crimine sumunt Some because they are reproved many by custome others by importunity Ordo fuit crevisse malis It grows upon crab-stocks and the lust it self is sowre and unwholesome and since it is evident that very many sins come in wholly upon these accounts such persons and such sins cannot pretend pleasure but as Naturalists say of pulse cum maledictis probris serendum praecipiunt ut laetiùs porvemat the countrey people were used to curse it and rail upon it all the while that it was sowing that it might thrive the better t is true with sins they grow up with curses with spite and contradiction peevishnesse and indignation pride and cursed principles and therefore pleasure ought not to be the inscription of the box for that 's the least part of its ingredient and constitution 8. The pleasures in the very enjoying of sin are infinitely trifling and inconsiderable because they passe away so quickly if they be in themselves little they are made lesse by their volatile and fugitive nature But if they were great then their being so transient does not only lessen the delight but changes it into a torment and loads the spirit of the sinner with impatience and indignation Is it not a high upbraiding to the watchfull adulterer that after he hath contriv'd the stages of his sin and tyed many circumstances together with arts and labour and these joyn and stand knit and solid only by contingency and are very often born away with the impetuous torrent of an inevitable accident like Xerxes bridge over the Hellespont and then he is to begin again and sets new wheels a going and by the arts and the labour and the watchings and the importunity and the violence and the unwearied study and indefatigable diligence of many moneths he enters upon possession and finds them not of so long abode as one of his cares which in so vast numbers made so great a portion of his life afflicted 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 The enjoying of sin for a season St. Paul cals it he names no pleasures our English translation uses the word of enjoying pleasures but if there were any they were but for that season that instant that very transition of the act which dies in its very birth and of which we can only say as the minstrell sung of Pacuvius when he was carryed dead from his supper to his bed 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 A man can scarce have time enough to say it is alive but that it was nullo non se die extulit it died every day it lived never unto life but lived and dyed unto death being its mother and its daughter The man dyed before the sin did live and when it had lived it consign'd him to dye eternally Adde to this that it so passes away that nothing at all remains behind it that is pleasant it is like the path of an arrow in the air the next morning no man can tell what is become of the pleasures of the last nights sin they are no where but in Gods books deposited in the conscience and sealed up against the day of dreadfull accounts but as to the man they are as if they never had been and then let it be considered what a horrible aggravation it will be to the miseries of damnation that a man shall for ever perish for that which if he looks round about he cannot see nor tell where it is He that dies dies for that which is not and in the very little present be findes it an unrewarding interest to walk seven dayes together over sharp stones only to see a place from whence he must come back in an hour If it goes off presently it is not worth the labour ifit stayes long it growes tedious so that it cannot be pleasant if it stayes and if it does stay it is not to be valued Haec mala mentis gaudia It abides too little a while to be felt or called pleasure and ifit should abide longer it would be troublesome as pain and loath'd like the tedious speech of an Orator pleading against the life of the innocent 9. Sin hath in its best advantages but a trifling inconsiderable pleasure because not only God and reason conscience and honour interest and lawes do sowre it in the sense and gust of pleasure but even the devill himself either being over-ruled by God or by a strange unsignificant malice makes it troublesome and intricate intangled and involv'd and one sin contradicts another and vexes the man with so great variety of evils that if in the course of Gods service he should meet with half the difficulty he would certainly give over the whole imployment Those that St. James speaks of who prayed that they might spend it upon their lusts were covetous and prodigall and therefore must endure the torments of one to have the pleasure of another and which is greater the pleasure of spending or the displeasure that it is spent and does not still remain after its consumption is easie to tell certain it is that this lasts much longer Does not the Devill often tempt men to
not likely good should come of so foul a beginning that the woman should beleeve the Devill putting on no brighter shape then a snakes skin she neither being afraid of sin nor afrighted to hear a beast speak and he pretending so weakly in the temptation that he promised only that they should know evill for they knew good before and all that was offered to them was the experience of evill and it was no wonder that the Devill promised no more for sin never could perform any thing but an experience of evill no other knowledge can come upon that account but the wonder was why the woman should sin for no other reward but for that which she ought to have fear'd infinitely for nothing could have continued her happinesse but not to have known evill Now this knowledge was the introduction of ignorance For when the understanding suffered it self to be so baffled as to study evill the will was as foolish to fall in love with it and they conspir'd to undoe each other For when the will began to love it then the understanding was set on work to commend to advance to conduct and to approve to beleeve it and to be factious in behalf of the new purchase I do not beleeve the understanding part of man received any naturall decrement or diminution For if to the Devils their naturals remain intire it is not likely that the lesser sin of man should suffer a more violent and effective mischief Neither can it be understood how the reasonable soul being immortall both in it self and its essentiall faculties can lose or be lessened in them any more then it can die But it received impediment by new propositions It lost and willingly forgot what God had taught and went away from the fountain of truth and gave trust to the father of lies and it must without remedy grow foolish and so a man came to know evill just as a man is said to taste of death for in proper speaking as death is not to be felt because it takes away all sense so nether can evill be known because whatsoever is truly cognoscible is good and true and therefore all the knowledge a man gets by sin is to feel evill he knowes it not by discourse but by sense not by proposition but by smart The Devill doing to man as Esculapius did to Neoclides 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 he gave him a formidable collyrium to torment him more the effect of which was 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the Devill himself grew more quick-sighted to abuse us but we became more blinde by that opening of our eyes I shall not need to discourse of the Philosophy of this mischief and by the connexion of what causes ignorance doth follow sin but it is certain whether a man would fam be pleased with sin or be quiet or fearlesse when he hath sinned or continue in it or perswade others to it he must do it by false propositions by lyings and such weak discourses as none can beleeve but such as are born fools or such as have made themselves so or are made so by others Who in the world is a verier fool a more ignorant wretched person then he that is an Atheist A man may better beleeve there is no such man as himself and that he is not in being then that there is no God for himself can cease to be and once was not and shall be changed from what he is and in very many periods of his life knowes not that he is and so it is every night with him when he sleeps but none of these can happen to God and if he knowes it not he is a fool Can any thing in this world be more foolish then to think that all this rare fabrick of heaven and earth can come by chance when all the skill of art is not able to make an Oyster To see rare effects and no cause an excellent government and no Prince a motion without an immovable a circle without a centre a time without eternity a second without a first a thing that begins not from it self and therefore not to perceive there is something from whence it does begin which must be without beginning these things are so against Philosophy and naturall reason that he must needs be a beast in his understanding that does not assent to them This is the Atheist the fool hath said in his heart there is no God That 's his character the thing framed saies that nothing framed it the tongue never made it self to speak and yet talks against him that did saying that which is made is and that which made it is not But this folly is as infinite as hell as much without light or bound as the Chaos or the primitive nothing But in this the Devill never prevailed very farre his Schooles were alwaies thin at these Lectures some few people have been witty against God that taught them to speak before they knew to spell a syllable but either they are monsters in their manners or mad in their understandings or ever finde themselves confuted by a thunder or a plague by danger or death But the Devill hath infinitely prevail'd in a thing that is almost as senselesse and ignorant as Atheisme and that is idolatry not only making God after mans image but in the likenesse of a calf of a cat of a serpent making men such fools as to worship a quartan ague fire and water onions and sheep This is the skill man learned and the Philosophy that he is taught by beleeving the Devill * What wisedome can there be in any man that cals good evill and evill good to say fire is cold and the Sun black that fornication can make a man happy or drunkennesse can make him wise And this is the state of a sinner of every one that delights in iniquity he cannot be pleased with it if he thinks it evill he cannot endure it without beleeving this proposition that there is in drunkennesse or lust pleasure enough good enough to make him amends for the intolerable pains of damnation But then if we consider upon what nonsense principles the state of an evill life relies we must in reason be in patient and with scorn and indignation drive away the fool such as are sense is to be preferred before reason interest before religion a lust before heaven moments before eternity money above God himself that a mans felicity consists in that which a beast enjoyes that a little in present uncertain fallible possession is better then the certain state of infinite glories hereafter what childe what fool can think things more weak and more unreasonable And yet if men do not go upon these grounds upon what account do they sin sin hath no wiser reasons for it self then these 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the same argument that a flye hath to enter into a candle the same argument a fool hath that enters into sin it looks prettily but rewards the eye as
and that which was private that which fools applauded and that which himself durst not own the secrets of his lust and the criminall contrivances of his thoughts the base and odious circumstances and the frequency of the action and the partner of his sin all that which troubles his conscience and all that he willingly forgets shall be proclaim'd by the trumpet of God by the voice of an Archangell in the great congregation of spirits and just men There is one great circumstance more of the shame of sin which extremely enlarges the evill of a sinfull state but that is not consequent to sin by a naturall emanation but is superinduc'd by the just wrath of God and therefore is to be consider'd in the third part which is next to be handled 3. When the Boeotians asked the Oracle by what they should become happy the answer was made 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 wicked and irreligious persons are prosperous and they taking the Devill at his word threw the inspired Pythian the ministring witch into the sea hoping so to become mighty in peace and warre The effect of which was this The Devill was found a lyar and they fools at first and at last felt the reward of irreligion For there are to some crimes such events which are not to be expected from the connexion of naturall causes but from secret influences and undiscernible conveyances * that a man should be made sick for receiving the holy Sacrament unworthily and blinde for resisting the words of an Apostle a preacher of the Lawes of Jesus and dye suddenly for breaking of his vow and committing sacriledge and be under the power and scourge of an exterminating Angell for climbing his Fathers bed these are things beyond the worlds Philosophy But as in Nature so in Divinity too there are Sympathies and Antipathies effects which we feel by experience and are forewarned of by revelation which no naturall reason can judge nor any providence can prevent but by living innocently and complying with the Commandements of God The rod of God which cometh not into the lot of the righteous strikes the sinning man with sore strokes of veng eance 1. The first that I shall note is that which I called the aggravation of the shame of sin and that is an impossibility of being concealed in most cases of heinous crimes 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 let no man suppose that he shall for ever hide his sin a single action may be conveyed away under the covert of an excuse or a privacy escaping as Ulysses did the search of Polyphemus and it shall in time be known that it did escape and shall be discover'd that it was private that is that it is so no longer But no wicked man that dwelt and delighted in sin did ever go off from his scene of unworthinesse without a filthy character The black veile is thrown over him before his death and by some contingency or other he enters into his cloud because few sins determine finally in the thoughts but if they dwell there they will also enter into action and then the thing discovers it self or else the injured person will proclaim it or the jealous man will talk of it before it 's done or curious people will inquire and discover or the spirit of detraction shall be let loose upon him and in spite shall declare more then he knowes not more then is true The Ancients especially the Scholars of Epicurus beleev'd that no man could be secured or quiet in his spirit from being discovered Scelus aliqua tutum nulla securum tulit They are not secure even when they are safe but are afflicted with perpetuall jealousies and every whisper is concerning them and all new noises are arrests to their spirits and the day is too light and the night is too horrid and both are the most opportune for their discovery and besides the undiscernible connexion of the contingencies of providence many secret crimes have been published by dreams and talkings in their sleep It is the observation of Lucretius Multi de magnis per somnum rebus loquuntur Indicióque sui facti persape fuêre And what their understanding kept a guard upon their fancy let loose fear was the bars and locks but sleep became the key to open even then when all the senses were shut and God rul'd alone without the choice and discourse of man And though no man regards the wilder talkings of a distracted man yet it hath sometimes hapned that a delirium and a feaver fear of death and the intolerable apprehensions of damnation have open'd the cabinet of sin and brought to light all that was acted in the curtains of night Quippe ubi se multis per somnia saepe loquentes Aut morbo delirantes protrâxe feruntur Et celata diu in medium peccata dedisse But there are so many wayes of discovery and amongst so many some one does so certainly happen that they are well summ'd up by Sophocles by saying that time hears all and tels all 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 A cloud may be its roof and cover till it passes over but when it is driven by a fierce winde or runs fondly after the Sun it layes open a deformity which like an ulcer had a skin over it and a pain within and drew to it a heap of sorrowes big enough to run over all its inclosures Many persons have betrayed themselves by their own fears and knowing themselves never to be secure enough have gone to purge themselves of what no body suspected them offer'd an Apology when they had no accuser but one within which like a thorn in the flesh or like a word in a fools heart was uneasie till it came out Non amo se nimium purgitantes when men are over-busie in justifying themselves it is a sign themselves think they need it Plutarch tels of a young gentleman that destroyed a swallow's nest pretending to them that repreved him for doing the thing which in their superstition the Creeks esteemed so ominous that the little bird accused him for killing his Father And to this purpose it was that Solomon gave counsell Curse not the King no not in thy thought nor the rich in thy bedchamber for a bird of the air shall carry the voice and that that hath wings shall tell the matter Murder and treason have by such strange wayes been revealed as if God had appointed an Angell president of the revelation and had kept this in secret and sure ministry to be as an argument to destroy Atheisme from the face of the earth by opening the secrets of men with this key of providence Intercepting of letters mistaking names false inscriptions errors of messengers faction of the parties fear in the actors horror in the action the majesly of the person the restlesnesse of the minde distracted looks wearinesse of the spirit and all under the conduct of the Divine wisdome and the Divine vengeance make the covers
