die but if ye through the Spirit do mortifie the deeds of the body ye shall live This first Mortification is the way of life if it continues but its continuance is not fecured till we are advanced towards life by one degree more of this Death For this condition is a state of a daily and dangerous warfare and many inrodes are made by sin and many times hurt is done and booty carried off for he that is but thus far mortified although his dwelling be within the Kingdom of Grace yet it is in the borders of it and hath a dangerous neighbourhood If we mean to be safe we must remove into the heart of the Land or carry the war farther off 6. Secondly We must not only be strangers here but we must be dead too dead unto the World that is we must not only deny our Vices but our Passions not only contradict the direct immediate Perswasion to a sin but also cross the Inclination to it So long as our Appetites are high and full we shall never have peace or safety but the dangers and insecurities of a full War and a potent Enemy we are always disputing the Question ever strugling for life but when our Passions are killed when our desires are little and low then Grace reigns then our life is hid with Christ in God then we have fewer interruptions in the way of Righteousness then we are not so apt to be surprised by sudden eruptions and transportation of Passions and our Piety it self is more prudent and reasonable chosen with a freer election discerned with clearer understanding hath more in it of Judgment than of Fancy and is more spiritual and Angelical He that is apt to be angry though he be habitually careful and full of observation that he sin not may at some time or other be surprised when his guards are undiligent and without actual expectation of an enemy but if his Anger be dead in him and the inclination lessened to the indisferency and gentleness of a Child the man dwells safe because of the impotency of his Enemy or that he is reduced to Obedience or hath taken conditions of peace He that hath refused to consent to actions of Uncleanness to which he was strongly tempted hath won a victory by sine force God hath blessed him well but an opportunity may betray him instantly and the sin may be in upon him unawares unless also his desires be killed he is betrayed by a party within David was a holy person but he was surprised by the sight of Bathsheba for his freer use of permitted beds had kept the fire alive which was apt to be put into a flame when so fair a beauty reflected through his eyes But Joseph was a Virgin and kept under all his inclinations to looser thoughts opportunity and command and violence and beauty did make no breach upon his spirit 7. He that is in the first state of Pilgrimage does not mutiny against his Superiors nor publish their faults nor envy their dignities but he that is dead to the world sees no fault that they have and when he hears an objection he buries it in an excuse and rejoyces in the dignity of their persons Every degree of Mortification endures reproof without murmur but he that is quite dead to the world and to his own will feels no regret against it and hath no secret thoughts of trouble and unwillingness to the suffering save only that he is sorry he deserv'd it For so a dead body resists not your violence changes not its posture you plac'd it in strikes not his striker is not moved by your words nor provoked by your scorn nor is troubled when you shrink with horror at the sight of it only it will hold the head downward in all its situations unless it be hindred by violence And a mortified spirit is such without indignation against scorn without revenge against injuries without murmuring at low offices not impatient in troubles indifferent in all accidents neither transported with joy nor deprest with sorrow and is humble in all his thoughts And thus he that is dead saith the Apostle is justified from sins And this is properly a state of life in which by the grace of Jesus we are restored to a condition of order and interiour beauty in our Faculties our actions are made moderate and humane our spirits are even and our understandings undisturbed 8. For Passions of the sensitive Soul are like an Exnalation hot and dry born up from the earth upon the wings of a cloud and detained by violence out of its place causing thunders and making eruptions into lightning and sudden fires There is a Tempest in the Soul of a passionate man and though every wind does not shake the earth nor rend trees up by the roots yet we call it violent and ill weather if it only makes a 〈◊〉 and is harmless And it is an inordination in the spirit of a man when his Passions are tumultuous and mighty though they do not determine directly upon a sin they discompose his peace and disturb his spirit and make it like troubled waters in which no man can see his own figure and just 〈◊〉 portions and therefore by being less a man cannot be so much a Christian in the midst 〈◊〉 so great indispositions For although the Cause may hallow the Passion and if a man be very angry for God's cause it is Zeal not Fury yet the Cause cannot secure the Person from violence transportation and inconvenience When Elisha was consulted by three Kings concerning the success of their present Expedition he grew so angry against idolatrous soram and was carried on to so great degrees of disturbance that when for Jehosaphat's sake he was content to enquire of the Lord he called for a minstrel who by his harmony might re-compose his disunited and troubled spirit that so he might be apter sor divination And sometimes this zeal goes besides the intention of the man and beyond the degrees of prudent or lawful and ingages in a sin though at first it was Zeal for Religion For so it happened in Moses at the waters of Massah and Meribah he spake foolishly and yet it was when he was zealous for God and extremely careful of the people's interest For his Passion he was hindred from entring into the Land of Promise And we also if we be not moderate and well-tempered even in our 〈◊〉 for God may like Moses break the Tables of the Law and throw them out of our hands with zeal to have them preserved for Passion violently snatches at the Conclusion but is inconsiderate and incurious concerning the Premises The summ and purpose of this Discourse is that saying of our Blessed Saviour He that will be my Disciple must deny himself that is not only desires that are sinful but desires that are his own pursuances of his own affections and violent motions though to things not evil or in themselves
Man if they pass through an even and an indifferent life towards the issues of an ordinary and necessary course they are little and within command but if they pass upon an end or aim of difficulty or ambition they duplicate and grow to a 〈◊〉 and we have seen the even and temperate lives of indifferent persons continue in many degrees of Innocence but the Temptation of busie designs is too great even for the best of dispositions 7. But these Temptations are crasse and material and soon discernible it will require some greater observation to arm against such as are more spiritual and immaterial For he hath Apples to cousen Children and Gold for Men the Kingdoms of the World for the Ambition of Princes and the Vanities of the World for the Intemperate he hath Discourses and fair-spoken Principles to abuse the pretenders to Reason and he hath common Prejudices for the more vulgar understandings Amongst these I chuse to consider such as are by way of Principle or Proposition 8. The first great Principle of Temptation I shall note is a general mistake which excuses very many of our crimes upon pretence of Infirmity calling all those sins to which by natural disposition we are inclined though by carelesness and evil customs they are heightned to a habit by the name of Sins of infirmity to which men suppose they have reason and title to pretend If when they have committed a crime their Conscience checks them and they are troubled and during the interval and abatement of the heats of desire resolve against it and commit it readily at the next opportunity then they cry out against the weakness of their Nature and think as long as this body of death is about them it must be thus and that this condition may stand with the state of Grace And then the Sins shall return periodically like the revolutions of a Quartan Ague well and ill for ever till Death surprizes the mistaker This is a Patron of sins and makes the Temptation prevalent by an authentick instrument and they pretend the words of S. Paul For the good that I would that I do not but the evil that I would not that I do For there is a law in my members 〈◊〉 against the law of my mind bringing me into captivity to the law of Sin And thus the 〈◊〉 of Sin is mistaken for a state of Grace and the imperfections of the Law are miscalled the affections and necessities of Nature that they might seem to be incurable and the persons apt for an excuse therefore because for Nature there is no absolute cure But that these words of S. Paul may not become a 〈◊〉 of death and instruments of a temptation to us it is observable that the Apostle by a siction of person as is usual with him speaks of himself not as in the state of Regeneration under the Gospel but under the 〈◊〉 obscurities insufficiencies and imperfections of the Law which indeed he there contends to have been a Rule good and holy apt to remonstrate our misery because by its prohibitions and limits given to natural desires it made actions before indifferent now to be sins it added many curses to the breakers of it and by an 〈◊〉 of contrariety it made us more desirous of what was now unlawful but it was a Covenant in which our Nature was restrained but not helped it was provoked but not sweetly assisted our Understandings were instructed but our Wills not sanctified and there were no suppletories of Repentance every greater sin was like the fall of an Angel irreparable by any mystery or express recorded or enjoyned Now of a man under this Govenant he describes the condition to be such that he understands his Duty but by the infirmities of Nature he is certain to fall and by the helps of the Law not strengthened against it nor restored after it and therefore he calls himself under that notion a miserable man sold under sin not doing according to the rules of the Law or the dictates of his Reason but by the unaltered misery of his Nature certain to prevaricate But the person described here is not S. Paul is not any justified person not so much as a Christian but one who is under a state of direct opposition to the state of Grace as will manifestly appear if we observe the antithesis from S. Paul's own characters For the Man here named is such as in whom sin wrought all concupiscence in whom sin lived and slew him so that he was dead in trespasses and sins and although he did delight in the Law after his inwardman that is his understanding had intellectual complacencies and satisfactions which afterwards he calls serving the Law of God with his mind that is in the first dispositions and preparations of his spirit yet he could act nothing for the law in his members did inslave him and brought him into captivity to the law of sin so that this person was full of actual and effective lusts he was a slave to sin and dead in trespasses But the state of a regenerate person is such as to have 〈◊〉 the flesh with the affections and lusts in whom sin did not reign not only in the mind but even also not in the mortal body over whom sin had no dominion in whom the old man was crucified and the body of sin was destroyed and sin not at all served And to make the antithesis yet clearer in the very beginning of the next Chapter the Apostle saith that the spirit of life in Christ Jesus had made him free from the law of sin and death under which law he complained immediately before he was sold and killed to shew the person was not the same in these so different and contradictory representments No man in the state of Grace can say The evil that I would not that I do if by evil he means any evil that is habitual or in its own nature deadly 9. So that now let no man pretend an inevitable necessity to sin for if ever it comes to a custom or to a great violation though but in a single act it is a condition of Carnality not of spiritual life and those are not the infirmities of Nature but the weaknesses of Grace that make us sin so frequently which the Apostle truly affirms to the same purpose The flesh lusteth against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh and these are contrary the one to the other so that ye cannot or that ye do not do the things that ye would This disability proceeds from the strength of the flesh and weakness of the spirit For he adds But if ye be led by the Spirit ye are not under the Law saying plainly that the state of such a combate and disability of doing good is a state of a man under the Law or in the flesh which he accounts all one but every man that is sanctified