by the gaping of the earth and the men were buryed alive and Dathan and Abiram were consumed with fire for usurping the Priests office But God hath struck severely since that time and for the prostitution of a Lady by the Spanish King the Moors were brought in upon his Kingdome and rul'd there for 700. years And have none of us known an excellent and good man to have descended or rather to have been thrust into a sin for which he hath repented which he hath confessed which he hath rescinded and which he hath made amends for as he could and yet God was so severely angry that this man was suffered to fall in so big a calamity that he dyed by the hands of violence in a manner so seemingly impossible to his condition that it looked like the biggest sorrow that hath happened to the sons of men But then let us consider how many and how great crimes we have done and tremble to think that God hath exacted so fearfull pains and mighty punishments for one such sin which we it may be have committed frequently Our sin deserves as bad as theirs and God is impartial and we have no priviledge no promise of exemption no reason to hope it what then do we think shall become of this affair where must we suffer this vengeance For that it is due that it is just we suffer it these sad examples are a perfect demonstration We have done that for which God thought flaying alive not to be too big a punishment that for which God hath smitten Kings with formidable plagues that for which governments have been changed and nations enslaved and Churches destroyed and the Candlestick removed and famines and pestilences have been sent upon a whole Kingdome and what shall become of us why do we vainly hope it shall not be so with us If it was just for these men to suffer what they did then we are at least to expect so much and then let us consider into what a fearfull condition sin hath put us upon whom a sentence is read that we shall be plagued like Zedekiah or Corah or Dathan or the King of Spain or any other King who were for ought we know infinitely more innocent and more excellent persons then any of us What will become of us For God is as just to us as to them and Christ dyed for them as well as for us and they have repented more then we have done and what mercy can we expect that they might not hope for upon at least as good ground as we Gods wayes are secret and his mercies and justice dwell in a great abysse but we are to measure our expectations by revelation and experience But then what would become of us if God should be as angry at our sin as at Zedekiahs or King Davids where have we in our body room enough for so many stripes as our sin ought justly to be punished withall or what security or probability have we that he will not so punish us For I did not represent this sad story as a matter of possibility only that we may fear such fearfull strokes as we see God lay upon sinners but we ought to look upon it as a thing that will come some way or other and for ought we know we cannot escape it So much and more is due for the sin and though Christ hath redeemed our souls and if we repent we shall not die eternally yet he hath no where promised we shall not be smitten It was an odde saying of the Devill to a sinner whom he would fain have had to despair Me è Coelo ad Barathrum demisit peccatum vos ullum in terra locum tutum existimabitis Sin thrust me from heaven to hell and do you think on earth to have security Men use to presume that they shall go unpunished but we see what little reason we have so to flatter and undoe our selves 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 He that hath sinn'd must look for a Judgement and how great that is we are to take our measures by those sad instances of vengeance by which God hath chastised the best of men when they have committed but a single sin 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 sin is damnable and destructive and therefore as the asse refused the barley which the fatted swine left perceiving by it he was fatted for the slaughter Tuum libenter prorsus appeterem cibum Nisi qui nutritus illo est jugulatus foret we may learn to avoid these vain pleasures which cut the throat after they are swallowed and leave us in that condition that we may every day fear lest that evill happen unto us which we see fall upon the great examples of Gods anger and our fears cannot ought not at all to be taken off but by an effective busie pungent hasty and a permanent repentance and then also but in some proportions for we cannot be secured from temporall plagues if we have sinn'd no repentance can secure us from all that nay Gods pardon or remitting his finall anger and forgiving the pains of hell does not secure us here 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 but sin lies at the door ready to enter in and rifle all our fortunes 1. But this hath two appendages which are very considerable and the first is that there are some mischiefs which are the proper and appointed scourges of certain sins and a man need not aske Cujus vulturïs hoc erit cadaver what vultur what death what affliction shall destroy this sinner The sin hath a punishment of its own which usually attends it as giddinesse does a drunkard He that commits sacriledge is marked for a vertiginousnesse and changeable fortune Make them O my God like unto a wheel of an unconstant state and we and our fathers have seen it in the change of so many families which have been undone by being made rich they took the lands from the Church and the curse went along with it and the misery and the affliction lasted longer then the sin Telling lies frequently hath for its punishment to be given over to believe a lye and at last that no body shall beleeve it but himself and then the mischief is full he becomes a dishonoured and a baffled person The consequent of lust is properly shame and witchcraft is still punished with basenesse and beggery and oppression of widowes hath a sting for the tears of the oppressed are to the oppressour like the waters of jealousie making the belly to swell and the thigh to rot the oppressor seldome dies in a tolerable condition but is remark'd towards his end with some horrible affliction The sting of oppression is darted as a man goes to his grave In these and the like God keeps a rule of striking In quo quis peccat in eo punitur The Divine Judgement did point at the sin lest that be concealed by excuses and protected by affection and increased by passion and destroy the man by
its abode For some sins are so agreeable to the spirit of a fool and an abused person because he hath fram'd his affections to them and they comply with his unworthy interest that when God out of an angry kindnesse smites the man and punishes the sin the man does fearfully defend his beloved sin as the serpent does his head which he would most tenderly preserve But therefore God that knowes all our tricks and devices our stratagems to be undone hath therefore apportioned out his punishments by analogies by proportions and entaile so that when every sin enters into its proper portion we may discern why God is angry and labour to appease him speedily 2. The second appendage to this consideration is this that there are some states of sin which expose a man to all mischief as it can happen by taking off from him all his guards and defences by driving the good Spirit from him by stripping him of the guards of Angels But this is the effect of an habituall sin a course of an evill life and it is called in Scripture a grieving the good Spirit of God But the guard of Angels is in Scripture only promised to them that live godly The Angels of the Lord pitch their tents round about them that fear him and delivereth them said David 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 And the Hellenists use to call the Angels 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 watchmen which custody is at first designed and appointed for all when by baptisme they give up their names to Christ and enter into the covenant of Religion And of this the Heathen have been taught something by conversation with the Hebrewes and Christians unicuique nostrum dare paedagogum Deum said Seneca to Lucilius non primarium sed ex eorum numero quos Ovidius vocat ex plebe deos There is a guardian God assigned to every one of us of the number of those which are of the second order such are those of whom David speaks before the Gods will I sing praise unto thee and it was the doctrine of the Stoicks that to every one there was assigned a Genius and a Juno Quamobrem major coelitum populus etiam quam hominum intelligi potest quum singuli ex semetipsis totidem Deos faciant Junones geniosque adoptando sibi said Pliny Every one does adopt Gods into his family and get a Gunius and a Juno of their own Junonem meam iratam habeam it was the oath of Quartilla in Petronius and Socrates in Plato is said to swear by his Juno though afterwards among the Romans it became the womans oath and a note of effeminacy But the thing they aim'd at was this that God took a care of us below and sent a ministring spirit for our defence but that this is only upon the accounts of piety they know not But we are taught it by the Spirit of God in Scripture For the Angels are ministring spirits sent forth to minister to the good of them who shal be heirs of salvation and concerning St. Peter the faithfull had an opinion that it might be his Angell agreeing to the Doctrine of our blessed Lord who spake of Angels appropriate to his little ones to infants to those that belong to him Now what God said to the sons of Israel is also true to us Christians Behold I send an Angell before thee beware of him and obey his voice provoke him not for he will not pardon your trangressions So that if we provoke the Spirit of the Lord to anger by a course of evill living either the Angell will depart from us or if he staies he will strike us The best of these is bad enough and he is highly miserable Qui non sit tanto hoc custode securus whom an Angell cannot defend from mischief nor any thing secure him from the wrath of God It was the description and character which the Erythrean Sibyl gave of God 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 It is Gods appellative to be a giver of excellent rewards to just and innocent persons but to assign to evill men fury wrath and sorrow for their portion If I should lanch further into this Dead sea I should finde nothing but horrid shriekings and the skuls of dead men utterly undone Fearfull it is to consider that sin does not only drive us into calamity but it makes us also impatient and imbitters our spirit in the sufferance * It cryes loud for vengeance and so torments men before the time even with such fearfull outcries and horrid alarms that their hell begins before the fire is kindled * It hinders our prayers and consequently makes us hopelesse and helplesse * It perpetually affrights the conscience unlesse by its frequent stripes it brings a callousnesse and an insensible damnation upon it * It makes us to lose all that which Christ purchased for us all the blessings of his providence the comforts of his spirit the aids of his grace the light of his countenance the hopes of his glory it makes us enemies to God and to be hated by him more then he hates a dog and with a dog shall be his portion to eternall ages with this only difference that they shall both be equally excluded from heaven but the dog shall not and the sinner shall descend into hell and which is the confirmation of all evill for a transient sin God shall inflict an eternall Death Well might it be said in the words of God by the Prophet ponam Babylonem in possessionem Erinacei Babylon shall be the possession of an Hedgehog that 's a sinners dwelling incompassed round with thornes and sharp prickles afflictions and uneasinesse all over So that he that wishes his sin big and prosperous wishes his Bee as big as a Bull and his Hedgehog like an Elephant the pleasure of the honey would not cure the mighty sting and nothing make recompense or be a good equall to the evill of an eternall ruine But of this there is no end I summe up all with the saying of Publius Mimus Tolerabilior est qui mori jubet quà m qui malè vivere He is more to be endured that puts a man to death then he that betrayes him into sin For the end of this is death eternall Sermon XXII THE GOOD and EVILL TONGUE Ephes. 4. 29. Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth but that which is good to the use of edifying that it may minister grace unto the hearers HE that had an ill memory did wisely comfort himselfe by reckoning the advantages he had by his forgetfulnesse For by this means he was hugely secured against malice and ambition for his anger went off with the short notice and observation of the injury and he saw himself unfit for the businesses of other men or to make records in his head undertake to conduct the intrigues of affairs of a multitude who was apt to
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 he 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 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 umbrant 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 infirmity but when it wants the grace of God or is mastered with passions and sinfull appetites and that infirmity is the state of unregeneration 3. The violence or strength of a temptation is not sufficient to excuse an action or to make it accountable upon the stock of a pitiable and innocent infirmity if it leaves the understanding still able to judge because a temptation cannot have any proper strengths but from our selves and because we have in us a principle of basenesse which this temptation meets and onely perswades me to act because I love it Joseph met with a temptation as violent and as strong as any man and it is certain there are not many Christians but would fall under it and call it a sin of infirmity since they have been taught so to abuse themselves by sowing fig-leaves before their nakednesse but because Joseph had a strength of God within him the strength of chastity therefore it could not at all prevail upon him Some men cannot by any art of hell be tempted to be drunk others can no more resist an invitation to such a meeting then they can refuse to die if a dagger were drunk with their heart blood because their evil habits made them weak on that part And some man that is fortified against revenge it may be will certainly fall under a temptation to uncleannesse for every temptation is great or small according as the man is and a good word will certainly lead some men to an action of folly while another will not think ten thousand pound a considerable argument to make him tell one single lie against his duty or his conscience 4. No habituall sin that is no sin that returns constantly or frequently that is repented of and committed again and still repented of and then again committed no such sin is excusable with a pretence of infirmity Because that sin is certainly noted and certainly condemned and therefore returns not because of the weaknesse of nature but the weaknesse of grace the principle of this is an evil spirit an habituall aversation from God a dominion and empire of sin and as no man for his inclination and aptnesse to the sins of the flesh is to be called carnall if he corrects his inclinations and turns them into vertues so no man can be called spirituall for his good wishes and apt inclinations to goodnesse if these inclinations passe not into acts and these acts into habits and holy customs and walkings and conversation with God But as natural concupiscence corrected becomes the matter of vertue so these good inclinations and condemnings of our sin if they be ineffective and end in sinfull actions are the perfect signes of a reprobate and unregenerate estate The sum is this An animal man a man under the law a carnall man for as to this they are all one is sold under sin he is a servant of corruption he falls frequently into the same sin to which he is tempted he commends the Law he consents to it that it is good he does not commend sin he does some little things against it but they are weak and imperfect his lust is stronger his passions violent and unmortified his habits vitious his customs sinfull and he lives in the regions of sin and dies and enters into its portion But a spirituall man a man that is in the state of grace who is born anew of the Spirit that is regenerate by the Spirit of Christ he is led by the Spirit he lives in the Spirit he does the works of God cheerfully habitually vigorously and although he sometimes slips yet it is but seldom it is in small instances his life is such as he cannot pretend to be justified by works and merit but by mercy and the faith of Jesus Christ yet he never sins great sins If he does he is for that present falne from Gods favour and though possibly he may recover and the smaller or seldomer the sin is the sooner may be his restitution yet for the present I say he is out of Gods favour But he that remains in the grace of God sins not by any deliberate consultive knowing act he is incident to such a surprize as may consist with the weaknesse and judgement of a good man but whatsoever is or must be considered if it cannot passe without consideration it cannot passe without sin and therefore cannot enter upon him while he remains in that state For he that is in Christ in him the body is dead by reason of sin and the Gospel did not differ from the Law but that the Gospel gives grace and strength to do whatsoever it commands which the Law did not and the greatnesse of the promise of eternall life is such an argument to them that consider it that it must needs be of force sufficient to perswade a man to use all his faculties and all his strength that he may obtain it God exacted all upon this stock God knew this could do every thing Nihil non in hoc praesumpsit Deus said one This will make a satyr chast and Silenus to be sober and Dives to be charitable and Simon Magus himself to despise reputation and Saul to turn from a Persecutor to an Apostle For since God hath given us reason
betrayed into them we would fain have things so ordered by chance or power that it may seem necessary to sin or that it may become excusable and dressed fitly for our own circumstances and for ever we long after the flesh pots of Egypt the garlick and the Onions and we so little do esteeme Manna the food of Angels we so loath the bread of Heaven that any temptation will make us return to our fetters and our bondage and if we do not tempt our selves yet we do not resist a temptation or if we pray against it we desire not to be heard and if we be assisted yet we will not work together with those assistances so that unlesse we be forced nothing will be done we are so willing to perish and so unwilling to be saved that we minister to God reason enough to suspect us and therefore it is no wonder that God is jealous of us We keep company with Harlots and polluted persons we are kind to all Gods Enemies and love that which he hates how can it be otherwise but that we should be suspected Let us make our best of it and see if we can recover the good opinion of God for as ye we are but suspected persons 2. And therefore God is inquisitive he looks for that which he fain would never finde God sets spies upon us he looks upon us himself through the Curtains of a cloud and he sends Angels to espie us in all our wayes and permits the Devil to winnow us and to accuse us and erects a Tribunal and witnesses in our own consciences and he cannot want information concerning our smalest irregularities Sometimes the Devil accuses but he also sometimes accuses us falsly either malioâ—ously or ignorantly and we stand upright in that particular by innocence and sometimes by penitence and all this while our Conscinence is our friend Sometimes our conscience does accuse us unto God and then we stand convict by our own judgement Sometimes if our conscience acquit us yet we are not thereby justified For as Moses accused the Jews so do Christ and his Apostles accuse us not in their personss but by their works and by their words by the thing it self by confronting the laws of Christ and our practises Sometimes the Angels who are the observers of all our works carry up sad tidings to the Court of Heaven against us Thus two Angels were the informers against Sodom but yet these were the last for before that time the cry of their iniquity had sounded loud and sadly in Heaven and all this is the direct and proper effect of his jealousie which sets spies upon all the actions and watches the circumstances and tells the steps and attends the businesses the recreations the publications and retirements of every man and will not suffer a thought to wander but he uses means to correct it's errour and to reduce it to himself For he that created us and daily feeds us he that intreats us to be happy with an opportunity so passionate as if not we but himself were to receive the favour he that would part with his onely Son from his bosome and the embraces of eternity and give him over to a shameful and cursed death for us cannot but be supposed to love us with a great love and to own us with an intire title and therefore that he would fain secure us to himself with an undivided possession and it cannot but be infinitely reasonable for to whom else should any of us belong but to God Did the world create us Or did lust ever do us any good Did Sathan ever suffer one stripe for our advantage Does not he study all the wayes to ruine us Doe the Sun or the stars preserve us alive Or do we get understanding from the Angels Did ever any joynt of our body knit or our heart ever keep one true minute of a pulse without God Had not we been either nothing or worse that is infinitely eternally miserable but that God made us capable and then pursued us with arts and devices of great mercy to force us to be happy Great reason therefore there is that God should be jealous lest we take any of our duty from him who hath so strangely deserved it all and give it to a creature or to our enemy who cannot be capable of any But however it will concern us with much caution to observe our own wayes since we are made aspectacle to God to Angels and to Men God hath set so many spies upon us the blessed Angels and the accursed Devils good men and bad men the eye of Heaven and eye of that eye God himself all watching lest we rob God of his Honour and our selves of our hopes For by his prime intention he hath chosen so to get his own glory as may best consist with our felicity His great designe is to be glorified in our being saved 3. Gods jealousie hath a sadder effect then all this For all this is for mercy but if we provoke this jealousie if he findes us in our spiritual whoredoms he is implacable that is he is angry with us to eternity unlesse we returne in time and if we do it may be he will not be appeased in all instances and when he forgives us he will make some reserves of his wrath he will punish our persons or our estate he will chastise us at home or abroad in our bodies or in our children for he will visit our sins upon our children from generation to generation and if they be made miserable for our sins they are unhappy in such parents but we bear the curse and the anger of God even while they bear his rod God visits the sins of the Fathers upon the children That 's the second Great stroke he strikes against sin and is now to be considered That God doth so is certain because he saith he doth and that this is just in him so to do is also as certain therefore because he doth it For as his lawes are our measures so his actions and his own will are his own measures He that hath right over all things and all persons cannot do wrong to any thing He that is essentially just and there could be no such thing as justice or justice it self could not be good if it did not derive from him it is impossible for him to be unjust But since God is pleased to speak after the manner of men it may well consist with our duty to enquire into those manners of consideration whereby we may understand the equity of God in this proceeding and to be instructed also in our own danger if we persevere in sin 1. No man is made a sinner by the fault of another man without his own consent For to every one God gives his choice and sets life and death before every of the sons of Adam and therefore this death is not a consequent to any sin but our own In this sense it is true that