desertions and anguish of spirit expecting all should work together for the best according to the promise if you can strengthen your selves in God when you are weakest believe when you see no hope and entertain no jealousies or suspicions of God though you see nothing to make you confident then and then only you have Faith which in conjunction with its other parts is able to save your Souls For in this precise duty of trusting God there are the rays of hope and great proportions of Charity and Resignation 17. The summ is that pious and most Christian sentence of the Author of the ordinary Gloss To believe in God through Jesus Christ is by believing to love him to adhere to him to be united to him by Charity and Obedience and to be incorporated into Christ ' s mystical body in the Communion of Saints I conclude this with a collation of certain excellent words of S. Paul highly to the present purpose Examine your selves Brethren whether ye be in the Faith prove your own selves Well but how Know you not your own selves how that Jesus Christ is in you except ye be Reprobates There 's the touchstone of Faith If Jesus Christ dwells in us then we are true Believers if he does not we are Reprobates we have no Faith But how shall we know whether Christ be in us or no Saint Paul tells us that too If Christ be in you the body is dead by reason of sin but the spirit is life because of righteousness That 's the Christian's mark and the Characteristick of a true Believer A death unto sin and a living unto righteousness a mortified body and a quickned spirit This is plain enough and by this we see what we must trust to A man of a wicked life does in vain hope to be saved by his Faith for indeed his Faith is but equivocal and dead which as to his purpose is just none at all and therefore let him no more deceive himself For that I may still use the words of S. Paul This is a faithful saying and these things I will that thou affirm constantly that they which have believed in God might be careful to maintain good works For such and such only in the great scrutiny for Faith in the day of Doom shall have their portion in the bosom of faithful Abraham The PRAYER I. O Eternal GOD 〈◊〉 of all Truth and Holiness in whom to believe is life eternal let thy Grace descend with a mighty power into my Soul beating down every strong hold and vainer imagination and bringing every proud thought and my confident and ignorant understanding into the obedience of Jesus Take from me all disobdience and refractoriness of spirit all ambition and private and baser interests remove from me all prejudice and weakness of perswasion that I may wholly resign my Understanding to the perswasions of Christianity acknowledging Thee to be the principle of Truth and thy Word the measure of Knowledge and thy Laws the rule of my life and thy Promises the satisfaction of my hopes and an union with thee to be the consummation of Charity in the fruition of Glory Amen II. HOly JESUS make me to acknowledge thee to be my Lord and Master and my self a Servant and Disciple of thy holy Discipline and Institution let me love to sit at thy feet and suck in with my ears and heart the sweetness of thy holy Sermons Let my Soul be shod with the preparation of the Gospel of Peace with a peaceable and docile disposition Give me great boldness in the publick Confession of thy Name and the Truth of thy Gospel in despite of all hostilities and temptations And grant I may always remember that thy Name is called upon me and I may so behave my self that I neither give scandal to others nor cause disreputation to the honour of Religion but that thou mayest be glorified in me and I by thy mercies after a strict observance of all the holy Laws of Christianity Amen III. O Holy and ever-Blessed SPIRIT let thy gracious influences be the perpetual guide of my rational Faculties Inspire me with Wisdom and Knowledge spiritual Understanding and a holy Faith and sanctifie my Faith that it may arise up to the confidence of Hope and the adherencies of Charity and be fruitful in a holy Conversation Mortifie in me all peevishness and pride of spirit all heretical dispositions and whatsoever is contrary to sound Doctrine that when the eternal Son of God the Author and Finisher of our Faith shall come to make scrutiny and an inquest for Faith I may receive the Promises laid up for them that believe in the Lord Jesus and wait for his coming in holiness and purity to whom with the Father and thee O Blessed Spirit be all honour and eternal adoration payed with all sanctity and joy and Eucharist now and for ever Amen SECT XI Of CHRIST's going to Jerusalem to the Passeover the first time after his Manifestation and what followed till the expiration of the Office of John the Baptist. The Visitation of the Temple Marke 11. 15. And Iesus went into y e Temple began to cast out them that sold bought in y e Temple and overthrew the tables of the money changers 16. And would not suffer that any man should carry any vessel through the Temple The Conference with Nicodemus Iohn 3. 9. Nicodemus answered said unto him How can these things be 10. Iesus answered and sayd unto him Art thou a Master of Israel and knowest not these things 1. IMmediately after this Miracle Jesus abode a few days in Capernaum but because of the approach of the great Feast of Passeover he ascended to Jerusalem and the first publick act of record that he did was an act of holy Zeal and Religion in behalf of the honour of the Temple For divers Merchants and Exchangers of money made the Temple to be the Market and the Bank and brought Beasts thither to be sold for sacrifice against the great Paschal Solemnity At the sight of which Jesus being moved with zeal and indignation made a whip of cords and drave the Beasts out of the Temple overthrew the accounting Tables and commanded them that sold the Doves to take them from thence For his anger was holy and he would mingle no injury with it and therefore the Doves which if let loose would be detrimental to the owners he caused to be fairly removed and published the Religion of Holy places establishing their Sacredness for ever by his first Gospel-Sermon that he made at Jerusalem Take these things hence Make not my Father's House a house of merchandise for it shall be called a house of Prayer to all Nations And being required to give a sign of his Vocation for this being an action like the Religion of the Zelots among the Jews if it was not attested by something extraordinary might be abused into an excess of liberty he only foretold the
our Redemption he adds Looking for that blessed hope and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Who gave himself for us to this very purpose that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purifie unto himself a peculiar people zealous of good works Purifying a people peculiar to himself is cleansing it in the Laver of Regeneration and appropriating it to himself in the rites of Admission and Profession Which plainly designs the first consignation of our Redemption to be in Baptism and that Christ there cleansing his Church from every spot or wrinkle made a Covenant with us that we should renounce all our sins and he should cleanse them all and then that we should abide in that state Which is also very explicitely set down by the same Apostle in that divine and mysterious Epistle to the Romans How shall we that are dead to sin live any longer therein Know ye not that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death Well what then Therefore we are buried with him by Baptism into his death that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father even so we also should walk in newness of life That 's the end and mysteriousness of Baptism it is a consignation into the Death of Christ and we die with him that once that is die to sin that we may for ever after live the life of righteousness Knowing this that our old man is crucified with him that the body of sin might be destroyed that henceforth we should not serve sin that is from the day of our Baptism to the day of our death And therefore God who knows the weaknesses on our part and yet the strictness and necessity of conserving Baptismal grace by the Covenant Evangelical hath appointed the auxiliaries of the Holy Spirit to be ministred to all baptized people in the holy Rite of Confirmation that it might be made possible to be done by Divine aids which is necessary to be done by the Divine Commandments 10. And this might not be improperly said to be the meaning of those words of our Blessed Saviour He that speaks a word against the Son of man it shall be forgiven him but he that speaks a word against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven him That is those sins which were committed in Infidelity before we became Disciples of the Holy Jesus are to be remitted in Baptism and our first profession of the Religion but the sins committed after Baptism and Confirmation in which we receive the Holy Ghost and by which the Holy Spirit is grieved are to be accounted for with more severity And therefore the Primitive Church understanding our obligations according to this discourse admitted not any to holy Orders who had lapsed and fallen into any sin of which she could take cognisance that is such who had not kept the integrity of their Baptism but sins committed before Baptism were no impediments to the susception of Orders because they were absolutely extinguished in Baptism This is the nature of the Covenant we made in Baptism that 's the grace of the Gospel and the effect of Faith and Repentance and it is expected we should so remain For it is nowhere expressed to be the mercy and intention of the Covenant Evangelical that this Redemption should be any more than once or that Repentance which is in order to it can be renewed to the same or so great purposes and present effects 11. But after we are once reconciled in Baptism and put intirely into God's favour when we have once been redeemed if we then fall away into sin we must expect God's dealing with us in another manner and to other purposes Never must we expect to be so again justified and upon such terms as formerly the best days of our Repentance are interrupted not that God will never forgive them that sin after Baptism and recover by Repentance but that Restitution by repentance after Baptism is another thing than the first Redemption No such intire clear and integral determinate and presential effects of Repentance but an imperfect little growing uncertain and hazardous Reconciliation a Repentance that is always in production a Renovation by parts a Pardon that is revocable a Salvation to be wrought by fear and trembling all our remanent life must be in bitterness our hopes allayed with fears our meat attempered with Coloquintida and death is in the pot as our best actions are imperfect so our greatest Graces are but possibilities and aptnesses to a Reconcilement and all our life we are working our selves into that condition we had in Baptism and lost by our relapse As the habit lessens so does the guilt as our Vertues are imperfect so is the Pardon and because our Piety may be interrupted our state is uncertain till our possibilities of sin are ceased till our fight is finished and the victory therefore made sure because there is no more fight And it is remarkable that S. Peter gives counsel to live holily in pursuance of our redemption of our calling and of our escaping from that corruption that is in the world through Lust lest we lose the benefit of our purgation to which by way of antithesis he opposes this Wherefore the rather give diligence to make your calling and election sure And if ye do these things ye shall never fall Meaning by the perpetuating our state of Baptism and first Repentance we shall never fall but be in a sure estate our calling and election shall be sure But not if we fall if we forget we were purged from our old sins if we forfeit our calling we have also made our election unsure movable and disputable 12. So that now the hopes of lapsed sinners relie upon another bottom And as in Moses's Law there was no revelation of Repentance but yet the Jews had hopes in God and were taught the succours of Repentance by the Homilies of the Prophets and other accessory notices So in the Gospel the Covenant was established upon Faith and Repentance but it was consigned in Baptism and was verifiable onely in the integrity of a following holy life according to the measures of a man not perfect but sincere not faultless but heartily endeavoured but yet the mercies of God in pardoning sinners lapsed after Baptism was declared to us by collateral and indirect occasions by the Sermons of the Apostles and the Commentaries of Apostolical persons who understood the meaning of the Spirit and the purposes of the Divine mercy and those other significations of his will which the blessed Jesus left upon record in other parts of his Testament as in Codicills annexed besides the precise Testament it self And it is certain if in the Covenant of Grace there be the same involution of an after-Repentance as there is of present Pardon upon past Repentance and future Sanctity it is impossible to
the wicked in a proportionable manner to the contrary purpose he shortens their days and takes a way their possibilities and opportunities when the time of Repentance is past because he will not do violence to their Wills and this lest they should return and be converted and I should heal them so that it is evident some persons are by some acts of God after a vicious life and the frequent rejection of the Divine grace at last prevented from mercy who without such courses and in contrary circumstances might possibly do acts of Repentance and return and then God would healthem 4. Let their purposes and vows be never so sincere in the principle yet since a man who is in the state of Grace may again fail of it and forget he was purged from his old sins and every dying sinner did so if ever he was washed in the laver of Regeneration and sanctified in his spirit then much more may such a sincere purpose fail and then it would be known to what distance of time or state from his purpose will God give his final sentence Whether will he quit him because in the first stage he will correspond with his intention and act his purposes or condemn him because in his second stage he would prevaricate And when a man does fail it is not because his first principle was not good for the Holy Spirit which is certainly the best principle of spiritual actions may be extinguished in a man and a sincere or hearty purpose may be lost or it may again be recovered and be lost again so that it is as unreasonable as it is unrevealed that a sincere purpose on a death-bed shall obtain pardon or pass for a new state of life Few men are at those instants and in such pressures hypocritical and vain and yet to perform such purposes is a new work and a new labour it comes in upon a new stock differing from that principle and will meet with temptations difficulties and impediments and an honest heart is not sure to remain so but may split upon a rock of a violent invitation A promise is made to be faithful or unfaithful ex post 〈◊〉 by the event but it was sincere or insincere in the principle only if the person promising did or did not respectively at that time mean what he said A sincere promise many times is not truly performed 42. Concerning all the other acts which it is to be supposed a dying person can do I have only this consideration If they can make up a new Creature become a new state be in any sence a holy life a keeping the Commandments of God a following of peace and holiness a becoming holy in all conversation if they can arrive to the lowest sence of that excellent condition Christ intended to all his Disciples when he made keeping the Commandments to be the condition of entring into life and not crying Lord Lord but doing the will of God if he that hath served the Lusts of the flesh and taken pay under all God's enemies during a long and malicious life can for any thing a dying person can do be said in any sence to have lived holily then his hopes are fairly built if not they rely upon a sand and the 〈◊〉 of Death and the Divine displeasure will beat 〈◊〉 violently upon them There are no suppletories of the Evangelical Covenant If we walk according to the Rule then shall peace and righteousness kiss each other if we have sinned and prevaricated the Rule Repentance must bring us into the ways of Righteousness and then we must go on upon the old stock but the deeds of the 〈◊〉 must be mortified and Christ must dwell in us and the Spirit must reign in us and Vertue must be habitual and the habits must be confirmed and this as we do by the Spirit of Christ so it is hallowed and accepted by the grace of God and we put into a condition of favour and redeemed from sin and reconciled to God But this will not be put off with single acts nor divided parts nor newly-commenced purposes nor fruitless sorrow it is a great folly to venture Eternity upon dreams so that now let me represent the condition of a dying person after a vicious life 43. First He that considers the srailty of humane bodies their incidences and aptness to sickness casualties death sudden or expected the condition of several diseases that some are of too quick a sense and are intolerable some are dull stupid and Lethargical then adds the prodigious Judgments which fall upon many sinners in the act of sin and are marks of our dangers and God's essential justice and severity and that security which possesses such persons whose lives are vicious and that habitual carelesness and groundless confidence or an absolute inconsideration which is generally the condition and constitution of such minds every one whereof is likely enough to confound a persevering sinner in miseries eternal will soon apprehend the danger of a delayed Repentance to be infinite and unmeasurable 44. Secondly But suppose such a person having escaped the antecedent circumstances of the danger is set fairly upon his Death-bed with the just apprehension of his sins about him and his addresses to Repentance consider then the strength of his Lusts that the sins he is to mortifie are inveterate habitual and confirmed having had the growth and stability of a whole life that the liberty of his Will is impaired the Scripture saying of such persons whose eyes are full of lust and that cannot cease from sin and that his servants they are whom they obey that they are slaves to sin and so not sui juris not at their own dispose that his Understanding is blinded his Appetite is mutinous and of a long time used to rebell and prevail that all the inferiour Faculties are in disorder that he wants the helps of Grace proportionable to his necessities for the longer he hath continued in sin the weaker the Grace of God is in him so that in effect at that time the more need he hath the less he shall receive it being God's rule to give to him that hath and from him that hath not to take even what he hath then add the innumerable parts and great burthens of Repentance that it is not a Sorrow nor a Purpose because both these suppose that to be undone which is the only necessary support of all our hopes in Christ when it is done the innumerable difficult cases of Conscience that may then occur particularly in the point of Restitution which among many other necessary parts of Repentance is indispensably required of all persons that are able and in every degree in which they are able the many Temptations of the Devil the strength of Passions the impotency of the Flesh the illusions of the spirits of darkness the tremblings of the heart the incogitancy of the mind the implication and
that is to come That is plain And although Christ revealed his Father's mercies to us in new expresses and great abundance yet he took nothing from the world which ever did in any sense invite Piety or indear Obedience or cooperate towards Felicity And 〈◊〉 the Promises which were made of old are also presupposed in the new and mentioned by intimation and implication within the greater When our Blessed Saviour in seven of the Eight Beatitudes had instanced in new Promises and Rewards as Heaven Seeing of God Life eternal in one of them to which Heaven is as certainly consequent as to any of the rest he did chuse to instance in a temporal blessing and in the very words of the Old Testament to shew that that part of the old Covenant which concerns Morality and the rewards of Obedience remains firm and included within the conditions of the Gospel 16. To this purpose is that saying of our Blessed Saviour Man liveth not by bread alone but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God meaning that besides natural means ordained for the preservation of our lives there are means supernatural and divine God's Blessing does as much as bread nay it is Every word proceeding out of the 〈◊〉 of God that is every Precept and Commandment of God is so for our good that it is intended as food and Physick to us a means to make us live long And therefore God hath done in this as in other graces and issues Evangelical which he purposed to continue in his Church for ever He first gave it in miraculous and extraordinary manner and then gave it by way of perpetual ministery The Holy Ghost appeared at first like a prodigy and with Miracle he descended in visible representments expressing himself in revelations and powers extraordinary but it being a Promise intended to descend upon all Ages of the Church there was appointed a perpetual ministery for its conveyance and still though without a sign or miraculous representment it is ministred in Confirmation by imposition of the Bishop's hands And thus also health and long life which by way of ordinary benediction is consequent to Piety Faith and Obedience Evangelical was at first given in a miraculous manner that so the ordinary effects being at first confirmed by miraculous and extraordinary instances and manners of operation might for ever after be confidently expected without any dubitation since it was in the same manner consigned by which all the whole Religion was by a voice from Heaven and a verification of Miracles and extraordinary supernatural effects That the gift of healing and preservation and restitution of life was at first miraculous needs no particular probation All the story of the Gospel is one entire argument to prove it and amongst the fruits of the Spirit S. Paul reckons gifts of healing and government and helps or exteriour assistences and advantages to represent that it was intended the life of Christian people should be happy and healthful for ever Now that this grace also descended afterwards in an ordinary ministery is recorded by S. James Is any man sick amongst you let him call for the Elders of the Church and let them pray over him anointing him with oyl in the name of the Lord that was then the ceremony and the blessing and effect is still for the prayer of faith shall save the sick and the Lord shall raise him up For it is observable that the blessing of healing and recovery is not appendent to the Anealing but to the Prayer of the Church to manifest that the ceremony went with the first miraculous and extraordinary manner yet that there was an ordinary ministery appointed for the daily conveyance of the blessing the faithful prayers offices of holy Priests shall obtain life and health to such persons who are receptive of it and in spiritual and apt dispositions And when we see by a continual flux of extraordinary benediction that even some Christian Princes are instruments of the Spirit not only in the government but in the gifts of healing too as a reward for their promoting the just interests of Christianity we may acknowledge our selves convinced that a holy life in the faith and obedience of Jesus Christ may be of great advantage for our health and life by that instance to entertain our present desires and to establish our hopes of life eternal 17. For I consider that the fear of God is therefore the best antidote in the World against sickness and death because it is the direct enemy to sin which brought in sickness and death and besides this that God by spiritual means should produce alterations natural is not hard to be understood by a Christian Philosopher take him in either of the two capacities 2. For there is a rule of proportion and analogy of effects that if sin destroys not only the Soul but the Body also then may Piety preserve both and that much rather for if sin that is the effects and consequents of sin hath abounded then shall grace superabound that is Christ hath done us more benefit than the Fall of Adam hath done us injury and therefore the effects of sin are not greater upon the body than either are to be restored or prevented by a pious life 3. There is so near a conjunction between Soul and Body that it is no wonder if God meaning to glorifie both by the means of a spiritual life suffers spirit and matter to communicate in effects and mutual impresses Thus the waters of Baptism purifie the Soul and the Holy Eucharist not the symbolical but the mysterious and spiritual part of it makes the Body also partaker of the death 〈◊〉 Christ and a holy union The flames of Hell whatsoever they are torment accursed Souls and the stings of Conscience vex and disquiet the Body 4. And if we consider that in the glories of Heaven when we shall live a life purely spiritual our Bodies also are so clarified and made spiritual that they also become immortal that state of Glory being nothing else but a perfection of the state of Grace it is not unimaginable but that the Soul may have some proportion of the same operation upon the Body as to conduce to its prolongation as to an antepast of immortality 5. For since the Body hath all its life from its conjunction with the Soul why not also the perfection of life according to its present capacity that is health and duration from the perfection of the Soul I mean from the ornaments of Grace And as the blessedness of the Soul saith the Philosopher consists in the speculation of honest and just things so the perfection of the Body and of the whole Man consists in the practick the exercise and operations of Vertue 18. But this Problem in Christian Philosophy is yet more intelligible and will be reduced to certain experience if we consider good life in union and concretion with particular