if the fathers eat sowre grapes the childrens teeth shall not be set on edge and therefore the sin of Adam which was derived to all the world did not bring the world to any other death but temporall by the intermediall stages of sickness and temporal infelicities And it is not said that sin passed upon all men but death that also no otherwise but 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 in as much as al men have sinned as they have followed the steps of their father so they are partakers of this death And therefore it is very remarkable that death brought in by sin was nothing superinduced to man man onely was reduced to his own naturall condition from which before Adams fall he stood exempted by supernaturall favour and therefore although the taking away that extraordinary grace or priviledge was a punishment yet the suffering the naturall death was directly none but a condition of his creation naturall and therefore not primarily evil but if not good yet at least indifferent And the truth and purpose of this observation will extend it self if we observe that before any man died Christ was promised by whom death was to lose its sting by whom death did cease to be an evil and was or might be if we do belong to Christ a state of advantage So that we by occasion of Adams sin being returned to our naturall certainty of dying do still even in this very particular stand between the blessing and the cursing If we follow Christ death is our friend If we imitate the praevarication of Adam then death becomes an evil the condition of our nature becomes the punishment of our own sin not of Adams for although his sin brought death in yet it is onely our sin that makes death to be evil And I desire this to be observed because it is of great use in vindicating the Divine justice in the matter of this question The materiall part of the evil came from our father upon us but the formality of it the sting and the curse is onely by our selves 2. For the fault of others many may become miserable even all or any of those whose relation is such to the sinner that he in any sense may by such inflictions be punished execrable or oppressed Indeed it were strange if when a plague were in Ethiopia the Athenians should be infected or if the house of Pericles were visited and Thucydides should die for it For although there are some evils which as Plutarch saith are ansis propagationibus praedita incredibili celeritate in longinquum penetrantia such which can dart evil influences as Porcupines do their quils yet as at so great distances the knowledge of any confederate events must needs be uncertain so it is also uselesse because we neither can joyne their causes nor their circumstances nor their accidents into any neighbourhood of conjunction Relations are seldome noted at such distances and if they were it is certain so many accidents will intervene that will out-weigh the efficacy of such relations that by any so far distant events we cannot be instructed in any duty nor understand our selves reproved for any fault But when the relation is neerer and is joyned under such a head and common cause that the influence is perceived and the parts of it do usually communicate in benefit notices or infelicity especially if they relate to each other as superiour and inferiour then it is certain the sin is infectious I mean not onely in example but also in punishment And of this I shall shew 1. In what instances usually it is so 2. For what reasons it is so and justly so 3. In what degree and in what cases it is so 4. What remedies there are for this evil 1. It is so in kingdoms in Churches in families in politicall artificiall and even in accidentall societies When David numbred the people God was angry with him but he punished the people for the crime seventy thousand men died of the plague and when God gave to David the choice of three plagues he chose that of the pestilence in which the meanest of the people and such which have the least society with the acts and crimes of Kings are most commonly devoured whilest the powerfull and sinning persons by arts of physick and flight by provisions of nature and accidents are more commonly secured * But the story of the Kings of Israel hath furnished us with an example sitted with all the stranger circumstances in this question Joshuah had sworn to the Gibeonites who had craftily secured their lives by exchanging it for their liberties Almost 500. yeers after Saul in zeal to the men of Israel and Judah slew many of them After this Saul dies and no question was made of it But in the dayes of David there was a famine in the land three yeers together and God being inquired of said it was because of Saul his killing the Gibeonites What had the people to do with their Kings fault or at least the people of David with the fault of Saul That we shall see anon But see the way that was appointed to expiate the crime and the calamity David took seven of Sauls sons and hanged them up against the Sun and after that God was intreated for the land The story observes one circumstance more that for the kindnesse of Jonathan David spared Mephibosheth Now this story doth not onely instance in Kingdoms but in families too The fathers fault is punished upon the sons of the family and the Kings fault upon the people of his land even after the death of the King after the death of the father Thus God visited the sin of Ahab partly upon himself partly upon his sons I will not bring the evil in his dayes but in his sons dayes will I bring the evil upon his house Thus did God slay the childe of Bathsheba for the sin of his father David and the whole family of Eâ—i all his kinred of the neerer lines were thrust from the priesthood and a curse made to descend upon his children for many ages that all the males should die young and in the flower of their youth The boldnesse and impiety of Cham made his posterity to be accursed and brought slavery into the world Because Ataalek fought with the sons of Israel at Rephidim God took up a quarrell against the nation for ever And above all examples is that of the Jews who put to death the Lord of life and made their nation to be an anathema for ever untill the day of restitution His blood be upon us and upon our children If we shed innocent blood If we provoke God to wrath If we oppresse the poor If we crucifie the Lord of life again and put him to an open shame the wrath of God will be upon us and upon our children to make us a cursed family and who are the sinners to be the stock and original of the curse the pedigree of the misery
where and by sin are made obnoxious not alone to personall judgements but that we are made like the fountains of the dead sea springs of the lake of Sodom in stead of refreshing our families with blessings we leave them brimstone and drought and poison and an evil 〈◊〉 and the wrath of God and a treasure of wrath and their Fathers sins for their portion and inheritance * Naturalists say that when the leading goats in the Greek Islands have taken an Eryngus or sea holly into their mouths all the herd will stand still till the herds man comes and forces it out as apprehending the evil that will come to them all if any of them especially their Principals tast an unwholesome plant and indeed it is of a General concernment that the Master of a family or the Prince of a people from whom as from a fountain many issues do derive upon their Relatives should be springs of health and sanctity and blessing It is a great right and propriety that a King hath in his people or a Father in his children that even their sins can do these a mischiefe not onely by a direct violence but by the execution of Gods wrath God hath made strange bands and vessels or chanels of communication between them when even the anger of God shal be conveied by the conduits of such relations That would be considered It binds them neerer then our new doctrine will endure but it also binds us to pray for them and for their Holinesse and good Government as earnestly as we would be delivered from death or sicknesse or poverty or war or the wrath of God in any instance 3. This also will satisfie the fearfulnesse of such persons who think the evil prosperous and call the proud happy No man can be called happy till he be dead nor then neither if he lived vitiously Look how God handles him in his children in his family in his grand-children and as it tells that generation which sees the judgement that God was all the while angry with him so it supports the spirits of men in the intervall and entertains them with the expectation of a certain hope for if I do not live to see his sin punished yet his posterity may finde themselves accursed and feel their fathers sins in their own calamity and the expectation or belief of that may relieve my oppression and ease my sorrows while I know that God will bear my injury in a lasting record and when I have forgot it will bring it forth to judgement The Athenians were highly pleased when they saw honours done to the posterity of Cimon a good man and a rare citizen but murdered for being wise and vertuous and when at the same time they saw a decree of banishment passe against the children of Lacharis and Aristo they laid their hands upon their mouthes and with silence did admire the justice of the Power above The sum of this is That in sending evils upon the posterity of evil men God serves many ends of providence some of wisedome some of mercy some of justice and contradicts none For the evil of the innocent son is the fathers punishment upon the stock of his sin and his relation but the sad accident happens to the son upon the score of nature and many ends of providence and mercy To which I adde that if any even the greatest temporall evil may fall upon a man as blindnesse did upon the blinde man in the Gospel when neither he nor his parents have sinned much more may it do so when his parents have though he have not For there is a neerer or more visible commensuration of justice between the parents sin and the sons sicknesse then between the evil of the son and the innocence of father and son together The dispensation therefore is righteous and severe 3. I am now to consider in what degree and in what cases this is usuall or to be expected It is in the Text instanced in the matter of worshipping images God is so jealous of his honour that he will not suffer an image of himself to be made lest the image dishonour the substance nor any image of a creature to be worshipped though with a lesse honour lest that lesse swell up into a greater and he that is thus jealous of his honour and therefore so instances it is also very curious of it in all other particulars and though to punish the sins of fathers upon the children be more solemnly threatned in this sin onely yet we finde it inflicted indifferently in any other great sin as appears in the former precedents This one thing I desire to be strictly observed That it is with much errour and great indiligence usually taught in this question that the wrath of God descends from fathers to children onely in case the children imitate and write after their fathers copy supposing these words in them that hate me to relate to the children But this is expressely against the words of the Text and the examples of the thing God afflicts good children of evil parents for their fathers sins and the words are plain and determinate God visits the sins of the fathers in tertiam quartam generationem eorum qui oderunt me to the third generation of them of those fathers that hate me that is upon the great-grand-children of such parents So that if the great-grandfathers be haters of God and lovers of iniquity it may intail a curse upon so many generations though the children be haters of their fathers hatred and lovers of God * And this hath been observed even by wise men among the Heathens whose stories tell that Antigonus was punished for the tyranny of his father Demetrius Phyleus for his father Augeâ—â— pious and wise Nestor for his father Neleus And it was so in the case of Jonathan who lost the Kingdom and his life upon the stock of his fathers sins and the innocent childe of David was slain by the anger of God not against the childe who never had deserved it but the fathers adultery I need not here repeat what I said in vindication of the Divine justice but I observed this to represent the danger of a sinning father or mother when it shall so infect the family with curses that it shall ruine a wise and an innocent son and that vertue and innocence which shall by God be accepted as sufficient through the Divine mercy to bring the son to Heaven yet it may be shall not be accepted to quit him from feeling the curse of his fathers crime in a load of temporall infelicities And who but a villain would ruine and undo a wise a vertuous and his own son But so it is in all the world A traytor is condemned to suffer death himself and his posterity are made beggers and dishonourable his Escutcheon is reversed his arms of honour are extinguished the noblesse of his Ancestours is forgotten but his own sin is not while men by the
characters of infamy are taught to call that family accursed which had so base a father Tiresias was esteemed unfortunate because he could not see his friends and children the poor man was blinde with age But Athamas and Agave were more miserable who did see their children but took them for Lions and Stags The parents were miserably frantick But of all they deplored the misery of Hercules who when he saw his children took them for enemies and endeavoured to destroy them And this is the case of all vitious parents That a mans enemies were they of his own house was accounted a great calamity but it is worse when we love them tenderly and fondly and yet do them all the despite we wish to enemies But so it is that in many cases we do more mischief to our children then if we should strangle them when they are newly taken from their mothers knees on tear them in pieces as Media did her brother Absyrtus For to leave them to inherit a curse to leave them an intaild calamity a misery a disease the wrath of God for an inheritance that it may descend upon them and remark the family like their coat of arms is to be the parent of evil the ruine of our family the causes of mischief to them who ought to be dearer to us then our own eyes And let us remember this when we are tempted to provoke the jealous God let us consider that his anger hath a progeny and a descending line and it may break out in the dayes of our Nephews A Greek woman was accused of adultery because she brought forth a Blackmoor and could not acquit her self till she had proved that she had descended in the fourth degree from an Ethiopian Her great Grand-father was a Moor. And if Naturalists say true that Nephews are very often liker to their Grandfathers then to their Fathers we see that the semblance of our souls and the character of the person is conveyed by secret and undiscernable conveyances Naturall production conveyes originall sin and therefore by the chanels of the body it is not strange that men convey an hereditary sin And lustfull sons are usually born to Satyrs and monsters of intemperance to the drunkards and there are also hereditary diseases which if in the fathers they were effects of their sin as it is in many cases it is notorious that the fathers sin is punished and the punishment conveyed by naturall instruments so that it cannot be a wonder but it ought to be a huge affrightment from a state of sin If a man can be capable of so much charity as to love himself in his own person or in the images of his nature and heirs of his fortunes and the supports of his family in the children that God hath given him Consider therefore that you do not onely act your own tragedies when you sin but you represent and effect the fortune of your children you slay them with your own barbarous and inhumane hands Onely be pleased to compare the variety of estates of your own and your children If they on earth be miserable many times for their fathers sins how great a state of misery is that in hell which they suffer for their own And how vile a person is that father or mother who for a little money or to please a lust will be a parricide and imbrue his hands in the blood of his own children The Intail of Curses cut off Part II. 4. IAm to consider what remedies there are for sons to cut off this intall of curses and whether and by what means it is possible for sons to prevent the being punished for their fathers sins And since this thing is so perplext and intricate hath so easie an objection and so hard an answer looks so like a cruelty and so unlike a justice though it be infinitely just and very severe and a huge enemy to sin it cannot be thought but that there are not onely wayes left to reconcile Gods proceeding to the strict rules of justice but also the condition of man to the possibilities of Gods usuall mercies One said of old Ex tarditate si Dij soutes praetereant insontes plectant justitiam suam non sic rectè resarciunt If God be so slow to punish the guilty that the punishment be deferred till the death of the guilty person and that God shall be forced to punish the innocent or to let the sin quite escape unpunished it will be something hard to joyn that justice with mercy or to joyn that action with justice Indeed it will seem strange but the reason of its justice I have already discoursed If now we can finde how to reconcile this to Gods mercy too or can learn how it may be turned into a mercy we need to take no other care but that for our own particular we take heed we never tempt Gods anger upon our families and that by competent and apt instruments we indeavour to cancell the decree if it be gone out against our families for then we make use of that severity which God intended and our selves shall be refreshed in the shades and by the cooling brooks of the Divine mercy even then when we see the wrath of God breaking out upon the families round about us 1. The first means to cut off the intail of wrath and cursings from a family is for the sons to disavow those signall actions of impiety in which their fathers were deeply guilty and by which they stained great parts of their life or have done something of very great unworthinesse and disreputation Si quis paterni vitij nascitur haeres nascitur poenae The heir of his fathers wickednesse is the heir of his fathers curse and a son comes to inherite a wickednesse from his father three wayes 1. By approving or any wayes consenting to his fathers sin As by speaking of it without regret or shame by pleasing himself in the story or by having an evil minde apt to counsell or do the like if the same circumstances should occur For a son may contract a sin not onely by derivation and the contagion of example but by approbation not onely by a corporall but by a virtuall contact not onely by transcribing an evil copy but by commending it and a man may have animum leprosum in cute mundâ a leprous and a polluted minde even for nothing even for an empty and ineffective lust An evil minde may contract the curse of an evil action and though the son of a covetous father prove a prodigall yet if he loves his fathers vice for ministring to his vanity he is disposed not onely to a judgement for his own prodigality but also to the curse of his fathers avarice 2. The son may inherit his fathers wickednesse by imitation and direct practise and then the curse is like to come to purpose a curse by accumulation a treasure of wrath and then the children as they arrive to the height
their friends and relatives and some Dole and issues of the almes-basket to the poor and if after all this they die quietly and like a lambe and be canoniz'd by a brib'd flatterer in a funerall sermon they make no doubt but they are children of the kingdom and perceive not their folly till without hope of remedy they roar in their expectations of a certain but a horrid eternity of pains * Certainly nothing hath made more ample harvests for the Devil then the deferring of repentance upon vain confidences and lessening it in the extension of parts as well as intension of degrees while we imagine that a few tears and scatterings of devotion are enough to expiate the basenesse of a fifty or threescore yeers impiety This I shall endeavour to cure by shewing what it is to repent and that repentance implies in it the duty of a life or of many and great of long and lasting parts of it and then by direct arguments shewing that repentance put off to our death-bed is invalid and ineffectuall sick languid and impotent like our dying bodies and disabled faculties 1. First therefore Repentance implies a deep sorrow as the beginning and introduction of this duty not a superficiall sigh or tear not a calling our selves sinners and miserable persons this is far from that godly sorrow that worketh repentance and yet I wish there were none in the world or none amongst us who cannot remember that ever they have done this little towards the abolition of their multitudes of sins but yet if it were not a hearty pungent sorrow a sorrow that shall break the heart in pieces a sorrow that shall so irreconcile us to sin as to make us rather choose to die then to sin it is not so much as the beginning of repentance But in Holy Scripture when the people are called to repentance and sorrow which is ever the prologue to it marches sadly and first opens the scene it is ever expressed to be great clamorous and sad it is called a weeping sorely in the verse next after my text a weeping with the bitternesse of heart a turning to the Lord with weeping fasting and mourning a weeping day and night the sorrow of heart the breaking of the spirit the mourning like a dove and chattering like a swallow and if we observe the threnes and sad accents of the Prophet Jeremy when he wept for the sins of his Nation the heart-breakings of David when he mourned for his adultery and murder and the bitter tears of Saint Peter when he washed off the guilt and basenesse of his fall and the denying his Master we shall be sufficiently instructed in this praeludium or introduction to repentance and that it is not every breath of a sigh or moisture of a tender eye not every crying Lord have mercy upon me that is such a sorrow as begins our restitution to the state of grace and Divine favour but such a sorrow that really condemnes our selves and by an active effectual sentence declares us worthy of stripes and death of sorrow and eternall paines and willingly endures the first to prevent the second and weeps and mourns and fasts to obtain of God but to admit us to a possibility of restitution and although all sorrow for sins hath not the same expression nor the same degree of pungency and sensitive trouble which differs according to the temper of the body custome the sexe and accidental tendernesse yet it is not a Godly sorrow unlesse it really produce these effects that is 1. That it makes us really to hate 2. actually to decline sin and 3. produce in us a fear fo Gods anger a sense of the guilt of his displeasure and 4. Then such consequent trouble as can consist with such apprehension of the Divine displeasure which if it expresse not in tears and hearty complaints must be expressed in watchings and strivings against sin in confessing the goodnesse and justice of God threatning or punishing us in patiently bearing the rod of God in confession of our sins in accusation of our selves in perpetual begging of pardon and mean and base opinions of our selves and in al the natural productions from these according to our temper and constitution it must be a sorrow of the reasonable faculty the greatest in its kinde and if it be lesse in kinde or not productive of these effects it is not a godly sorrow not the exordium of repentance But I desire that it be observed that sorrow for sins is not Repentance not that duty which gives glory to God so as to obtain of him that he will glorifie us Repentance is a great volume of duty and Godly sorrow is but the frontispiece or title page it is the harbinger or first introduction to it or if you will consider it in the words of Saint Paul Godly sorrow worketh repentance sorrow is the Parent and repentance is the product and therefore it is a high piece of ignorance to suppose that a crying out and roaring for our sins upon our deathbed can reconcile us to God our crying to God must be so early and so lasting as to be able to teeme and produce such a daughter which must live long and grow from an Embryo to an infant from infancy to childhood from thence to the fulnesse of the stature of Christ and then it is a holy and a happy sorrow but if it be a sorrow onely of a death-bed it is a fruitlesse shower or like the rain of Sodom not the beginning of repentance but the kindling of a flame the comencement of an eternal sorrow For Ahab had a great sorrow but it wrought nothing upon his spirit it did not reconcile his affections to his duty and his duty to God Judas had so great a sorrow for betraying the innocent blood of his Lord that it was intolerable to his Spirit and he burst in the middle and if meer sorrow be repentance then hell is full of penitents for there is weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth for evermore Let us therefore beg of God as Calebs daughter did of her Father dedisti mihi terram aridam da etiam irriguam thou hast given me a dry land give me also a land of waters a dwelling place in tears rivers of tears ut quoniam non sumus digni oculos orando ad coelum levare at simus digni oculos plorando caecare as Saint Austins expression is that because we are not worthy to lift up our eyes to heaven in prayer yet we may be worthy to weep our selves blinde for sin the meaning is that we beg sorrow of God such a sorrow as may be sufficient to quench the flames of lust and surmount the hills of our pride and may extinguish our thirst of covetousnesse that is a sorrow that shall be an effective principle of arming all our faculties against sin and heartily setting upon the work of grace and the persevering labours of a holy life *
a man should depart this world in one of those godly fits as he thinks them he is no neerer to obtain his blessed hope then a man in the stone collick is to health when his pain is eased for the present his disease still remaining and threatning an unwelcome return That resolution onely is the beginning of a holy repentance which goes forth into act and whose acts enlarge into habits and whose habits are productive of the fruits of a holy life From hence we are to take our estimate whence our resolutions of piety must commence He that resolves not to live well till the time comes that he must die is ridiculous in his great designe as he is impertinent in his intermedial purposes and vain in his hope Can a dying man to any real effect resolve to be chast for vertue must be an act of election and chastity is the contesting against a proud and an imperious lust active flesh and insinuating temptation And what doth he resolve against who can no more be tempted to the sin of unchastity then he can returne back again to his youth and vigour And it is considerable that since all the purposes of a holy life which a dying man can make cannot be reduced to act by what law or reason or covenant or revelation are we taught to distinguish the resolution of a dying man from the purposes of a living and vigorous person Suppose a man in his youth and health mooved by consideration of the irregularity and deformity of sin the danger of its productions the wrath and displeasure of Almightie God should resolve to leave the puddles of impurity and walk in the paths of righteousnesse can this resolution alone put him into the state of grace is he admitted to pardon and the favour of God before he hath in some measure performed actually what he so reasonably hath resolved By no means For resolution and purpose is in its own nature and constitution an imperfect act and therefore can signifie nothing without its performance and consummation It is as a faculty is to the act as spring is to the harvest as seed time is to the Autumne as Egges are to birds or as a relative to its correspondent nothing without it And can it be imagined that a resolution in our health and life shall be ineffectual without performance and shall a resolution barely such do any Good upon our deathbed Can such purposes prevail against a long impiety rather then against a young and a newly begun state of sin Will God at an easier rate pardon the sins of fifty or sixty yeers then the sins of our youth onely or the iniquity of five yeers or ten If a holy life be not necessary to be liv'd why shall it be necessary to resolve to live it But if a holy life be necessary then it cannot be sufficient meerly to resolve it unlesse this resolution go forth in an actuall and reall service Vain therefore is the hope of those persons who either go on in their sins before their last sicknesse never thinking to return into the wayes of God from whence they have wandred all their life never renewing their resolutions and vows of holy living or if they have yet their purposes are for ever blasted with the next violent temptation More prudent was the prayer of David Oh spare me a little that I may recover my strength before I go hence and be no more seen And something like it was the saying of the Emperour Charles the fifth Inter vitae negotia mortis diem oportet spacium intercedere When ever our holy purposes are renewed unlesse God gives us time to act them to mortifie and subdue our lusts to conquer and subdue the whole kingdom of sin to rise from our grave and be clothed with nerves and flesh and a new skin to overcome our deadly sicknesses and by little and little to return to health and strength unlesse we have grace and time to do all this our sins will lie down with us in our graves * For when a man hath contracted a long habit of sin and it hath been growing upon him ten or twenty fourty or fifty yeers whose acts he hath daily or hourly repeated and they are grown to a second nature to aim and have so prevailed upon the ruines of his spirit that the man is taken captive by the Devil at his will he is fast bound as a slave tugging at the oar that he is grown in love with his fetters and longs to be doing the work of sin is it likely that all this progresse and groweth in sin in the wayes of which he runs fast without any impediment is it I say likely that a few dayes or weeks of sicknesse can recover him the especiall hindrances of that state I shall afterwards consider but Can a man be supposed so prompt to piety and holy living a man I mean that hath lived wickedly a long time together can he be of so ready and active a vertue upon the sudden as to recover in a moneth or a week what he hath been undoing in 20 or 30 yeers Is it so easie to build that a weak and infirm person bound hand and foot shall be able to build more in three dayes then was a building above fourty yeers Christ did it in a figurative sence but in this it is not in the power of any man so suddenly to be recovered from so long a sicknesse Necessary therefore it is that all these instruments of our conversion Confession of sins praying for their pardon and resolutions to lead a new life should begin before our feet slum le upon the dark mountains lest we leave the work onely resolved upon to be begun which it is necessary we should in many degrees finish if ever we mean to escape the eternall darknesse For that we should actually abolish the whole body of sin and death that we should crucifie the old man with his lusts that we should lay aside every weight and the sin that doth so easily beset us that we should cast away the works of darknesse that we should awake from sleep and arise from death that we should redeem the time that we should cleanse our hands and purifie our hearts that we should have escaped the corruption all the corruption that is in the whole world through lust that nothing of the old leaven should remain in us but that we be wholly a new lump throughly transformed and changed in the image of our minde these are the perpetuall precepts of the Spirit and the certain duty of man and that to have all these in purpose onely is meerly to no purpose without the actuall eradication of every vitious habit and the certain abolition of every criminall adherence is clearly and dogmatically decreed every where in the Scripture For they are the words of Saint Paul they that are Christs have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts the work
direct action And therefore we may also as well be sorrowfull the third time for want of the just measure or hearty meaning of the second sorrow as be sorrowfull the second time for want of true sorrow at the first and so on to infinite And we shall never be secure in this Artifice if we be not certain of our naturall and hearty passion in our direct and first apprehensions Thus many persons think themselves in a good estate and make no question of their salvation being confident onely because they are confident and they are so because they are bidden to be so and yet they are not confident at all but extreamly timerous and fearfull How many persons are there in the world that say they are sure of their salvation and yet they dare not die And if any man pretends that he is now sure he shall be saved and that he cannot fall away from grace there is no better way to confute him then by advising him to send for the Surgeon and bleed to death For what should hinder him not the sin for it cannot take him from Gods favour not the change of his condition for he sayes he is sure to go to a Better why does he not then say 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 like the Romane gallants when they decreed to die The reason is plainly this They say they are confident and yet are extreamly timerous they professe to beleeve that Doctrine and yet dare not trust it nay they think they beleeve but they do not so false is a mans heart so deceived in its own Acts so great a stranger to its own sentence and opinions 3. The heart is deceitfull in its own resolutions and purposes for many times men make their resolutions onely in their understanding not in their wills they resolve it sitting to be done not decree that they will do it And instead of beginning to be reconciled to God by the renewed and hearty purposes of holy living they are advanced so far onely as to be convinced and apt to be condemned by their own sentence But suppose our resolutions advanced further and that our Will and Choices also are determined see how our hearts deceive us 1. We resolve against those sins that please us not or where temptation is not present and think by an over-acted zeal against some sins to get an indulgence for some others There are some persons who will be Drunk The Company or the discourse or the pleasure of madnesse or an easie nature and a thirsty soul something is amisse that cannot be helped But they will make amends and the next day pray twice as much Or it may be they must satisfie a beastly lust but they will not be drunk for all the world and hope by their Temperance to Commute for their want of Chastity But they attend not the eraft of their secret enemy their Heart for it is not love of the vertue if it were they would love Vertue in all its Instances for Chastity is as much a vertue as Temperance and God hates Lust as much as he hates Drunkennesse But this sin is against my health or it may be it is against my lust it makes me impotent and yet impatient full of desire and empty of strength Or else I do an act of Prayer lest my conscience become unquiet while it is not satisfied or cozened with some intervals of Religion I shall think my self a damned wretch if I do nothing for my soul but if I do I shall call the one sin that remains nothing but my Infirmity and therefore it is my excuse and my Prayer is not my Religion but my Peace and my Pretence and my Fallacy 2. We resolve against our sin that is we will not act it in those circumstances as formerly I will not be drunk in the streets but I may sleep till I be recovered and then come forth sober or if I be overtaken it shall be in Civill and Gentile company Or it may be not so much I will leave my intemperance and my Lust too but I will remember it with pleasure I will revolve the past action in my minde and entertain my fancy with a moros delectation in it and by a fiction of imagination will represent it present and so be satisfied with a little effeminacy or phantastick pleasure Beloved suffer not your hearts so to cozen you as if any man can be faithfull in much that is faithlesse in a little He certainly is very much in love with sin and parts with it very unwillingly that keeps its Picture and wears its Favour and delights in the fancy of it even with the same desire as a most passionate widow parts with her dearest husband even when she can no longer enjoy him But certainly her staring all day upon his picture and weeping over his Robe and wringing her hands over his children are no great signes that she hated him And just so do most men hate and accordingly part with their sins 3. We resolve against it when the opportunity is slipped and lay it aside as long as the temptation please even till it come again and no longer How many men are there in the world that against every Communion renew their vowes of holy living Men that for twenty for thirty yeers together have been perpetually resolving against what they daily Act and sure enough they did beleeve themselves And yet if a man had daily promised us a curtesie and failed us but ten times when it was in his power to have done it we should think we had reason never to beleeve him more And can we then reasonably beleeve the resolutions of our hearts which they have falsified so many hundred times We resolve against a religious Time because then it is the Custome of men and the Guise of the Religion Or we resolve when we are in a great danger and then we promise any thing possible or impossible likely or unlikely all is one to us we onely care to remove the present pressure and when that is over and our fear is gone and no love remaining our condition being returned to our first securities our resolutions also revert to their first indifferencies Or else we cannot look a temptation in the face and we resolve against it hoping never to be troubled with its arguments and importunity Epictetus tells us of a Gentleman returning from banishment in his journey towards home called at his house told a sad story of an Imprudent life the greatest part of which being now spent he was resolved for the future to live Philosophically and entertain no businesse to be candidate for no employment not to go to the Court not to salute Caesar with ambitious attendancies but to study and worship the gods and die willingly when nature or necessity called him It may be this man beleeved himself but Epictetus did not And he had reason For 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Letters from Caesar met him at the doors