her in the midst of her journey Against this David prayed O my God cut me 〈◊〉 off in the midst of my days But in this there is some variety For God does it sometimes in mercy sometimes in judgment The righteous die and no man regardeth not considering that they are taken away from the evil to come God takes the righteous man hastily to his Crown lest temptation snatch it from him by interrupting his hopes and sanctity And this was the case of the old World For from Adam to the Floud by the Patriarchs were eleven generations but by Cain's line there were but eight so that Cain's posterity were longer liv'd because God intending to bring the Floud upon the World took delight to rescue his elect from the dangers of the present impurity and the future Deluge Abraham lived five years less than his son Isaac it being say the Doctors of the Jews intended for mercy to him that he might not see the iniquity of his Grandchild 〈◊〉 And this the Church for many Ages hath believed in the case of baptized Infants dying before the use of Reason For besides other causes in the order of Divine Providence one kind of mercy is done to them too for although their condition be of a lower form yet it is secured by that timely shall I call it or untimely death But these are cases extraregular ordinarily and by rule God hath revealed his purposes of interruption of the lives of sinners to be in anger and judgment for when men commit any signal and grand impiety God suffers not Nature to take her course but strikes a stroke with his own hand To which purpose I think it a remarkable instance which is reported by 〈◊〉 that for 3332 years even to the twentieth Age there was not one example of a Son that died before his Father but the course of Nature was kept that he who was first born in the descending line did die first I speak of natural death and therefore Abel cannot be opposed to this observation till that Terah the father of Abraham taught the People to make Images of clay and worship them and concerning him it was first remarked that Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity God by an unheard-of Judgment and a rare accident punishing his newly-invented crime And when-ever such 〈◊〉 of a life happens to a vicious person let all the world acknowledge it for a Judgment and when any man is guilty of evil habits or unrepented sins he may therefore expect it because it is threatned and designed for the lot and curse of such persons This is threatned to Covetousness Injustice and Oppression As a Partridge sitteth on eggs and hatcheth them not so he that getteth riches and not by right shall leave them in the midst of his days and at his end shall be a Fool. The same is threatned to Voluptuous persons in the highest caresses of delight and Christ told a parable with the same design The rich man said Soul take thy ease but God answered O fool this night shall thy Soul be required of thee Zimri and Cozbi were slain in the trophies of their Lust and it was a sad story which was told by Thomas Cantipratanus Two Religious persons tempted by each other in the vigour of their youth in their very first pleasures and opportunities of sin were both struck dead in their embraces and posture of entertainment God smote Jeroboam for his Usurpation and Tyranny and he died Saul died for Disobedience against God and asking counsel of a Pythonisse God smote 〈◊〉 with a Leprosie for his profaneness and distressed 〈◊〉 sorely for his Sacrilege and sent a horrid disease upon Jehoram for his Idolatry These instances represent Voluptuousness and Covetousness Rapine and Injustice Idolatry and Lust Profaneness and Sacrilege as remarked by the signature of exemplary Judgments to be the means of shortening the days of man God himself proving the Executioner of his own fierce wrath I instance no more but in the singular case of Hananiah the false Prophet Thus saith the LORD Behold I will cut thee from off the face of the earth this year thou shalt die because thou hast taught Rebellion against the LORD That is the curse and portion of a false Prophet a short life and a suddén death of God's own particular and more immediate 〈◊〉 23. And thus also the sentence of the Divine anger went forth upon criminal persons in the New Testament Witness the Disease of Herod Judas's Hanging himself the Blindness of 〈◊〉 the Sudden death of Ananias and Sapphira the Buffetings with which Satan 〈◊〉 the bodies of persons excommunicate Yea the blessed Sacrament of CHRIST's Body and Bloud which is intended for our spiritual life if it be unworthily received proves the cause of a natural death For this cause many are weak and sickly among you and many are fallen asleep saith S. Paul to the 〈◊〉 Church 24. Thirdly But there is yet another manner of ending man's life by way of Chance or Contingency meaning thereby the manner of God's Providence and event of things which is not produced by the disposition of natural causes nor yet by any particular and special act of God but the event which depends upon accidental causes not so certain and regular as Nature not so conclusive and determined as the acts of decretory Providence but comes by disposition of causes irregular to events rare and accidental This David expresses by entring into battel and in this as in the other we must separate cases extraordinary and rare from the ordinary and common Extraregularly and upon extraordinary reasons and permissions we find that holy persons have miscarried in battel So the 〈◊〉 fell before Benjamin and Jonathan and 〈◊〉 and many of the Lord's champions fighting against the Philistines but in these deaths as God served other ends of Providence so he kept to the good men that fell all the mercies of the Promise by giving them a greater blessing of event and compensation In the more ordinary course of Divine dispensation they that prevaricate the Laws of God are put out of protection God withdraws his special Providence or their tutelar Angel and leaves them exposed to the influences of Heaven to the power of a Constellation to the accidents of humanity to the chances of a Battel which are so many and various that it is ten thousand to one a man in that case never escapes and in such variety of contingencies there is no probable way to assure our safety but by a holy life to endear the Providence of God to be our Guardian It was a remarkable saying of Deborah The Stars sought in their courses 〈◊〉 in their orbs against Sisera Sisera fought when there was an evil Aspect or malignant influence of Heaven upon him For even the smallest thing that is in opposition to us is enough to turn the
our life and he dwells in the body and the spirit of every one that eats Christ's flesh and drinks his bloud Happy is that man that sits at the Table of Angels that puts his hand into the dish with the King of all the Creatures and feeds upon the eternal Son of God joyning things below with things above Heaven with Earth Life with Death that mortality might be swallowed up of life and Sin be destroyed by the inhabitation of its greatest Conqueror And now I need not enumerate any particulars since the Spirit of God hath ascertained us that Christ enters into our hearts and takes possession and abides there that we are made Temples and celestial mansions that we are all one with our Judge and with our Redeemer that our Creator is bound unto his Creature with bonds of charity which nothing can dissolve unless our own hands break them that Man is united with God and our weakness is fortified by his strength and our miseries wrapped up in the golden leaves of glory 2. Hence it follows that the Sacrament is an instrument of reconciling us to God and taking off the remanent guilt and stain and obligations of our sins This is the 〈◊〉 that was shed for you for the remission of sins For there is no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus And such are all they who worthily eat the flesh of Christ by receiving him they more and more receive remission of sins redemption sanctification wisdom and certain hopes of glory 〈◊〉 as the Soul touching and united to the flesh of Adam contracts the stain of original misery and imperfection so much the 〈◊〉 shall the Soul united to the flesh of Christ receive pardon and purity and all those blessed emanations from our union with the Second Adam But this is not to be understood as if the first beginnings of our pardon were in the holy Communion for then a man might come with his impurities along with him and lay them on the holy Table to stain and pollute so bright a presence No first Repentance must 〈◊〉 the ways of the Lord and in this holy Rite those words of our Lord are verified He that is justified let him be justified 〈◊〉 that is here he may receive the increase of Grace and as it grows so sin dies and we are reconciled by nearer unions and approximations to God 9. Thirdly The holy Sacrament is the pledge of Glory and the earnest of Immortality for when we have received him who hath overcome Death and henceforth dies no more he becomes to us like the Tree of life in Paradise and the consecrated Symbols are like the seeds of an eternal duration springing up in us to eternal life nourishing our spirits with Grace which is but the prologue and the infancy of Glory and differs from it only as a Child from a Man But God first raised up his Son to life and by giving him to us hath also consigned us to the same state for our life is hid with Christ in God When we lay down and cast aside the impurer robes of flesh they are then but preparing for glory and if by the only touch of Christ bodies were redintegrate and restored to natural perfections how shall not we live for ever who eat his flesh and drink his bloud It is the discourse of S. Cyril Whatsoever the Spirit can convey to the body of the Church we may expect 〈◊〉 this Sacrament for as the Spirit is the instrument of life and action so the bloud of Christ is the conveyance of his Spirit And let all the mysterious places of holy Scripture concerning the effects of Christ communicated in the blessed Sacrament be drawn together in one Scheme we cannot but observe that although they are so expressed as 〈◊〉 their meaning may seem intricate and involved yet they cannot be drawn to any meaning at all but it is as glorious in its sense as it is mysterious in the expression and the more intricate they are the greater is their purpose no words being apt and proportionate to signifie this spiritual secret and excellent effects of the Spirit A veil is drawn before all these testimonies because the people were not able to behold the glory which they cover with their curtain and Christ dwelling in us and giving us his flesh to 〈◊〉 and his bloud to drink and the hiding of our life with God and the communication of the body of Christ and Christ being our life are such secret glories that as the fruition of them is the portion of the other world so also is the full perception and understanding of them for therefore God appears to us in a cloud and his glories in a veil that we understanding more of it by its concealment than we can by its open face which is too bright 〈◊〉 our weak eyes may with more piety also entertain the greatness by these indefinite and mysterious significations than we can by plain and direct intuitions which like the Sun in a direct ray enlightens the object but confounds the organ 10. I should but in other words describe the same glories if I should add That this holy Sacrament does enlighten the spirit of Man and clarifie it with spiritual discernings and as he was to the two Disciples at 〈◊〉 so also to other faithful people Christ is known in the breaking of bread That it is a great defence against the hostilities of our ghostly enemies this Holy Bread being like the Cake in 〈◊〉 's Camp overturning the tents of 〈◊〉 That it is the relief of our sorrows the antidote and preservative of Souls the viand of our journey the guard and passe-port of our death the wine of Angels That it is more healthful than Rhubarb more pleasant than Cassia That the Betele and 〈◊〉 of the 〈◊〉 the Moly or Nepenthe of Pliny the Lirinon of the 〈◊〉 the Balsam of 〈◊〉 the Manna of Israel the Honey of Jonathan are but weak expressions to tell us that this is excellent above Art and Nature and that nothing is good enough in Philosophy to become its 〈◊〉 All these must needs fall very short of those plain words of Christ This is my Body The other may become the ecstasies of Piety the transportation of joy and wonder and are like the discourse of S. 〈◊〉 upon mount Tabor he was resolved to say some great thing but he knew not what but when we remember that the Body of our Lord and his Bloud is communicated to us in the Bread and the Chalice of blessing we must sit down and rest our selves for this is the mountain of the Lord and we can go no farther 11. In the next place it will 〈◊〉 our enquiry to consider how we are to prepare our selves For at the gate of life a man may meet with death and although this holy Sacrament be like Manna in which the obedient find the relishes of Obedience the chaste of