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 are troubled at little things and are carelesse of greater 6. We are overjoyed at a petty accident and despise great and eternall pleasures 7. We beleeve things not for their Reasons and proper Arguments but as they serve our turns be they true or false 8. We long extreamly for things that are forbidden us And what we despise when it is permitted us we snatch at greedily when it is taken from us 9. We love our selves more then we love God and yet we eat poysons daily and feed upon Toads and Vipers and nourish our deadly enemies in our bosome and will not be brought to quit them but brag of our shame and are ashamed of nothing but Vertue which is most honourable 10. We fear to die and yet use all means we can to make Death terrible and dangerous 11. We are busie in the faults of others and negligent of our own 12. We live the life of spies striving to know others and to be unknown our selves 13. We worship and flatter some men and some things because we fear them not because we love them 14. We are ambitious of Greatnesse and covetous of wealth and all that we get by it is that we are more beautifully tempted and a troop of Clients run to us as to a Pool whom first they trouble and then draw dry 15. We make our selves unsafe by committing wickednesse and then we adde more wickednesse to make us safe and beyond punishment 16. We are more servile for one curtesie that we hope for then for twenty that we have received 17. We entertain slanderers and without choice spread their calumnies and we hugg flatterers and know they abuse us And if I should gather the abuses and impieties and deceptions of the Heart as Chrysippus did the oracular Lies of Apollo into a Table I fear they would seem Remedilesse and beyond the cure of watchfulnesse and Religion Indeed they are Great and Many But the Grace of God is Greater and if Iniquity abounds then doth Grace superabound and that 's our Comfort and our Medicine which we must thus use 1. Let us watch our hearts at every turn 2. Deny it all its Desires that do not directly or by consequence end in godlinesse At no hand be indulgent to its fondnesses and peevish appetites 3. Let us suspect it as an Enemy 4. Trust not to it in any thing 5. But beg the grace of God with perpetuall and importunate prayer that he would be pleased to bring good out of these evils and that he would throw the salutary wood of the Crosse the merits of Christs death and passion into these salt waters and make them healthful and pleasant And in order to the mannaging these advises and acting the purposes of this prayer let us strictly follow a rule and choose a Prudent and faithful guide who may attend our motions and watch our counsels and direct our steps and prepare the way of the Lord and make his paths streight apt and imitable For without great watchfulnesse and earnest devotion and a prudent Guide we shall finde that true in a spiritual sense which Plutarch affirmed of a mans body in the natural that of dead Buls arise Bees from the carcases of horses hornets are produced But the body of man brings forth serpents Our hearts wallowing in their own natural and acquired corruptions will produce nothing but issues of Hell and images of the old serpent the divel for whom is provided the everlasting burning Sermon IX THE FAITH and PATIENCE OF THE SAINTS OR The righteous cause oppressed 1 Peter 4. 17. For the time is come that judgement must begin at the house of God and if it first begin at us what shall the end be of them that obey not the Gospel of God 18. And if the righteous scarcely be saved where shal the ungodly and the sinner appear SO long as the world lived by sense and discourses of natural reason as they were abated with humane infirmities and not at all heightned by the spirit divine revelations So long men took their accounts of good and bad by their being prosperous or unfortunate and amongst the basest and most ignorant of men that onely was accounted honest which was profitable and he onely wise that was rich and that man beloved of God who received from him all that might satisfie their lust their ambition or their revenge Fatis accede deisque colâ— felices miseros fuge sidera terra ut distant flamma maeri sic utile recto But because God sent wise men into the world and they were treated rudely by the world and exercised with evil accidents and this seemed so great a discouragement to vertue that even these wise men were more troubled to reconcile vertue and misery then to reconcile their affections to the suffering God was pleased to enlighten their reason with a little beame of faith or else heightned their reason by wiser principles then those of vulgar understandings and taught them in the clear glasse of faith or the dim perspective of Philosophy to look beyond the cloud and there to spie that there stood glories behinde their curtain to which they could not come but by passing through the cloud and being wet with the dew of heaven and the
waters of affliction And accordding as the world grew more enlightned by faith so it grew more dark with mourning sorrowes God sometimes sent a light of fire and pillar of a cloud and the brightnesse of an angel and the lustre of a star and the sacrament of a rainbowe to guide his people thorough their portion of sorrows and to lead them through troubles to rest But as the Sun of righteousnesse approached towards the chambers of the East and sent the harbingers of light peeping through the curtains of the night and leading on the day of faith and brightest revelation so God sent degrees of trouble upon wise and good men that now in the same degree in the which the world lives by faith and not by sense in the same degree they might be able to live in vertue even while she lived in trouble and not reject so great a beauty because she goes in mourning and hath a black cloud of cypresse drawn before her face literally thus God first entertained their services and allured and prompted on the infirmities of the infant world by temporal prosperity but by degrees changed his method and as men grew stronger in the knowledge of God and the expectations of heaven so they grew weaker in their fortunes more afflicted in their bodies more abated in their expectations more subject to their enemies and were to endure the contradiction of sinners and the immission of the sharpnesses of providence and divine Oeconomy First Adam was placed in a Garden of health and pleasure from which when he fell he was onely tied to enter into the covenant of natural sorrows which he and all his posteritie till the flood run through but in all that period they had the whole wealth of the earth before them they need not fight for empires or places for their cattle to grase in they lived long and felt no want no slavery no tyrannie no war and the evils that happened were single personal and natural and no violences were then done but they were like those things which the law calls rare contingencies for which as the law can now take no care and make no provisions so then there was no law but men lived free and rich and long and they exercised no vertues but natural and knew no felicity but natural and so long their prosperity was just as was their vertue because it was a natural instrument towards all that which they knew of happinesse * But this publick easinesse and quiet the world turned into sin and unlesse God did compel men to do themselves good they would undoe themselves and then God broke in upon them with a flood and destroyed that generation that he might begin the government of the world upon a new stock and binde vertue upon mens spirits by new bands endeared to them by new hopes and fears Then God made new laws and gave to Princes the power of the sword and men might be punshed to death in certain cases and mans life was shortened and slavery was brought into the world and the state of servants and then war began and evils multiplied upon the face of the earth in which it is naturally certain that they that are most violent and injurious prevailed upon the weaker and more innocent and every tyranny that began from Nimrod to this day and every usurper was a peculiar argument to shew that God began to teach the world vertue by suffering and that therefore he suffered Tyrannies and usurpations to be in the world and to be prosperous and the rights of men to be snatched away from the owners that the world might be established in potent and setled governments and the sufferers be taught al the passive vertues of the soul. For so God brings good out of evil turning Tyranny into the benefits of Government and violence into vertue and sufferings into rewards and this was the second change of the world personal miseries were brought in upon Adam and his posterity as a punishment of sin in the first period and in the second publick evils were brought in by tyrants and usurpers and God suffered them as the first elements of vertue men being just newly put to schoole to infant sufferings But all this was not much Christs line was not yet drawn forth it began not to appear in what family the King of sufferings should descend till Abrahams time and therefore till then there were no greater sufferings then what I have now reckoned But when Abrahams family was chosen from among the many nations and began to belong to God by a special right and he was designed to be the Father of the Messias then God found out a new way to trie him even with a sound affliction commanding him to offer his beloved Isaac but this was accepted and being intended by Abraham was not intended by God for this was a type of Christ and therefore was also but a type of sufferings excepting the sufferings of the old periods and the sufferings of nature and accident we see no change made for a long while after but God having established a law in Abrahams family did build it upon promises of health and peace and victory and plenty and riches and so long as they did not prevaricate the law of their God so long they were prosperous but God kept a remnant of Cananites in the land like a rod held over them to vex or to chastise them into obedience in which while they persevered nothing could hurt them and that saying of David needs no other sence but the letter of its own expression I have been young and now am old and yet saw I never the righteous for saken nor his seed begging their bread The godly generally were prosperous and a good cause seldome had an ill end and a good man never died an ill death till the law had spent a great part of its time and it descended towards its declension and period But that the great prince of sufferings might not appear upon his stage of tragedies without some forerunners of sorrow God was pleased to choose out some good men and honour them by making them to become little images of suffering I saiah Jeremy and Zachary were martyrs of the law but these were single deaths Shadrac Meshec and Abednego were thrown into a burning furnace and Daniel into a den of lions and Susanna was accused for adultery but these were but little arrests of the prosperity of the Godly as the time drew neerer that Christ should be manifest so the sufferings grew bigger and more numerous and Antiochus raised up a sharp persecution in the time of the Maccabees in which many passed through the red sea of blood into the bosome of Abraham then Christ came and that was the third period in which the changed method of Gods providence was perfected for Christ was to do his great work by sufferings by sufferings was to enter into blessednesse by his passion he
was made prince of the Catholickchurch and as our Head was so must the members be God made the same covenant with us that he did with his most holy Son Christ obtaind no better conditions for us then for himself that was not to be looked for the servant must not be above his master it is well if he be as his Master if the world persecuted him they will also persecute us and from the dayes of John the Baptist the kingdome of Heaven suffers violence and the violent take it by force not the violent doers but the sufferers of violence for though the old law was established in the promises of temporal prosperity yet the gospel is founded in temporal adversity It is directly a covenant of sufferings and sorrows for now the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God that 's the sence and designe of the text and I intend it as a direct antinomy to the common perswasions of tyrannous carnal and vicious men who reckon nothing good but what is prosperous for though that proposition had many degrees of truth in the beginning of the law yet the case is now altered God hath established its contradictory and now every good man must look for persecution and every good cause must expect to thrive by the sufferings and patience of holy persons and as men do well and suffer evil so they are dear to God and whom he loves most he afflicts most and does this with a designe of the greatest mercy in the world 1. Then the state of the Gospel is a state of sufferings not of temporal prosperities this was foretold by the prophets a fountain shall go out of the house of the Lord irrigabit torrentem spinarum so it is in the vulgar latin and it shall water the torrent of thorns that is the state or time of the gospel which like a torrent shall cary all the world before it and like a torrent shall be fullest in ill weather and by its banks shall grow nothing but thorns and briers sharp afflictions temporal infelicities and persecution This sense of the words is more fully explained in the book of the prophet Isa. upon the ground of my people shall thorns and briers come up how much more in all the houses of the city of rejoycing which prophecy is the same in the stile of the prophets that my text is in the stile of the Apostles the house of God shall be watered with the dew of heaven and there shall spring up briers in it judgement must begin there but how much more in the houses of the city of rejoycing how much more among them that are at ease in Sion that serve their desires that satisfie their appetites that are given over to their own hearts lust that so serves themselves that they never serve God that dwell in the city of rejoycing they are like Dives whose portion was in this life who went in fine linnen and fared deliciously every day they indeed trample upon their briers and thorns and suffer them not to grow in their houses but the roots are in the ground and they are reserved for fuel of wrath in the day of everlasting burning Thus you see it was prophesied now see how it was performed Christ was the captain of our sufferings and he began He entred into the world with all the circumstances of poverty he had a star to illustrate his birth but a stable for his bed chamber and a manger for his cradle the angels sang hymnes when he was born but he was cold and cried uneasy and unprovided he lived long in the trade of a carpenter he by whom God made the world had in his first years the businesse of a mean and an ignoble trade he did good where ever he went and almost where ever he went was abused he deserved heaven for his obedience but found a crosse in his way thither and if ever any man had reason to expect fair usages from God and to be dandled in lap of ease softnes and a prosperous fortune he it was onely that could deserve that or any thing that can be good But after he had chosen to live a life of vertue of poverty and labour he entred into a state of death whose shame and trouble was great enough to pay for the sins of the whole world And I shall choose to expresse this mystery in the vvords of scripture he died not by a single or a sudden death but he was the Lambe slain from the beginning of the world For he was massacred in Abel saith Saint Paulinus he was tossed upon the waves of the Sea in the person of Noah It was he that went out of his Countrey when Abraham was called from Charran and wandred from his native soil He was offered up in Isaac persecuted in Jacob betrayed in Joseph blinded in Sampson affronted in Moses sawed in Esay cast into the dungeon with Jeremy For all these were types of Christ suffering and then his passion continued even after his resurrection for it is he that suffers in all his members it is he that endures the contradiction of all sinners it is he that is the Lord of life and is crucified again and put to open shame in all the sufferings of his servants and sins of rebels and defiances of Apostates and renegados and violence of Tyrants and injustice of usurpers and the persecutions of his Church It is he that is stoned in Saint Stephen flayed in the person of Saint Bartholomew he was rosted upon Saint Laurence his Gridiron exposed to lyons in Saint Ignatius burned in Saint Polycarpe frozen in the lake where stood fourty Martyrs of Cappadocia Unigenitus enim Dei ad peragendum mortis suae sacramentum consummavit omne genus humanarum passionum said Saint Hilary The Sacrament of Christs death is not to be accomplished but by suffering all the sorrows of humanity All that Christ came for was or was mingled with sufferings For all those little joyes which God sent either to recreate his person or to illustrate his office were abated or attended with afflictions God being more carefull to establish in him the Covenant of sufferings then to refresh his sorrows Presently after the Angels had finished their Halleluiahs he was forced to fly to save his life and the air became full of shrikes of the desolate mothers of Bethlehem for their dying Babes God had no sooner made him illustrious with a voyce from heaven and the descent of the Holy Ghost upon him in the waters of Baptisme But he was delivered over to be tempted and assaulted by the Devil in the wildernesse His transfiguration was a bright ray of glory but then also he entred into a cloud and was told a sad story what he was to suffer at Jerusalem And upon Palme-Sunday when he rode triumphantly into Jerusalem and was adorned with the acclamations of a King and a God he wet the Palmes with
viri fortes quos Gentiles praedicabant in exemplum aerumnis suis inclytifloruerunt The Gentiles in their whole religion never propounded any man imitable unlesse the man were poor or persecuted Brutus stood for his countries liberty but lost his army and his life Socrates was put to death for speaking a religious truth Cato chose to be on the right side but happened to fall upon the oppressed and the injured he died together with his party Victrix causa Deis placuit sed vict a Catoni And if God thus dealt with the best of Heathens to whom he had made no cleare revelation of immortal recompences how little is the faith and how much lesse is the patience of Christians if they shall think much to suffer sorrows since they so clearly see with the eye of faith the great things which are laid up for them that are faithful unto the death Faith is uselesse if now in the midst of so great pretended lights we shall not dare to trust God unlesse we have all in hand that we desire and suffer nothing for all we can hope for They that live by sense have no use of faith yet our Lord Jesus concerning whose passions the gospel speaks much but little of his glorifications whose shame was publick whose pains were notorious but his joyes and transfigurations were secret and kept private he who would not suffer his holy mother whom in great degrees he exempted from sin to be exempted from many and great sorrows certainly intends to admit none to his resurrection but by the doors of his grave none to glory but by the way of the crosse If we be planted into the likenesse of his death we shall be also of his resurrection else on no termes Christ took away sin from us but he left us our share of sufferings and the crosse which was first printed upon us in the waters of baptisme must for ever be born by us in penance in mortification in self-denial and in martyrdom and toleration according as God shall require of us by the changes of the world and the condition of the Church For Christ considers nothing but souls he values not their estate or bodies supplying our want by his providence and being secured that our bodies may be killed but cannot perish so long as we preserve our duty and our consciences Christ our Captain hangs naked upon the crosse our fellow souldiers are cast into prison torne with Lions rent in sunder with trees returning from their violent bendings broken upon wheels rosted upon gridirons and have had the honour not onely to have a good cause but also to suffer for it and by faith not by armies by patience not by fighting have overcome the world sit anima mea cum Christianis I pray God my soul may be among the Christians and yet the Turks have prevailed upon a great part of the Christian world and have made them slaves and tributaries and do them all spite and are hugely prosperous but when Christians are so then they are tempted and put in danger and never have their duty and their interest so well secured as when they lose all for Christ and are adorned with wounds or poverty change or scorn affronts or revilings which are the obelisks and triumphs of a holy cause Evil men and evil causes had need have good fortune and great successe to support their persons and their pretences for nothing but innocence and Christianity can flourish in a persecution I summe up this first discourse in a word in all the Scripture and in all the Authentick stories of the Church we finde it often that the Devil appeared in the shape of an Angell of light but was never suffered so much as to conterfeit a persecuted sufferer say no more therefore as the murmuring Israelites said If the LORD be with us why have these evils apprehended us for if to be afflicted be a signe that God hath forsaken a man and refuses to own his religion or his question then he that oppresses the widow and murders the innocent and puts the fatherlesse to death and follows providence by doing all the evils that he can that is all that God suffers him he I say is the onely Saint and servant of God and upon the same ground the wolf and the fox may boast when they scatter and devour a flock of lambs and harmlesse sheep Sermon X. The Faith and Patience of the SAINTS OR The righteous cause oppressed Part II. IT follows now that we inquire concerning the reasons of the Divine Providence in this administration of affairs so far as he hath been pleased to draw aside the curtain and to unfold the leaves of his counsels and predestination and for such an inquiry we have the precedent of the Prophet Jeremy Righteous art thou O Lord when I plead with thee yet let us talk to thee of thy judgements wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper Wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously Thou hast planted them yea they have taken root they grow yea they bring forth fruit Concerning which in generall the Prophet Malachy gives this account after the same complaint made And now we call the proud happy and they that work wickednesse are set up yea they that tempt God are even delivered They that feared the Lord spake often one to another and the Lord hearkened and heard and a book of remembrance was written before time for them that feared the Lord and thought upon his Name and they shall be mine saith the Lord of Hosts in that day when I binde up my jewels and I will spare them as a man spareth his own son that serveth him Then shall ye return and discern betwen the righteous and the wicked between him that serveth God and him that serveth him not In this interval which is a valley of tears it is no wonder if they rejoyce who shall weep for ever and they that sow in tears shall have no cause to complain when God gathers all the mourners into his kingdom they shall reape with joy For innocence and joy were appointed to dwel together for ever And joy went not first but when innocence went away sorrow and sicknesse dispossessed joy of its habitation and now this world must be alwayes a scene of sorrows and no joy can grow here but that which is imaginary and phantastick there is no worldly joy no joy proper for this world but that which wicked persons fancy to themselves in the hopes and designes of iniquity He that covets his neighbours wife or land dreams of fine things and thinks it a fair condition to be rich and cursed to be a beast and die or to lie wallowing in his filthinesse but those holy souls who are not in love with the leprosie the Itch for the pleasure of scratching they know no pleasure can grow from the thorns which Adam planted in the hedges of Paradise and that sorrow which
to passe from thence and as it is in the natural so it is in the spiritual nothing but the union of faith and obedience can secure our regeneration and our new birth and can bring us to see the light of heaven but there are a thousand passages of turning into darknesse and it is not enough that our bodies are exposed to so many sad infirmities and dishonourable imperfections unlesse our soul also be a subject capable of so many diseases follies irregular passions false principles accursed habits and degrees of perversnesse that the very kindes of them are reducible to a method and make up the part of a science There are variety of stages and descents to death as there are diversity of torments and of sad regions of misery in hell which is the centre and kingdom of sorrows But that we may a little refresh the sadnesses of this consideration for every one of these stages of sin God hath measured out a proportion of mercy for if sin abounds grace shall much more abound and God hath concluded all under sin not with purposes to destroy us but Ut omnium misereatur that he might have mercy upon all that light may break forth from the deepest inclosures of darknesse and mercy may rejoyce upon the recessions of justice and grace may triumph upon the ruins of sin and God may be glorified in the miracles of our conversion and the wonders of our preservation and glories of our being saved There is no state of sin but if we be persons capable according to Gods method of healing of receiving antidotes we shall finde a sheet of mercy spread over our wounds and nakednesse If our diseases be small almost necessary scarce avoidable then God does and so we are commanded to cure them and cover them with a vail of pity compassion and gentle remedies If our evils be violent inveterate gangrened and incorporated into our nature by evil customes they must be pulled from the flames of hell with censures and cauteries and punishments and sharp remedies quickly and rudely their danger is present and sudden its effect is quick and intolerable and there is no soft counsels then to be entertained they are already in the fire but they may be saved for all that so great so infinite so miraculous is Gods mercy that he will not give a sinner over though the hairs of his head be singed with the flames of hell Gods desires of having us to be saved continue even when we begin to be damned even till we will not be saved and are gone beyond Gods method and all the revelations of his kindnesse And certainly that is a bold and a mighty sinner whose iniquity is sweld beyond all the bulk and heap of Gods revealed loving kindnesse If sin hath sweld beyond grace and superabounds over it that sin is gone beyond the measures of a man such a person is removed beyond all the malice of humane nature into the evil and spite of Devils and accursed spirits there is no greater sadnesse in the world then this God hath not appointed a remedy in the vast treasures of grace for some men and some sins they have sinned like the falling Angels and having over run the ordinary evil inclinations of their nature they are without the protection of the divine mercy and the conditions of that grace which was designed to save all the world was sufficient to have saved twenty This is a condition to be avoyded with the care of God and his Angels and all the whole industry of man In order to which end my purpose now is to remonstrate to you the several states of sin and death together with those remedies which God had proportioned out to them that we may observe the evils of the least and so avoid the intolerable mischiefs of the greater even of those sins which still are within the power and possibilities of recovery lest insensibly we fall into those sins and into those circumstances of person for which Christ never died which the Holy Ghost never means to cure and which the eternal God never will pardon for there are of this kinde more then commonly men imagine whilest they amuse their spirits with gaietyes and false principles till they have run into horrible impieties from whence they are not willing to withdraw their foot and God is resolved never to snatch and force them thence I of some have compassion and these I shall reduce to four heads or orders of men and actions all which have their proper cure pro portionable to their proper state gentle remedies to the lesser irregularities of the soul. The first are those that sin without observation of their particular state either because they are uninstructed in the special cases of conscience or because they do an evil against which there is no expresse commandment It is a sad calamity that there are so many milions of men and women that are entred into a state of sicknesse and danger and yet are made to believe they are in perfect health and they do actions concerning which they never made a question whether they were just or no nor were ever taught by what names to call them For while they observe that modesty is sometimes abused by a false name and called clownishnesse want of breeding and contentednesse and temperate living is suppressed to be want of courage and noble thoughts and severity of life is called imprudent and unsociable and simplicity and hearty honesty is counted foolish and unpolitick they are easily tempted to honour prodigality and foolish dissolution of their estates with the title of liberal and noble usages timorousnesse is called caution rashnesse is called quicknesse of spirit covetousnesse is frugality amorousnesse is society and gentile peevishnesse and anger is courage flattery is humane and courteous and under these false vails vertue sliâ—s away like truth from under the hand of them that fight for her and leave vices dressed up with the same imagery and the fraud not discovered till the day of recompences when men are distingushed by their rewards But so men think they sleep freely when their spirits are loaden with a Lethargy and they call a hestick-feaver the vigour of a natural heat tell nature changes those lesse discerned states into the notorious images of death Very many men never consider whether they sin or no in 10000. of their actions every one of which is very disputable and do not think they are bound to consider these men are to be pitied and instructed they are to be called upon to use religion like a daily diet their consciences must be made tender and their Catechisme enlarged teach them and make them sensible and they are cured But the other in this place are more considerable Men sin without observation because their actions have no restraint of an expresse Commandment no letter of the law to condemn them by an expresse sentence And this happens when the crime is comprehended under
is a law for sons not for servants and God that gives his grace without measure and rewards without end and acts of favour beyond our askings and provides for us beyond our needs and gives us counsels beyond commandments intends not to be limited out by the just evennesses and stricken measures of the words of a commandment Give to God full measure 〈◊〉 together pressed down heaped up and running over for God does so to us and when we have done so to him we are infinitely short of the least measure of what God does for us we are still unprofitable servants And therefore as the breaking any of the laws of Christianity provoks God to anger so the prevaricating in the analogy of Christianity stirres him up to jealousie He hath reason to suspect our hearts are not right with him when we are so reserved in the matter and measures of our services and if we will give God but just what he calls for by expresse mandate it is just in him to require all of that at our hands without any abatement then we are sure to miscarry And let us remember that when God said he was a jealous God he expressed the meaning of it to be he did punish to the third and fourth genoration Jelousie is like the rage of a man but if it be also like the anger of God it is insupportable and will crush us into the ruines of our grave But because these things are not frequently considered there are very many sins committed against religion which because the commandment hath not marked men refuse to mark and think God requires no more I am entred into a sea of matter which I must not now prosecute but I shall onely note this to you that it is but reasonable we should take accounts of our lives by the proportions as well as by the expresse rules of our religion because in humane and civil actions all the nations of the world use so to call their subjects to account For that which in the accounts of men is called reputation and publick honesty is the same which in religion we call analogy and proportion in both cases there being some things which are besides the notices of laws and yet are the most certain consignations of an excellent vertue He is a base person that does any thing against publick honesty and yet no man can be punished if he marries a wife the next day after his first wives funeral and so he that prevaricates the proportions and excellent reasons of Christianity is a person without zeal and without love and unlesse care be taken of him he will quickly be without religion But yet these I say are a sort of persons which are to be used with gentlenesse and treated with compassion for no man must be handled roughly to force him to do a kindnesse and coercion of laws and severity of Judges serjeants and executioners are against offenders of commandments But the way to cure such persons is the easiest and genteliest remedy of all others They are to be instructed in all the parts of duty and invited forward by the consideration of the great rewards which are laid up for all the sons of God who serve him without constraint without measures and allaves even as fire burns and as the roses grow even as much as they can and to all the extent of their natural and artificial capacities For it is a thing fit for our compassion to see men fettered in the iron bands of laws and yet to break the golden chains of love but all those instruments which are proper to enkindle the love of God and to turn fear into charity are the proper instances of that compassion which is to be used towards these men 2. The next sort of those who are in the state of sin and yet to be handled gently and with compassion are those who entertain themselves with the beginnings and little entrances of sin which as they are to be more pitied because they often come by reason of inadvertancy and an unavoidable weaknesse in many degrees so they are more to be taken care of because they are undervallued undiscernably run into incovenience when we see a childe strike a servant rudely or jeere a silly person or wittily cheat his play-fellow or talk words light as the skirt of a summer garment we laugh and are delighted with the wit and confidence of the boy and incourage such hopeful beginnings and in the mean time we consider not that from these beginnings he shall grow up till he become a Tyrant an oppressor a Goat and a Traytor Nemo simul malus fit malus esse cernitur sicut nec scorpijs tum innasâ—untur stimuli cum pungunt No man is discerned to be vitious so soon as he is so and vices have their infancy and their childe-hood and it cannot be expected that in a childs age should be the vice of a man that were monstrous as if he wore a beard in his cradle and we do not believe that a serpents sting does just then grow when he stricks us in a vital part The venome and the little spear was there when it first began to creep from his little shell And little boldnesses and looser words and wranglings for nuts and lying for trifles are of the same proportion to the malice of a childe as impudence and duels and injurious law-suits and false witnesse in judgement perjuries are in men And the case is the same when men enter upon a new stock of any sin the vice is at first apt to be put out of countenance and a little thing discourages it and it amuses the spirit with words and phantastick images and cheape instances of sin and men think themselves safe because they are as yet safe from laws and the sin does not as yet out cry the healthful noise of Christs loud cryings and intercession with his Father nor call for thunder or an amazing judgement but according to the old saying the thornes of Dauphine will never fetch blood if they do not scratch the first day we shal finde that the little undecencies and riflings of our souls the first openings and disparkings of our vertue differ onely from the state of perdition as infancy does from old age as sicknesse from death It is the entrance into those regions whether whosoever passes finally shall lie down and groan with an eternal sorrow Now in this case it may happen that a compassion may ruine a man if it be the pity of an indiscreet mother and nurse the sin from its weaknesse to the strength of habit and impudence The compassion that is to be used to such persons is the compassion of a Phisitian or a severe Tutor chastise thy infant-sinne by discipline and acts of vertue and never begin that way from whence you must return with some trouble and much shame or else if you proceed you finish your eternal ruine He that means to
and his own hands forced it into the entertainments of his heart And because it is painfull to draw it forth by a sharp and salutary repentance he still rouls and turns upon his wound and carries his death in his bowels where it first entered by choice and then dwelt by love and at last shall finish the tragedy by divine judgements and an unalterable decree But as the pardon of these sins is uncertain so the conditions of restitution are hard even to them who shall be pardoned their pardon and themselves too must be fetched from the fire water will not do it tears and ineffective sorrow cannot take off a habit or a great crime O nimium faciles qui tristia crimina cadis Tolli flumineâ posse putatis aquâ Bion seeing a Prince weep and tearing his hair for sorrow asked if baldnesse would cure his grief such pompous sorrows may bee good indices but no perfect instruments of restitution Saint James plainly declares the possibilities of pardon to great sins in the cases of contention adultery lust and envy which are the four great indecencies that are most contrary to Christianity and in the 5. Chap. he implies also a possibility of pardon to an habitual sinner whom he calls 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 one that erres from the truth that is from the life of a Christian the life of the Spirit of truth and he addes that such a person may be reduced and so be pardoned though he have sinned long he that converts such a one shall hide a multitude of sins But then the way that he appoints for the restitution of such persons is humilty and humiliation penanoes and sharp penitentiall sorrows and afflictions resisting the Devil returning to God weeping and mourning confessions and prayers as you may read at large in the 4. and 5. Chapters and there it is that you shall finde it a duty that such persons should be afflicted and should confesse to their brethren and these are harder conditions then God requires in the formet cases these are a kinde of fiery tryall I have now done with my Text and should adde no more but that the nature of these sins is such that they may increase in their weight and duration and malice and then they increase in mischief and fatality and so go beyond the Text. Cicero said well Ipsa consuetudo assentiendi periculosa esse videtur lubrica l. 4. Acad. Qu. The very custome of consenting in the matters of civility is dangerous and slippery and will quickly ingage us in errour and then we think we are bound to defend them or else we are made flatterers by it and so become vitious and we love our own vices that we are used to and keep them till they are incurable that is till we will never repent of them and some men resolve never to repent that is they resolve they will not be saved they tread under foot the blood of the everlasting covenant those persons are in the fire too but they will not be pulled out concerning whom Gods Prophets must say as once concerning Babylon Curavimus non est sanata derelinquamus eam We would have healed them but they would not be healed let us leave them in their sins and they shall have enough of it Onely this those that put themselves out of the condition of mercy are not to be endured in Christian societies they deserve it not and it is not safe that they should be suffered But besides all this I shall name one thing more unto you for nunquam adeò foedis adeoquè pudendis Utimur exemplis ut non pejora supersint There are some single actions of sin of so great a malice that in their own nature they are beyond the limit of Gospel pardon they are not such things for the pardon of which God entered into covenant because they are such sins which put a man into perfect indispotisions and incapacities of entring into or being in the covenant In the first ages of the world Atheisme was of that nature it was against their whole religion and the sin is worse now against the whole religion still and against a brighter light In the ages after the flood idolatry was also just such another for as God was known first onely as the creator then he began to manifest himself in special contracts with men and he quickly was declared the God of Israel and idolatry perfectly destroyed all that religion and therefore was never pardoned intirely but God did visit it upon them that sinned and when he pardoned it in some degrees yet he also punished it in so me and yet rebellion against the supreme power of Moses and 〈…〉 was worse for that also is a perfect destruction of the whole religion because it refused to submit to those hands upon which God had placed all the religion and all the government And now if we would know in the Gospel what answers these precedent sins I answer first the same sins acted by a resolute hand and heart are worse now then ever they were and a third or fourth is also to be added and that is Apostacy or or a voluntary malicious renouncing the faith The Church hath often declared that sin to be unpardonable witchcraft or final impenitence and obstinacy in any sin are infallibly desperate and in general and by a certain parity of reason whatsoever does destroy charity or the good life of a Christian with the same general venom and deletery as Apostacy destroyes faith and he that is a Renegado from charity is as unpardonable as he that returns to solemn Atheisme or infidelity for all that is directly the sin against the holy Ghost that is a throwing that away wherby onely we can be Christians wherby onely we can hope to be saved to speak a word against the holy Ghost in the Pharisees was declared unpardonable because it was such a word which if it had been true or believed would have destroyed the whole religion for they said that Christ wrought by Beelzebub and by consequence did not come from God He that destroyes al the whole order of Priesthood destroyes one of the greatest parts of the religion one of the greatest effects of the holy Ghost He that destroyes government destroyes another part but that we may come neerer to our selves to quench the spirit of God is worse then to speak some words against him to grieve the spirit of God is a part of the same impiety to resist the holy Ghost is another part and if we consider that every great sin does this in its proportion it would concern us to be careful lest we fal into presumptuous sins lest they get the dominion over us out of this that I have spoken you may easily gather what sort of men those are who cannot be snatched from the fire for whom as S. John saies we are not to pray and how neer men come to it that continue in