Epistles to the seven Churches of Asia all planted or at least cultivated by him the doctrine in it suitable to the Apostolick spirit and temper evidently bearing witness in this case That which seems to have given ground to doubt concerning both its Author and authority was its being long before it was usually joyned with the other Books of the holy Canon for containing in it some passages directly levell'd at Rome the Seat of the Roman Empire others which might be thought to symbolize with some Jewish dreams and 〈◊〉 it might possibly seem fit to the prudence of those Times for a while to suppress it Nor is the conjecture of a learned Man to be despised who thinks that it might be intrusted in the keeping of John the Presbyter Scholar to our Apostle whence probably the report might arise that he who was only the Keeper was the Author of it 15. HIS Gospel succeeds written say some in Patmos and published at Ephesus but as Irenaeus and others more truly written by him after his return to Ephesus composed at the earnest intreaty and sollicitation of the Asian Bishops and Embassadors from several Churches in order whereunto he first caused them to proclaim a general Fast to seek the blessing of Heaven on so great and solemn an undertaking which being done he set about it And if we may believe the report of Gregory Bishop of Tours he tells us that upon a Hill near Ephesus there was a Proseucha or uncovered Oratory whither our Apostle used often to retire for Prayer and Contemplation and where he obtained of God that it might not Rain in that Place till he had finished his Gospel Nay he adds that even in his time no shower or storm ever came upon it Two causes especially contributed to the writing of it the one that he might obviate the early heresies of those times especially of Ebion Cerinthus and the rest of that crew who began openly to deny Christ's Divinity and that he had any existence before his Incarnation the reason why our Evangelist is so express and copious in that subject The other was that he might supply those passages of the Evangelical History which the rest of the Sacred Writers had omitted Collecting therefore the other three Evangelists he first set to his Seal ratifying the truth of them with his approbation and consent and then added his own Gospel to the rest principally insisting upon the Acts of Christ from the first commencing of his Ministery to the Death of John the Baptist wherein the others are most defective giving 〈◊〉 any account of the first Year of our Saviour's Ministry which therefore he made up in very large and particular Narrations He largely records as Nazianzen observes our Saviour's discourses but takes little notice of his Miracles probably because so fully and particularly related by the rest The subject of his writing is very sublime and mysterious mainly designing to prove Christ's Divinity eternal pre-existence creating of the World c. Upon which account Theodoret stiles his Gospel 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 a Theology which humane understandings can never fully penetrate and find out Thence generally by the Ancients he is resembled to an Eagle soaring aloft within the Clouds whither the weak eye of Man was unable to follow him hence peculiarly honoured with the title of The Divine as if due to none but him at least to him in a more eminent and extraordinary manner Nay the very Gentile-Philosophers themselves could not but admire his Writings Witness Amelius the famous Platonist and Regent of Porphyries School at Alexandria who quoting a passage out of the beginning of S. John's Gospel sware by Jupiter that this Barbarian so the proud Greeks counted and called all that differed from them had hit upon the right notion when he affirmed that the Word that made all things was in the beginning and in place of prime dignity and authority with God and was that God that created all things in whom every thing that was made had according to its nature its life and being that he was incarnate and clothed with a body wherein he manifested the glory and magnificence of his nature that after his death he returned to the repossession of Divinity and became the same God which he was before his assuming a body and taking the humane nature and flesh upon him I have no more to observe but that his Gospel was afterwards translated into Hebrew and kept by the Jews 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 among their secret Archives and Records in their Treasury at Tiberias where a Copy of it was found by one Joseph a Jew afterwards converted and whom 〈◊〉 the Great advanced to the honour of a Count of the Empire who breaking open the Treasury though he missed of mony found 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Books beyond all Treasure S. Matthew and S. John's Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles in Hebrew the reading whereof greatly contributed towards his Conversion 16. BESIDES these our Apostle wrote three Epistles the first whereof is Catholick calculated for all times and places containing most excellent rules for the conduct of the Christian life pressing to 〈◊〉 and purity of manners and not to rest in a naked and empty profession of Religion not to be led away with the crafty insinuations of Seducers antidoting Men against the poyson of the Gnostick-principles and practices to whom it is not to be doubted but that the Apostle had a more particular respect in this Epistle According to his wonted modesty he conceals his name it being of more concernment with 〈◊〉 Men what it is that is said than who it is that says it And this Epistle Eusebius tells us was universally received and never questioned by any anciently as appears 〈◊〉 S. Augustin inscribed to the Parthians though for what reason I am yet to learn unless as we hinted before it was because he himself had heretofore Preached in those Parts of the World The other two Epistles are but short and directed to particular Persons the one a Lady of honourable Quality the other the charitable and hospitable Gaius so kind a friend so courteous an entertainer of all indigent Christians These Epistles indeed were not of old admitted into the Canon nor are owned by the Church in Syria at this Day ascribed by many to the younger John Disciple to our Apostle But there is no just cause to question who was their Father seeing both the Doctrine phrase and design of them do sufficiently challenge our Apostle for their Author These are all the Books wherein it pleased the Holy Spirit to make use of S. John for its Pen man and Secretary in the composure whereof though his stile and character be not florid and elegant yet is it grave and simple short and perspicuous Dionysius of Alexandria tells us that in his Gospel and first Epistle his phrase is more neat and
with the thing it self which they supposed would be a federal Rite under the dispensation of the Messiah but only quarrelled with him for taking upon him to administer it when yet he denied himself to be one of the prime Ministers of this new state They said unto him why baptizest thou then if thou be not that Christ nor 〈◊〉 neither that 〈◊〉 Either of which had he owned himself they had not questioned his right to enter Proselytes by this way of Baptism It is called the Baptism of Repentance this being the main qualification that he required of those who took it upon them as the fittest means to dispose them to receive the Doctrine and Discipline of the Messiah and to intitle them to that pardon of sin which the Gospel brought along with it whence he is said to baptize in the Wilderness and to preach the Baptism of repentance for the remission of sins And the success was answerable infinite Multitudes flocking to it and were baptized of him in Jordan confessing their sins Nor is it the least part of his happiness that he had the honour to baptize his Saviour which though modestly declined our Lord put upon him and was accompanied with the most signal and miraculous attestations which Heaven could bestow upon it 5. AFTER his Preparatory Preachings in the Wilderness he was called to Court by Herod at least he was his frequent Auditor was much delighted with his plain and impartial Sermons and had a mighty reverence for him the gravity of his Person the strictness of his Manners the freedom of his Preaching commanding an awe and veneration from his Conscience and making him willing in many things to reform But the bluntness of the holy Man came nearer and touched the King in the tenderest part smartly reproving his adultery and incestuous embraces for that Prince kept Herodias his Brother Philip's Wife And now all corrupt interests were awakened to conspire his ruine Extravagant Lusts love not to be controll'd and check'd Herodias resents the asfront cannot brook disturbance in the pleasures of her Bed or the open challenging of her honour and therefore by all the arts of Feminine subtlety meditates revenge The issue was the Baptist is cast into Prison as the praeludium to a sadder fate For among other pleasures and scenes of mirth performed upon the King's Birth-day Herod being infinitely pleased with the Dancing of a young Lady Daughter of this Herodias promised to give her Her request and solemnly ratified his promise with an Oath She prompted by her Mother asks the Head of John the Baptist which the King partly out of a pretended reverence to his Oath partly out of a desire not to be interrupted in his unlawful pleasures presently granted and it was as quickly accomplished Thus died the Holy man a man strict in his conversation beyond the ordinary measures of an Anchoret bold and resolute faithful and impartial in his Office indued with the power and spirit of Elias a burning and a shining light under whose light the Jews rejoyced to sit exceedingly taken with his temper and principles He was the happy Messenger of the Evangelical tidings and in that respect more than a Prophet a greater not arising among them that were born of Women In short he was a Man loved of his Friends revered and honoured by his Enemies Josephus gives this character of him that he was a good man and pressed the Jews to the study of vertue to the practice of picty towards God and justice and righteousness towards men and to joyn themselves to his Baptism which he told them would then become effectual and acceptable to God when they did not only cleanse the body but purifie the mind by goodness and vertue And though he gives somewhat a different account of Herod's condemning him to dic from what is assigned in the Sacred History yet he confesses that the Jews universally looked upon the putting him to death as the cause of the miscarriage of Herod's Army and an evident effect of the Divine vengeance and displeasure The Jews in their Writings make honourable mention of his being put to death by Herod because reproving him for the company of his Brother Philip's Wife stiling him Rabbi Johanan the High-Priest and reckoning him one 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 of the wise men of Israel Where he is called High-Priest probably with respect to his being the Son of Zachariah Head or Chief of one of the XXIV Families or courses of the Priests who are many times called Chief or High-Priests in Scripture 6. THE Evangelical state being thus proclaimed and ushered in by the Preaching and Ministry of the Baptist our Lord himself appeared next more fully to publish and confirm it concerning whose Birth Life Death and Resurrection the Doctrine he delivered the Persons he deputed to