walked upon the pavements of heaven whose feet were clothed with stars whose eyes were brighter then the Sun whose voice is louder then thunder whose understanding is larger then that infinite space which we imagine in the uncircumscribed distance beyond the first orbe of heaven a person to whom felicity was as essential as life to God this was the onely person that was designed in the eternal decrees of the divine predestination to pay the price of a soul to ransom us from death lesse then this person could not do it for although a soul in its essence is finite yet there were many infinites which were incident and annexed to the condition of lost souls For all which because provision was to be made nothing lesse then an infinite excellence could satisfie for a soul who was lost to infinite and eternal ages who was to be afflicted with insupportable and indetermined that is next to infinite paines who was to bear the load of an infinite anger from the provocation of an eternal God and yet if it be possible that infinite can receive degrees this is but one half of the abysse and I think the lesser for that this person who was God eternal should be lessened in all his appearances to a span to the little dimensions of a man and that he should really become very contemptibly little although at the same time he was infinitely and unalterably great that is essential natural and necessary felicity should turn into an intolerable violent and immense calamity to his person that this great God should not be admitted to pay the price of our redemption unlesse he would suffer that horrid misery which that lost soul should suffer as it represents the glories of his goodnesse who used such rare and admirable instruments in actuating the designes of his mercy so it shewes our condition to have been very desperate and our losse invaluable A soul in Gods account is valued at the price of the blood and shame and tortures of the Son of God and yet we throw it a way for the exchange of sins that a man naturally is ashamed to own we lose it for the pleasure the sottish beastly pleasure of a night I need not say we lose our soul to save our lives for though that was our blessed Saviours instance of the great unreasonablenesse of men who by saving their lives lose them that is in the great account of Dooms-day though this I say be extreamly unreasonable yet there is something to be pretended in the bargain nothing to excuse him with God but something in the accounts of timerous men but to lose our souls with swearing that unprofitable dishonourable and unpleasant vice to lose our souls with disobedience or rebellion a vice that brings a curse and danger all the way in this life To lose our souls with drunkennesse a vice which is painfull and sickly in the very acting it which hastens our damnation by shortning our lives are instances fit to be put in the stories of fools and mad-men and all vice is a degree of the same unreasonablenesse the most splendid temptation being nothing but a prety well weaved fallacy a meer trick a sophisme and a cheating and abusing the understanding but that which I consider here is that it is an affront and contradiction to the wisdom of God that we should so slight and undervalue a soul in which our interest is so concerned a soul which he who made it and who delighted not to see it lost did account a fit purchase to be made by the exchange of his Son the eternal Son of God To which also I adde this additionall account that a soul is so greatly valued by God that we are not to venture the losse of it to save all the world For therefore whosoever should commit a sin to save kingdoms from perishing or if the case could be put that all the good men and good causes and good things in this world were to be destroyed by Tyranny and it were in our power by perjury to save all these that doing this sin would be so farre from hallowing the crime that it were to offer to God a sacrifice of what he most hates and to serve him with swines blood and the rescuing all these from a Tyrant or a hangman could not be pleasing to God upon those termes because a soul is lost by it which is in it self a greater losse and misery then all the evils in the world put together can out-ballance and a losse of that thing for which Christ gave his blood a price Persecutions and temporal death in holy men and in a just cause are but seeming evils and therefore not to be bought off with the losse of a soul which is a real but an intolerable calamity And if God for his own sake would not have all the world saved by sin that is by the hazarding of a soul we should do well for our own sakes not to lose a soul for trifles for things that make us here to be miserable and even here also to be ashamed 3. But it may be some natures or some understandings care not for all this therefore I proceed to the third and most material consideration as to us and I consider what it is to lose a soul which Hierocles thus explicates 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 An immortall substance can die not by ceasing to be but by losing all being well by becomming miserable And it is remarkable when our blessed Saviour gave us caution that we should not fear them that can kill the body onely but fear him he sayes not that can kill the soul But 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 him that is able to destroy the body and soul in hell which word signifieth not death but tortures For some have chosen death for sanctuary and fled to it to avoid intolerable shame to give a period to the sence of a sharp grief or to cure the earthquakes of fear and the damned perishing souls shall wish for death with a desire impatient as their calamity But this shall be denied them because death were a deliverance a mercy and a pleasure of which these miserable persons must despair of for ever I shall not need to represent to your considerations those expressions of Scripture which the Holy Ghost hath set down to represent to our capacities the greatnesse of this perishing choosing such circumstances of character as were then usuall in the world and which are dreadful to our understanding as any thing Hell fire is the common expression for the Eastern nations accounted burnings the greatest of their miserable punishments and burning malefactours was frequent brimstone and fire to Saint John Revel 14. 10. calls the state of punishment prepared for the Devil and all his servants he adding the circumstance of brimstone for by this time the Devil had taught the world more ingenious pains and himself was new escaped out of boiling oil and brimstone and such
bituminous matter and the Spirit of God knew right well the worst expression was not bad enough 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 so our blessed Saviour calls it the outer darknesse that is not onely an abjection from the beatifick regions where God and his Angels and his Saints dwell for ever but then there is a positive state of misery expressed by darknesses 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 as two Apostles Saint Peter and Saint Jude call it The blacknesse of darknesse for ever In which although it is certain that God whose Justice there rules will inflict but just so much as our sins deserve and not superadde degrees of undeserved misery as he does to the Saints of glory for God gives to blessed souls in heaven more infinitely more then all their good works could possibly deserve and therefore their glory is infinitely bigger glory then the pains of hell are great pains yet because Gods Justice in hell rules alone without the allayes and sweeter abatements of mercy they shall have pure and unmingled misery no pleasant thought to refresh their wearinesse no comfort in an other accident to alleviate their pressures no waters to cool their flames but because when there is a great calamity upon a man every such man thinks himself the most miserable and though there are great degrees of pain in hell yet there are none perceived by him that thinks he suffers the greatest It follows that every man that loses his soul in this darknesse is miserable beyond all those expressions which the tortures of this world could furnish to the Writers of holy Scripture But I shall choose to represent this consideration in that expression of our blessed Saviour Mark the 9. the 44. verse which himself took out of the Prophet Esay the 66. verse the 24. Where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched this is the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 spoken of by Daniel the Prophet for although this expression was a prediction of that horrid calamity and abscision of the Jewish Nation when God poured out a full vial of his wrath upon the crucifiers of his Son and that this which was the greatest calamity which ever did or ever shall happen to a Nation Christ with great reason took to describe the calamity of accursed souls as being the greatest instance to signifie the greatest torment yet we must observe that the difference of each state makes the same words in the several cases to be of infinite distinction The worm stuck close to the Jewish Nation and the fire of Gods wrath flamed out till they were consumed with a great and unheard of destruction till many millions did die accursedly and the small remnant became vagabonds and were reserved like broken pieces after a storm to shew the greatnesse of the storm and misery of the shipwrack but then this being translated to signifie the state of accursed souls whose dying is a continual perishing who cannot cease to be it must mean an eternity of duration in proper and naturall significations And that we may understand it fully observe the places In the 34. Esa. 8. The Prophet prophecies of the great destruction of Jerusalem for all her great iniquities It is the day of the Lords vengeance and the yeer of recompences for the controversie of Sion and the streams thereof shall be turned into pitch and the dust thereof into brimstone and the land thereof shall become burning pitch It shall not be quenched night nor day the smoak thereof shall go up for ever from generation to generation It shall lie wast none shall passe thorow it for ever and ever This is the final destruction of the Nation but this destruction shall have an end because the Nation shall end and the anger also shall end in its own period even then when God shall call the Jews into the common inheritance with the Gentiles and all the sons of God And this also was the period of their worme as it is of their fire The fire of the Divine vengeance upon the Nation which was not to be extinguished till they were destroyed as we see it come to passe And thus also in Saint Jude the Angels who kept not their first state are said to be reserved by God in everlasting chains under darknesse which word everlasting signifies not absolutely to eternity but to the utmost end of that period for so it follows unto the judgement of the great day that everlasting lasts no longer and in verse the seventh the word eternal is just so used The men of Sodom and Gomorrha are set forth for an example suffering the vengeance of eternal fire that is of a fire which burned till they were quite destroyed and the cities and the countrey with an irreparable ruine never to be rebuilt and reinhabited as long as this world continues The effect of which observations is this That these words for ever everlasting eternal the never-dying worme the fire unquenchable being words borrowed by our blessed Saviour and his Apostles from the stile of the old Testament must have a signification just proportionable to the state in which they signifie so that as this worme when it signifies a temporal infliction meanes a worme that never ceases giving torment till the body is consumed So when it is translated to an immortall state it must signifie as much in that proportion that eternal that everlasting hath no end at all because the soul cannot be killed in the natural sense but is made miserable and perishing for ever that is the worme shall not die so long as the soul shall be unconsumed the fire shall not be quenched till the period of an immortall nature comes and that this shall be absolutely for ever without any restriction appears unanswerably in this because the same for ever that is for the blessed souls the same for ever is for the accursed souls but the blessed souls that die in the Lord henceforth shall die no more death hath no power over them for death is destroyed it is swallowed up in victory saith Saint Paul and there shall be no more death saith Saint John Revel 21. 4. So that because for ever hath no end till the thing or the duration it self have end in the same sense in which the Saints and Angels give glory to God for ever in the same sense the lost souls shall suffer the evils of their sad inheritance and since after this death of nature which is a separation of soul and body there remains no more death but this second death this eternal perishing of miserable accursed souls whose duration must be eternall It follows that the worm of conscience and the unquenchable fire of hell have no period at all but shall last as long as God lasts or the measures of a proper eternity that they who provoke God to wrath by their base unreasonable and sottish practises may know what their portion shall be in the everlasting habitations and yet suppose that Origens
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 without huge disturbances but by being also Atheistical in their opinions and to believe that the story of hell is but a bug-bear to affright children and fools easy believing people to make them soft and apt for government and designes of princes and this is an opinion that befriends none but impure and vicious persons others there are that believe God to be all mercy that he forgets his justice believing that none shall perish with so sad a ruine if they do but at their death-bed ask God forgivenesse and say they are sorry but yet continue their impiety till their house be ready to fall being like the Circassians whose Gentlemen enter not into the Church till they be threescore years old that is in effect till by their age they cannot any longer use rapine till then they hear service at their windows dividing unequally their life between sin and devotition dedicateing their youth to robbery and their old age to a repentance without restitution Our youth and our man-hood and old age are all of them due to God and justice and mercy are to him equally essential and as this life is a time of the possibilities of mercy so to them that neglect it the next world shall be a state of pure and unmingled justice Remember the fatal and decretory sentence which God hath passed upon all man-kinde it is appointed to all men once to die and after death comes judgement and if any of us were certain to die next morning with what earnestnesse should we pray with what hatred should we remember our sins with what scorn should we look upon the licentious pleasures of the world then nothing could be welcome unto us but a prayer book no company but a Comforter and a Guide of souls no imployment but repentance no passions but in order to religion no kindnesse for a lust that hath undone us and if any of you have been arrested with alarmes of death or been in hearty fear of its approach remember what thoughts and designes then possessed you how precious a soul was then in your account and what then you would give that you had despised the world and done your duty to God and man and lived a holy life It will come to that again and we shall be in that condition in which we shall perfectly understand that all the things and pleasures of the world are vain and unprofitable and irkesome and that he onely is a wise man who secures the interest of his soul though it be with the losse of all this world and his own life into the bargain When we are to depart this life to go to strange company and stranger places and to an unknown condition then a holy conscience will be the best security the best possession it wil be a horror that every friend we meet shall with triumph upbraid to us the sottishnesse of our folly Lo this is the goodly change you have made you had your good things in your life time and how like you the portion that is reserved to you for ever The old Rabbins those Poets of religion report of Moses that when the courtiers of Pharaoh were sporting with the childe Moses in the chamber of Pharaohs daughter they presented to his choice an ingot of gold in one hand and a cole of fire in the other and that the childe snatched at the coal thrust it into his mouth and so singed and parched his tongue that he stammered ever after and certainly it is infinitely more childish in us for the glittering of the small gloworms and the charcoal of worldly possessions to swallow the flames of hell greedily in our choice such a bit will produce a worse stammering then Moses had for so the aeccursed and lost souls have their ugly and horrid dialect they roare and blaspheme blaspheme and roare for ever And suppose God should now at this instant send the great Archangel with his trumpet to summon all the world to judgement would not all this seem a notorious visible truth a truth which you will then wonder that every man did not lay to his heart and preserve therein actual pious and effective consideration let the trumpet of God perpetually sound in your ears surgite mortui venite ad judicium place your selves by meditation every day upon your death-bed and remember what thoughts shall then possesse you and let such thoughts dwell in your understanding for ever and be the parent of all your resolutions and actions The Doctors of the Jews report that when Absalom hanged among the oakes by the haire of the head he seemed to see under him hell gaping wide ready to receive him and he durst not cut off the hair that intangled him for fear he should fall into the horrid lake whose portion is flames and torment but chose to protract his miserable life a few
had the gift of prophecy and by this character the Holy Ghost in all ages hath given us caution to avoid such assemblies where the speaking and ruling man shall be the canker of government and a preacher of sedition who shall either ungirt the Princes sword or unloose the button of their mantle 9. But the Apostles in all these prophecies have remarked lust to be the inseparable companion of these rebel prophets they are filthy dreamers they defile the flesh so Saint Jude they walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleannesse so Saint Peter they are lovers of pleasure more then lovers of God incontinent and sensual So Saint Paul and by this part of the character as the Apostles remarked the Nicolatians and Gnosticks the Carpocratians and all their impure branches which began in their dayes and multiplied after their deaths so they prophetically did foresignifie al such sects to be avoided who to catch silly women laden with sins preach doctrines of ease and licenciounesse apt to countenance and encourage vile things and not apt to restrain a passion or mortifie a sin Such as those that God sees no sin in his children that no sin will take us from Gods favour that all of such a party are elect people that God requires of us nothing but faith and that faith which justifies is nothing but a meere believing that we are Gods chosen that we are not tied to the law of commandments that the law of grace is a law of liberty and that liberty is to do what we list that divorces are to be granted upon many and slight causes that simple fornication is no sin these are such doctrines that upon the belief of them men may doe any thing and will do that which shall satisfie their own desires and promote their interests and seduce their shee disciples and indeed it was not without great reason that these three Apostles joyned lust and treason together because the former is so shameful a crime and renders a mans spirit naturally averse to government that if it falls upon the person of a Ruler it takes from him the spirit of government and renders 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 proeecd far but their folly shall bemanifest 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 said Lysias Cito ad naturam sicta 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
he hath made it so sure to us to become happy even in this world that if we will not he hath threatened to destroy us which is not a desire or aptnesse to do us an evil but an art to make it impossible that we should For God hath so ordered it that we cannot perish unlesse we desire it our selves and unlesse we will do our selves a mischief on purpose to get hell we are secured of heaven and there is not in the nature of things any way that can more infallibly do the work of felicity upon creatures that can choose then to make that which they should naturally choose be spiritually their duty and that he will make them happy hereafter if they will suffer him to make them happy here But hardly stand another throng of mercies that must be considered by us and God must be glorified in them for they are such as are intended to preserve to us all this felicity 9. God that he might secure our duty and our present and consequent felicity hath tied us with golden chaines and bound us not onely with the bracelets of love and the deliciousnesse of hope but with the ruder cords of fear and reverence even with all the innumerable parts of a restraining grace For it is a huge aggravation of humane calamity to consider that after a man hath been instructed in the love and advantages of his Religion and knows it to be the way of honour and felicity and that to prevaricate his holy sanctions is certain death and disgrace to eternal ages yet that some men shall despise their religion others shall be very weary of its laws and cal the commandments a burden and too many with a perfect choice shall delight in death and the wayes that lead thither and they choose mony infinitely and to rule over their Brother by al means to be revenged extremely and to prevail by wrong and to do all that they can and please themselves in all that they desire and love it fondly and be restlesse in all things but where they perish if God should not interpose by the arts of a miraculous and merciful grace and put a bridle in the mouth of our lusts and chastise the sea of our follies by some heaps of sand or the walls of a rock we should perish in the deluge of sin universally as the old world did in that storm of the divine anger the flood of waters But thus God suffers but few adulteries in the world in respect of what would be if all men that desire to be adulterers had power opportunity and yet some men and very many women are by modesty and natural shamefacednesse chastised in their too forward appetites or the laws of man or publick reputation or the undecency and unhandsome circumstances of sin check the desire and make it that it cannot arrive at act for so have I seen a busie flame sitting upon a sullen cole turn its point to all the angles and portions of its neighbour-hood and reach at a heap of prepared straw which like a bold temptation called it to a restlesse motion and activity but either it was at too big a distance or a gentle breath from heaven diverted the speare and the ray of the fire to the other side and so prevented the violence of the burning till the flame expired in a weak consumption and dyed turning into smoak and the coolnesse of death and the harmlesnesse of a Cinder and when a mans desires are winged with sailes and a lusty wind of passion and passe on in a smooth chanel of opportunity God often times hinders the lust and the impatient desire from passing on to its port and entring into action by a suddain thought by a little remembrance of a word by a fancy by a sudden disability by unreasonable and unlikely fears by the suddain intervening of company by the very wearinesse of the passion by curiosity by want of health by the too great violence of the desire bursting it self with its fulnesse into dissolution a remisse easinesse by a sentence of scripture by the reverence of a good man or else by the proper interventions of the spirit of grace chastising the crime and representing its appendant mischiefs and its constituent disorder and irregularity and after all this the very anguish and trouble of being defeated in the purpose hath rolled it self into so much uneasinesse and unquiet reflections that the man is grown a shamed and vexed into more sober counsels And the mercy of God is not lesse then infinite in separating men from the occasions of their sin from the neighbour-hood and temptation for if the Hyaena and a dog should be thrust into the same Kennel one of them would soon finde a grave and it may be both of them their death so infallible is the ruine of most men if they be shewed a temptation Nitre and resin Naphtha and Bitumen sulphur and pitch are their constitution and the fire passes upon them infinitely and there is none to rescue them But God by removing our sins far from us as far as the East is from the West not onely putting away the guilt but setting the occasion far from us extremely far so far that sometimes we cannot sin and many times not easily hath magnified his mercy by giving us safety in all those measures in which we are untempted It would be the matter of new discourses if I should consider concerning the variety of Gods grace his preventing and accompanying his inviting and corroborating grace his assisting us to will his enabling us to do his sending Angels to watch us to remove us from evil company to drive us with swords of fire from forbidden instances to carry us by unobserved opportunities into holy company to minister occasions of holy discourses to make it by some means or other necessary to do a holy action to make us in love with vertue because they have mingled that vertue with a just and a fair interest to some men by making religion that thing they live upon to others the means of their reputation and the securities of their honour and thousands of wayes more which every prudent man that watches the wayes of God cannot but have observed But I must also observe other great conjugations of mercy for he that is to passe through an infinite must not dwell upon everie little line of life 10. The next order of mercies is such which is of so pure and unmingled constitution that it hath at first no regard to the capacities and disposition of the receivers and afterwards when it hath it relates onely to such conditions which it self creates and produces in the suscipient I mean the mercies of the divine predestination For was it not an infinite mercy that God should predestinate all mankinde to salvation by Jesus Christ even when he had no other reason to move him to do it but because man was miserable and needed his pity
and pride and covetousnesse and unthankefulnesse and disobedience Most men that are tempted with lust could easily enough entertain the sobrieties of other counsels as of temperance and justice or religion if it would indulge to them but that one passion of lust persons that are greedy of mony are not fond of amorous vanities nor care they to sit long at the wine and one vice destroyes another and when one vice is consequent to another it is by way of punishment and dereliction of the man unlesse where vices have cognation and seem but like several degrees of one another and it is evil custome and superinduced habits that make artificiall appetites in most men to most sins But many times their naturall temper vexes them into uneasie dispositions and aptnesses onely to some one unhandsome sort of action that one thing therefore is it in which God demands of thee mortification and self deniall Certain it is There are very many men in the world that would fain commute their severity in al other instances for a licence in their one appetite they would not refuse long prayers after a drunken meeting or great almes to gether with one great lust but then consider how easie it is for them to go to heaven God demands of them for his sake their own to crucifie but one natural lust or one evil habit for all the rest they are easie enough to do themselves God will give them heaven where the joy is more then one and I said it is but one mortification God requires of most men for if those persons would extirp but that one thing in which they are principally tempted it is not easily imaginable that any lesse evill to which the temptation is trifling should interpose between them and their great interest If Saul had not spared Agag the people could not have expected mercy and our little and inferiour appetites that rather come to us by intimation and consequent adherences then by direct violence must not dwell with him who hath crossed the violence of his distempered nature in a beloved instance since therefore this is the state of most men and God in effect demands of them but one thing and in exchange for that will give them all good things it gives demonstration of his huge easinesse to redeem us from that intolerable evil that is equally consequent to the indulging to one or to twenty sinful habits 2. Gods readinesse to pardon appears in this that he pardons before we ask for he that bids us ask for pardon hath in designe and purpose done the thing already for what is wanting on his part in whose onely power it is to give pardon and in whose desire it is that we should be pardoned and who commands us to lay hold upon the offer he hath done all that belongs to God that is all that concerns the pardon there it lies ready it is recorded in the book of life it wants nothing but being exemplified and taken forth and the Holy spirit stands ready to consigne and passe the privy signet that we may exhibit it to devils and evil men when they tempt us to despair or sin 3. Nay God is so ready in his mercy that he did pardon us even before he redeemed us for what is the secret of the mysterie that the eternal Son of God should take upon him our nature and die our death and suffer for our sins and do our work and enable us to do our own he that did this is God he who thought it no robbery to be equal with God he came to satisfie himself to pay to himself the price for his own creature and when he did this for us that he might pardon us was he at that instant angry with us was this an effect of his anger or of his love that God sent his Son to work our pardon and salvation Indeed we were angry with God at enmity with the the Prince of life but he was reconciled to us so far as that he then did the greatest thing in the world for us for nothing could be greater then that God the Son of God should die for us here was reconciliation before pardon and God that came to die for us did love us first before he came this was hasty love But it went further yet 4. God pardoned us before we sinned and when he foresaw our sin even mine and yours he sent his son to die for us our pardon was wrought and effected by Christs death above 1600. years ago and for the sins of to morrow and the infirmities of the next day Christ is already dead already risen from the dead and does now make intercession and atonement And this is not onely a favour to us who were born in the due time of the Gospel but to all mankinde since Adam For God who is infinitely patient in his justice was not at all patient in his mercy he forbears to strike and punish us but he would not forbear to provide cure for us and remedy for as if God could not stay from redeeming us he promised the Redeemer to Adam in the beginning of the worlds sin Christ was the lamb slain from the begining of the world and the covenant of the Gospel though it was not made with man yet it was from the beginning performed by God as to his part as to the ministration of pardon The seed of the woman was set up against the dragon as soon as ever the Tempter had won his first battle and though God laid his hand and drew a vail of types and secresy before the manifestation of his mercies yet he did the work of redemption and saved us by the covenant of faith and the righteousnesse of believing and the mercies of repentance the graces of pardon and the blood of the slain lamb even from the fall of Adam to this very day and will do till Christs second coming Adam fell by his folly and did not perform the covenant of one little work a work of a single abstinence but he was restored by faith in the seed of the woman and of this righteousnesse Noah was a preacher and by faith Enoch was traslated and by faith a remnant was saved at the flood and to Abraham this was imputed for righteousnesse and to all the Patriarks and to al the righteous judges and holy Prophets and Saints of the old Testament even while they were obliged so far as the words of their covenant were expressed to the law of works their pardon was sealed kept with in the vail within the curtains of the sanctuary and they saw it not then but they feel it ever since and this was a great excellency of the Divine mercy unto them God had mercy on all mankinde before Christs manifestation even beyond the mercies of their covenant they were saved as we are by the seed of the woman by God incarnate by the lamb slain from the beginning of
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 considence 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 everthink 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 up 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 Una 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
legation and a speciall commission as appears in S. John which power what sense soever it admits of could not expire with the persons of the Apostles unlesse the succeeding ages of the Church had no discipline or government no scandals to be removed no weak persons offended no corrupt members to be cut off no hereticks rejected no sins or no pardon and that were a more heresie then that of the Novatians for they onely denyed this ministery in some cases not in all saying Priestly absolution was not fit to be dispensed to them who in time of persecution had sacrificed to idols 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 To these onely pardon is to be dispensed without the ministery of the Priest To these who were 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 sacrificers and mingled the table of the Lord with the table of devils Against other sinners they were not so severe But however so long as that distinction remaines of sinnes unto death and sinnes not unto death there are a certain sort of sins which are remediable and cognoscible and judicable and a power was dispensed to a distinct sort of persons to remit or retain those sins which therefore must remain with the Apostles for ever that is with their persons first and then with the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 with their successors because the Church needs it for ever and there was nothing in the power that by relating to a present and temporary occasion did insinuate its short life and speedy expiration In execution of this power and pursuance of this commission for which the power was given the Apostles went forth and all they upon whom this signature passed 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 executed this power in appropriation and distinct ministery it was the sword of their proper ministery and S. Paul does almost exhibite his commission and reades the words when he puts it in execution and does highly verifie the parts and the consequence of this argument God hath reconciled us to himself by Christ Jesus and hath given to us the ministery of reconciliation and it followes now then we are Embassadours for Christ. The ministery of reconciliation is an appropriate ministery It is committed to us we are Embassadours it is appropriate by virtue of Christs mission and legation He hath given to us he hath made and deputed certain Embassadours whom he hath sent upon the message and ministery of reconcilement which is a plain exposition of the words of his commission before recorded John 20. 21. And that this also descended lower we have the testimony of S. James who advises the sick person to send for the Elders of the Church that they may pray over him that they may anoint him that in that society there may be consession of sins by the clinick or sick person and that after these preparatives and in this ministery his sins may be forgiven him Now that this power fell into succession this instance proves for the Elders were such who had not the commission immediately from Christ but were 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 they were fathers of the people but sons of the Apostles and therefore it is certain the power was not personall and meerly Apostolicall but derived upon others by such a communication as gives evidence the power was to be succeeded in And when went it out when the anointing and miraculous healing ceased There is no reason for that For forgivenesse of sins was not a thing visible and therefore could not be of the nature of miracles to confirme the faith and christianity first and after its work was done return to God that gave it neither could it be onely of present use to the Church but as eternall and lasting as sin is and therefore there could be nothing in the nature of the thing to make it so much as suspicious it was presently to expire To which also I adde this consideration that the Holy Ghost which was to enable the Apostles in the precise office Apostolicall as it was an office extraordinary circumstantionate definite and to expire all that was promised should descend upon them after Christs ascension and was verified in Pentecost for to that purpose to bring all things to their minde all of Christs doctrine and all that was necessary of his life and miracles and a power from above to enable them to speake boldly and learnedly and with tongues all that besides the other parts of ordinary power was given them ten days after the Ascension And therefore the breathing the holy Ghost upon the Apostles in the octaves of the resurrection and this mission with such a power was their ordinary mission a sending them as ordinary Pastors and Curates of souls with a power to govern binding and loosing can mean no lesse and they were the words of the promise with a power to minister reconciliation for so S. Paul expounds remitting and retaining which two were the great hinges of the Gospell the one to invite and collect a Church the other to govern it the one to dispense the greatest blessing in the world the other to keep them in capacities of enjoying it For since the holy Ghost was now actually given to these purposes here expressed and yet in order to all their extraordinaries and temporary needs was promised to descend after this there is no collection from hence more reasonable then to conclude all this to be part of their commission of ordinary Apostleship to which the ministers of religion were in all ages to succeed In attestation of all which who please may see the united testimony of S. Cyrill S. Chrysostome S. Ambrose S. Gregory and the Author of the questions of the old and new Testament who unlesse by their calling shall rather be called persons interest then by reason of their famous piety and integrity shall be accepted as competent are a very credible and fair representment of this truth and that it was a doctrine of Christianity that Christ gave this power to the Apostles for themselves and their successors for ever and that therefore as Christ in the first donation so also some Churches in the tradition of that power used the same forme of words intending the collation of the same power and separating persons for the work of that ministery I end this with the counsell S. Augustine gives to all publick penitents Veniant ad Antistites per quos illis in Ecclesia claves ministrantur a praepositis sacrorum accipiant satisfactionis suae modum let them come to the Presidents of religion by whom the Keys are ministred and from the governours of holy things let them receive those injunctions which shall exercise and signifie their repentance SECT III. THe second power I instance in is preaching the Gospel for which work he not onely at first designed Apostles but others also were appointed for the same work forever to all generations of the Church This Commission was signed