Preach and convey it to the World and its success by the Ministry of the Apostles large particular accounts are given in the following work That which may be proper and material to observe in this place is what the Scripture so frequently takes notice of the excellency of this above the preceding dispensations especially that brought in by Moses so much magnified in the Old Testament and so passionately admired and adhered to by the Jews at this day Jesus is the Mediator 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 as the Apostle calls it of a better Covenant And better it is in several regards besides the infinite difference between the Persons who were imployed to introduce and settle them Moses and our Lord. The preheminence eminently appears in many instances whereof we shall remark the most considerable And first the Mosaick dispensation was almost wholly made up of types and shadows the Evangelical has brought in the truth and substance The Law was given by Moses but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. Their Ordinances were but shadows of good things to come sensible representations of what was to follow after the Body is Christ the perfection and accomplishment of their whole ritual Ministration Their Ceremonies were Figures of those things that are true the Land of Canaan typified Heaven Moses and Joshua were types of the Blessed Jesus and the Israelites after the flesh of the true Israel which is after the Spirit and all their Expiatory Sacrifices did but represent that Great Sacrifice whereby Christ offered up himself and by his own bloud purged away the sins of mankind indeed the most minute and inconsiderable circumstances of the Legal Oeconomy were intended as little lights that might gradually usher in the state of the Gospel A curious Artist that designs a famous and excellent piece is not wont to complete and finish it all at once but first with his Pencil draws some rude lines and rough draughts before he puts his last hand to it By such a method the wise God seems to have delivered the first draughts and Images of those things by Moses to the Church the substance
receive Honour but to seek it for desigus of pride and complacency or to make it rest in our hearts But when the hand of Vertue receives the honour and transmits it to God from our own head the desires of Nature are sufficiently satisfied and nothing of Religion contradicted And it is certain by all the experience of the world that in every state and order of men he that is most humble in proportion to that state is if all things else be symbolical the most honoured person For it is very observable that when God designed man to a good and happy life as the natural end of his creation to verifie this God was pleased to give him objects sufficient and apt to satisfie every appetite I say to satisfie it naturally not to satisfie those extravagancies which might be accidental and procured by the irregularity either of Will or Understanding not to answer him in all that his desires could extend to but to satisfie the necessity of every appetite all the desires that God made not all that man should make For we see even in those appetites which are common to men and beasts all the needs of Nature and all the ends of creation are served by the taking such proportions of their objects which are ordinate to their end and which in man we call Temperance not as much as they naturally can such as are mixtures of sexes merely for production of their kind eating and drinking for needs and hunger And yet God permitted our appetites to be able to extend beyond the limits of the mere natural design that God by restraining them and putting the setters of Laws upon them might turn natural desires into Sobriety and Sobriety into Religion they becoming servants of the Commandment And now we must not call all those swellings of appetites Natural inclination nor the satisfaction of such tumours and excrescencies any part of natural felicities but that which does just cooperate to those ends which perfect humane Nature in order to its proper End For the appetites of meat and drink and pleasures are but intermedial and instrumental to the End and are not made for themselves but first for the End and then to serve God in the instances of Obedience And just so is the natural desire of Honour intended to be a spur to Vertue for to Vertue only it is naturally consequent or to natural and political Superiority but to desire it beyond or besides the limit is the swelling and the disease of the desire And we can take no rule for its perfect value but by the strict limits of the natural End or the superinduced End of Religion in positive restraints 35. According to this discourse we may best understand that even the severest precepts of the Christian Law are very consonant to Nature and the first Laws of mankind Such is the Precept of Self-denial which is nothing else but a confining the Appetites within the limits of Nature for there they are permitted except when some greater purpose is to be served than the present answering the particular desire and whatsoever is beyond it is not in the natural order to Felicity it is no better than an itch which must be scratched and satisfied but it is unnatural But for Martyrdom it self quitting our goods losing lands or any temporal interest they are now become as reasonable in the present constitution of the world as taking unpleasant potions and suffering a member to be cauterized in sickness or disease And we see that death is naturally a less evil than a continual torment and by some not so resented as a great disgrace and some persons have chosen it for sanctuary and remedy And therefore much rather shall it be accounted prudent and reasonable and agreeable to the most perfect desires of Nature to exchange a House for a Hundred a Friend for a Patron a short Affliction for a lasting Joy and a temporal Death for an eternal Life For so the question is stated to us by him that understands it best True it is that the suffering of losses afflictions and death is naturally an evil and therefore no part of a natural Precept or prime injunction But when God having commanded instances of Religion Man will not suffer us to obey God or will not suffer us to live then the question is Which is most agreeable to the most perfect and reasonable desires of Nature to obey God or to obey man to fear God or to fear man to preserve our bodies or to preserve our Souls to secure a few years of uncertain and troublesome duration or an eternity of a very glorious condition Some men reasonably enough chuse to die for considerations lower than that of a happy Eternity therefore Death is not such an evil but that it may in some cases be desired and reasonably chosen and in some be recompensed at the highest rate of a natural value And if by accident we happen into an estate in which of necessity one evil or another must be suffered certainly nothing is more naturally reasonable and eligible than to chuse the least evil and when there are two good things propounded to our choice both which cannot be possessed nothing is more certainly the object of a prudent choice than the greater good And therefore when once we understand the question of Suffering and Self-denial and Martyrdom to this sence as all Christians do and all wise men do and all Sects of men do in their several perswasions it is but remembring that to live happily after this life is more intended to us by God and is more perfective of humane nature than to live here with all the prosperity which this state affords and it will evidently follow that when violent men will not let us enter into that condition by the ways of Nature and prime intendment that is of natural Religion Justice and Sobriety it is made in that case and upon that supposition certainly naturally and infallibly reasonable to secure the perfective and principal design of our Felicity though it be by such instruments which are as unpleasant to our senses as are the instruments of our restitution to Health since both one and the other in the present conjunction and state of affairs are most proportionable to Reason because they are so to the present necessity not primarily intended to us by God but superinduced by evil accidents and the violence of men And we not only find that Socrates suffered death in attestation of a God though he flattered and discoursed himself into the belief of an immortal reward De industria consultae aequanimitatis non de fiducia compertae veritatis as Tertullian says of him but we also find that all men that believed the Immortality of the Soul firmly and unmoveably made no scruple of exchanging their life for the preservation of Vertue with the interest of their great hope for Honour sometimes and oftentimes for their Countrey 36. Thus the
to be quitted But it is S. Chrysostom's Simile As a Lamb sucking the breast of its dam and Mother moves the head from one part to another till it hath found a distilling fontinel and then it fixes till it be satisfied or the 〈◊〉 cease dropping so should we in Meditation reject such materials as are barren like the tops of hills and six upon such thoughts which nourish and refresh and there dwell till the nourishment be drawn forth or so much of it as we can then temperately digest 14. Fifthly In Meditation strive rather for Graces than for Gifts for affections in the way of Vertue more than the overslowings of sensible Devotion and therefore if thou findest any thing by which thou mayest be better though thy spirit do not actually rejoyce or find any gust or relish in the manducation yet chuse it greedily For although the chief end of Meditation be Affection and not Determinations intellectual yet there is choice to be had of the Affections and care must be taken that the affections be desires of Vertue or repudiations and aversions from something criminal not joys and transportations spiritual comforts and complacencies for they are no part of our duty sometimes they are encouragements and sometimes rewards sometimes they depend upon habitude and disposition of body and seem great matters when they have little in them and are more bodily than spiritual like the gift of tears and yerning of the bowels and sometimes they are illusions and temptations at which if the Soul stoops and be greedy after they may prove like Hippomenes's golden Apples to Atalanta retard our course and possibly do some hazard to the whole race And this will be nearer reduced to practice if we consider the variety of matter which is fitted to the Meditation in several states of men travelling towards Heaven 15. For the first beginners in Religion are imployed in the mastering of their first Appetites casting out their Devils exterminating all evil customs lessening the proclivity of habits and countermanding the too-great forwardness of vicious inclinations and this which Divines call the Purgative way is wholly spent in actions of Repentance Mortification and Self-denial and therefore if a penitent person snatches at Comforts or the tastes of sensible Devotion his Repentance is too delicate it is but a rod of Roses and Jessamine If God sees the spirit broken all in pieces and that it needs a little of the oyl of gladness for its support and restitution to the capacities of its duty he will give it but this is not to be designed nor snatched at in the Meditation Tears of joy are not good expressions nor instruments of Repentance we must not gather grapes from thorns nor figs from thistles no refreshments to be looked for here but such only as are necessary for support and when God sees they are let not us trouble our selves he will provide them But the Meditations which are prompt to this Purgative way and practice of first beginners are not apt to produce delicacies but in the sequel and consequent of it Afterwards it brings forth the pleasant fruit of righteousness but for the present it hath no joy in it no joy of sense though much satisfaction to Reason And such are Meditations of the Fall of Angels and Man the Ejection of them from Heaven of our Parents from Paradise the Horrour and obliquity of Sin the Wrath of God the severity of his Anger Mortification of our body and spirit Self-denial the Cross of Christ Death and Hell and Judgment the terrours of an evil Conscience the insecurities of a Sinner the unreasonableness of Sin the troubles of Repentance the Worm and sting of a burthened spirit the difficulties of rooting out evil Habits and the utter abolition of Sin if these nettles bear honey we may fill our selves but such sweetnesses spoil the operations of these bitter potions Here therefore let your addresses to God and your mental prayers be affectionate desires of Pardon humble considerations of our selves thoughts of revenge against our Crimes designs of Mortification indefatigable solicitations for Mercy expresses of shame and confusion of face and he meditates best in the purgative way that makes these affections most operative and high 16. After our first step is taken and the punitive part of Repentance is resolved on and begun and put forward into good degrees of progress we then enter into the Illuminative way of Religion and set upon the acquist of Vertues and the purchase of spiritual Graces and therefore our Meditations are to be proportioned to the design of that imployment such as are considerations of the Life of Jesus Examples of Saints reasons of Vertue means of acquiring them designations of proper exercises to every pious habit the Eight Beatitudes the gifts and fruits of the Holy Ghost the Promises of the Gospel the Attributes of God as they are revealed to represent God to be infinite and to make us Religious the Rewards of Heaven excellent and select Sentences of holy persons to be as incentives of Piety These are the proper matter for Proficients in Religion But then the affections producible from these are love of vertue desires to imitate the Holy Jesus affections to Saints and holy persons conformity of choice subordination to God's will election of the ways of Vertue satisfaction of the Understanding in the ways of Religion and resolutions to pursue them in the midst of all discomforts and persecutions and our mental prayers or entercourse with God which are the present emanations of our Meditations must be in order to these affections and productions from those and in all these yet there is safety and piety and no seeking of our selves but designs of Vertue in just reason and duty to God and for his sake that is for his commandment And in all these particulars if there be such a sterility of spirit that there be no end served but of spiritual profit we are never the worse all that God requires of us is that we will live well and repent in just measure and right manner and he that doth so hath meditated well 17. From hence if a pious Soul passes to affections of greater sublimity and intimate and more immediate abstracted and immaterial love it is well only remember that the love God requires of us is an operative material and communicative love If ye love me keep my Commandments so that still a good life is the effect of the sublimest Meditation and if we make our duty sure behind us ascend up as high into the Mountain as you can so your ascent may consist with the securities of your person the condition of infirmity and the interests of your duty According to the saying of 〈◊〉 Our empty saying of 〈◊〉 and reciting verses in honour of his Name please not God so well as the imitation of him does advantage to us and a devout 〈◊〉 pleases the Spouse better than an idle Panegyrick Let your work
God at first designed to us And therefore as our Baptism is a separation of us from unbelieving people so the descent of the Holy Spirit upon us in our Baptism is a consigning or marking us for God as the Sheep of his pasture as the Souldiers of his Army as the Servants of his houshold we are so separated from the world that we are appropriated to God so that God expects of us Duty and Obedience and all Sins are acts of Rebellion and Undutifulness Of this nature was the sanctification of Jeremy and John the Baptist from their mothers womb that is God took them to his own service by an early designation and his Spirit marked them to a holy Ministery To this also relates that of S. Paul whom God by a decree separated from his mother's womb to the Ministery of the Gospel the 〈◊〉 did antedate the act of the Spirit which did not descend upon him until the day of his Baptism What these persons were in order to exteriour Ministeries that all the faithful are in order to Faith and Obedience consigned in Baptism by the Spirit of God to a perpetual relation to God in a continual service and title to his Promises And in this sence the Spirit of God is called 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 a Seal In whom also after that ye believed ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of Promise 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 The Water washes the body and the Spirit seals the Soul viz. to a participation of those Promises which he hath made and to which we receive a title by our Baptism 22. Secondly The second effect of the Spirit is Light or Illumination that is the holy Spirit becomes unto us the Author of holy thoughts and firm perswasions and sets to his seal that the Word of God is true into the belief of which we are then baptized and makes Faith to be a Grace and the Understanding resigned and the Will confident and the Assent stronger than the premises and the Propositions to be believed because they are beloved and we are taught the ways of Godliness after a new manner that is we are made to perceive the Secrets of the Kingdom and to love Religion and to long for Heaven and heavenly things and to despise the World and to have new resolutions and new perceptions and new delicacies in order to the establishment of Faith and its increments and perseverance 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 God sits in the Soul when it is illuminated in 〈◊〉 as if he sate in his Throne that is he rules by a firm perswasion and intire principles of Obedience And therefore Baptism is called in Scripture 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 and the baptized 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 illuminated Call to mind the former days in which you were illuminated and the same phrase is in the 6. to the Hebrews where the parallel places expound each other For that which S. Paul calls 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 illuminated he calls after 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 a receiving the knowledge of the truth and that you may perceive this to be wholly meant of Baptism the 〈◊〉 expresses it still by Synonyma's Tasting of the heavenly gift and made partakers of the Holy Ghost sprinkled in our hearts from an evil conscience and washed in our bodies with pure water all which also are a syllabus or collection of the several effects of the graces bestowed in Baptism But we are now instancing in that which relates most properly to the Understanding in which respect the Holy Spirit also is called Anointing or Unction and the mystery is explicated by S. John The Anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you and ye need not that any man teach you but as the same Anointing teacheth you of all things 23. Thirdly The Holy Spirit descends upon us in Baptism to become the principle of a new life to become a holy seed springing up to Holiness and is called by S. John 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the 〈◊〉 of God and the purpose of it we are taught by him Whosoever is 〈◊〉 of God that is he that is regenerated and entred into this New birth doth not 〈◊〉 sin for his seed remaineth in him and he cannot sin because he is born of God The Spirit of God is the Spirit of life and now that he by the Spirit is born anew he hath in him that principle which if it be cherished will grow up to life to life eternal And this is the Spirit of Sanctification the victory over the World the deletery of Concupiscence the life of the Soul and the perpetual principle of Grace sown in our spirits in the day of our Adoption to be the sons of God and members of Christ's body But take this Mystery in the words of S. Basil. There are two Ends proposed in Baptism to wit to abolish the body of Sin that we may no more bring forth fruit unto death and to live in the Spirit and to have our fruit to Sanctification The Water represents the image of death receiving the body in its bosom as in a Sepulchre but the quickning Spirit sends upon us a vigorous 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 power or 〈◊〉 even from the beginning renewing our Souls from the death of sin unto life For as our Mortification is 〈◊〉 in the water so the Spirit works life in us To this purpose is the discourse of S. Paul having largely discoursed of our being baptized into the death of 〈◊〉 he adds this as the Corollary of all He that is dead is freed from sin that is being mortified and buried in the waters of Baptism we have a new life of Righteousness put into us we are quitted from the dominion of Sin and are planted together in the likeness of Christ's Resurrection that henceforth we should not serve sin 24. Fourthly But all these intermedial Blessings tend to a glorious Conclusion for Baptism does also consign us to a holy Resurrection It takes the sting of death from us by burying us together with Christ and takes 〈◊〉 Sin which is the sting of death and then we shall be partakers of a blessed Resurrection This we are taught by S. Paul 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 ye not that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his Death For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his Death we shall be also in the likeness of his Resurrection That declares the real event in its due season But because Baptism consigns it and admits us to a title to it we are said with S. Paul to be risen with Christ in Baptism Buried with him in Baptism wherein also you are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God which hath raised him from the dead Which expression I desire to be remembred that by it we may better understand those other
natural nor gracious neither original nor derivative And well may we lament the death of poor babes that are 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 concerning whom if we neglect what is regularly prescribed to all that enter Heaven without any difference expressed or case reserved we have no reason to be comforted over our dead children but may weep as they that have no hope We may hope when our neglect was not the hinderance because God hath wholly taken the matter into his own hand and then it cannot miscarry and though we know nothing of the Children yet we know much of God's goodness but when God hath permitted it to us that is offered and permitted Children to our ministery what-ever happens to the Innocents we may well fear 〈◊〉 God will require the Souls at our hands and we cannot be otherwise secure but that it will be said concerning our children which S. Ambrose used in a case like this Anima illa potuit salva fieri si habuisset purgationem This Soul might have gone to God if it had been purified and washed We know God is good infinitely good but we know it is not at all good to tempt his goodness and he tempts him that leaves the usual way and pretends it is not made for him and yet hopes to be at his journey's end or expects to meet his Child in Heaven when himself shuts the door against him which for ought he knows is the only one that stands open S. Austin was severe in this Question against unbaptized Infants therefore he is called durus Pater Infantum though I know not why the original of that Opinion should be attributed to him since S. Ambrose said the same before him as appears in his words before quoted in the margent 25. And now that I have enumerated the Blessings which are consequent to Baptism and have also made apparent that Infants can receive these Blessings I suppose I need not use any other perswasions to bring Children to Baptism If it be certain they may receive these good things by it it is certain they are not to be hindred of them without the greatest impiety and sacriledge and uncharitableness in the world Nay if it be only probable that they receive these Blessings or if it be but possible they may nay unless it be impossible they should and so declared by revelation or demonstratively certain it were intolerable unkindness and injustice to our pretty Innocents to let their crying be unpitied and their natural misery eternally irremediable and their sorrows without remedy and their Souls no more capable of relief than their bodies of Physick and their death left with the sting in and their Souls without Spirits to go to God and no Angel-guardian to be assigned them in the Assemblies of the faithful and they not to be reckoned in the accounts of God and God's Church All these are sad stories 26. There are in Scripture very many other probabilities to perswade the Baptism of Infants but because the places admit of divers interpretations the Arguments have so many diminutions and the certainty that is in them is too fine for 〈◊〉 understandings I have chosen to build the ancient Doctrines upon such principles which are more easie and certain and have not been yet sullied and rifled with the contentions of an adversary This only I shall observe That the words of our Blessed Lord Unless a man be born of Water and the Spirit he cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven cannot be expounded to the exclusion of Children but the same expositions will also make Baptism not necessary for men for if they be both necessary ingredients Water and the Spirit then let us provide water and God will provide the Spirit if we bring wood to the Sacrifice he will provide a Lamb. And if they signifie distinctly one is ordinarily as necessary as the other and then Infants must be baptized or not be saved But if one be exegetical and explicative of the other and by Water and the Spirit is meant only the purification of the Spirit then where is the necessity of Baptism 〈◊〉 men It will be as the other Sacrament at most but highly convenient not simply necessary and all the other places will easily be answered if this be avoided But however these words being spoken in so 〈◊〉 a manner are to be used with fear and reverence and we must be infallibly sure by some certain infallible arguments that 〈◊〉 ought not to be baptized or we ought to fear concerning the 〈◊〉 of these decretery words I shall only add two things by way of Corollary to this Discourse 27. That the Church of God ever since her 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 hath for very many Ages consisted almost wholly of Assemblies of them who have been 〈◊〉 in their Infancy and although in the 〈◊〉 callings of the Gentiles the chiefest and most frequent Baptisms were of converted and 〈◊〉 persons and believers yet from the beginning also the Church hath baptized the Infants of Christian Parents according to the Prophecy of Isaiah Behold I will list up my hands to the Gentiles and set up a standard to the people and they shall bring thy sons in their arms and thy daughters shall be carried upon their shoulders Concerning which I shall not only bring the testimonies of the matter of 〈◊〉 but either a report of an Apostolical Tradition or some Argument from the Fathers which will make their testimony more effectual in all that shall relate to the Question 28. The Author of the Book of Ecclesiastical Hierarchy attributed to S. Denis the 〈◊〉 takes notice that certain unholy persons and enemies to the Christian Religion think it a ridiculous thing that Infants who as yet cannot understand the Divine Mysteries should be partakers of the Sacraments and that Professions and Abrenunciations should be made by others for them and in their names He answers that Holy men Governours of Churches have so taught having received a Tradition from their Fathers and Elders in Christ. By which answer of his as it appears that he himself was later than the Areopagite so it is so early by him affirmed that even then there was an ancient Tradition for the Baptism of Infants and the use of Godfathers in the ministery of the Sacrament Concerning which it having been so ancient a Constitution of the Church it were well if men would rather humbly and modestly observe than like scorners deride it in which they shew their own folly as well as immodesty For what 〈◊〉 or incongruity is it that our Parents natural or spiritual should stipulate for us when it is agreeable to the practice of all the laws and transactions of the world an effect of the Communion of Saints and of Christian Oeconomy For why may not Infants be stipulated for as well as we All were included in the stipulation made with Adam he made a losing bargain for himself and we smarted for his folly and if the
to him are forgiven not his own but the 〈◊〉 of another man None ought to be driven from Baptism and the Grace of God who is 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 gentle and pious unto all and therefore much less Infants who more 〈◊〉 our aid and more need the Divine mercy because in the first beginning of their birth crying and 〈◊〉 they can do nothing but call for mercy and relief 〈◊〉 this reason it was saith 〈◊〉 that they to whom the secrets of the Divine 〈◊〉 were committed 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 their 〈◊〉 because there was born with them the impurities of sin which did need material Ablution as a Sacrament of spiritual purification For that it may appear that our sins have a proper analogy to this Sacrament the Body it self is called the 〈◊〉 of 〈◊〉 and therefore the washing of the Body is not ineffectual towards the great work of Pardon and abolition Indeed after this Ablution there remains 〈◊〉 or the material part of our misery and sin For Christ by his death only took away that which when he did die for us he bare in his own body upon the tree Now Christ only bare the punishment of our sin and therefore we shall not die for it but the material part of the sin Christ bare not Sin could not come so near him it might make him sick and die but not disordered and stained He was pure from Original and Actual sins and therefore that remains in the body though the guilt and 〈◊〉 be 〈◊〉 off and changed into advantages and grace and the Actual are 〈◊〉 by the Spirit of Grace descending afterwards upon the Church and sent by our Lord to the same purpose 33. But it is not rationally to be answered what S. Ambrose says Quia omnis peccato 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 For it were strange that sin and misery should seize upon the innocent and most 〈◊〉 persons and that they only should be left without a Sacrament and an instrument of expiation And although they cannot consent to the present susception yet neither do they refuse and yet they consent as much to the grace of the Sacrament as to the prevarication of Adam and because 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 under this it were but reason they should be relieved by that And it 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 as Gregory 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 that they should be consigned and sanctified without their own knowledge than to die without their being sanctified for so it happened to the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 of Israel and if the conspersion and washing the door-posts with the bloud of a Lamb did sacramentally preserve all the first-born of Goshen it cannot 〈◊〉 thought impossible or unreasonable that the want of understanding in Children should hinder them from the blessing of a Sacrament and from being redeemed and washed with the bloud of the Holy Lamb who was 〈◊〉 for all from the beginning of the world 34. After all this it is not inconsiderable that we say the Church hath great power and authority about the Sacraments which is observable in many instances She appointed what persons she pleased and in equal power made an unequal dispensation and ministery The Apostles first dispensed all things and then they left off exteriour ministeries to attend to the Word of God and Prayer and S. Paul accounted it no part of his office to Baptize when he had been separated by imposition of hands at Antioch to the work of Preaching and greater ministeries and accounted that act of the Church the act of Christ saying Christ sent me not to baptize but to preach the Gospel They used various forms in the ministration of Baptism sometimes baptizing in the name of Christ sometimes expresly invocating the Holy and ever-Blessed Trinity one while 〈◊〉 baptize 〈◊〉 as in the Latine Church but in the Greek Let the servant of Christ be baptized And in all Ecclesiastical ministeries the Church invented the forms and in most things hath often changed them as in Absolution Excommunication And sometimes they baptized people under their profession of Repentance and then taught them as it happened to the Goaler and his family in whose case there was no explicit Faith 〈◊〉 in the mysteries of Religion so far as appears and yet he and not only he but all his house were baptized at that hour of the night when the Earthquake was terrible and the 〈◊〉 was pregnant upon them and this upon their Master's account as it is likely but others were baptized in the conditions of a previous Faith and a new-begun Repentance They baptized in Rivers or in Lavatories by dipping or by sprinkling for so we find that S. Laurence did as he went to martyrdom and so the Church did sometimes to Clinicks and so it is highly convenient to be done in Northern Countries according to the Prophecy of 〈◊〉 So shall 〈◊〉 sprinkle many Nations according as the typical expiations among the Jews were usually by sprinkling And it is fairly relative to the mystery to the sprinkling with the 〈◊〉 of Christ and the watering of the furrows of our Souls with the dew of Heaven to make them to bring forth fruit unto the Spirit and unto Holiness The Church sometimes dipt the Catechumen three times sometimes but once Some Churches use Fire in their Baptisms so do the Ethiopians and the custom was ancient in 〈◊〉 places And so in the other Sacrament sometimes they stood and sometimes kneeled and sometimes received it in the mouth and sometimes in the hand one while in 〈◊〉 another while in unlevened bread sometimes the wine and water were mingled sometimes they were pure and they admitted some persons to it sometimes which at other times they rejected sometimes the Consecration was made by one form sometimes by another and to conclude sometimes it was given to Infants sometimes not And she had power so to do for in all things where there was not a Commandment of Christ expressed or implied in the nature and in the end of the Institution the Church had power to alter the particulars as was most expedient or conducing to edification And although the after-Ages of the Church which refused to communicate Infants have 〈◊〉 some little things against the lawfulness and those Ages that used it found out some pretences for its 〈◊〉 yet both the one and the other had liberty to follow their own necessities so in all things they followed Christ. Certainly there is 〈◊〉 more reason why Insants may be Communicated than why they may not be Baptized And that this discourse may 〈◊〉 to its first intention although there is no record extant of any Church in the world and from the Apostles days inclusively to this very day ever refused to Baptize their Children yet if they had upon any present reason they might also change 〈◊〉 practice when the reason should be 〈◊〉 and therefore if there were nothing else in it yet the universal practice of all Churches in all Ages is abundantly sufficient to determine us and to
Resurrection of his body after three days death but he expressed it in the metaphor of the Temple Destroy this Temple and I will build it again in three days He spake of the Temple of his Body and they understood him of the Temple at Jerusalem and it was never rightly construed till it was accomplished 2. At this publick Convention of the Jewish Nation Jesus did many Miracles published himself to be the Messias and perswaded many Disciples amongst whom was Nicodemus a Doctor of the Law and a Ruler of the Nation he came by night to Jesus and affirmed himself to be convinced by the Miracles which he had seen for no man could do those miracles except God be with him When Jesus perceived his understanding to be so far disposed he began to instruct him in the great secret and mysteriousness of Regeneration telling him that every production is of the same nature and condition with its parent from flesh comes flesh and corruption from the Spirit comes spirit and life and immortality and nothing from a principle of nature could arrive to a supernatural end and therefore the only door to enter into the Kingdom of God was Water by the manuduction of the Spirit and by this Regeneration we are put into a new capacity of living a spiritual life in order to a spiritual and supernatural end 3. This was strange Philosophy to Nicodemus but Jesus bad him not to wonder for this is not a work of humanity but a fruit of God's Spirit and an issue of Predestination For the Spirit bloweth where it listeth and is as the wind certain and notorious in the effects but secret in the principle and in the manner of production And therefore this Doctrine was not to be estimated by any proportions to natural principles or experiments of sense but to the secrets of a new Metaphysick and abstracted separate Speculations Then Christ proceeds in his Sermon telling him there are yet higher things for him to apprehend and believe for this in respect of some other mysteriousness of his Gospel was but as Earth in comparison of Heaven Then he tells of his own descent from Heaven foretells his Death and Ascension and the blessing of Redemption which he came to work for mankind he preaches of the Love of the Father the Mission of the Son the rewards of Faith and the glories of Eternity he upbraids the unbelieving and impenitent and declares the differences of a holy and a corrupt Conscience the shame and fears of the one the confidence and serenity of the other And this is the summ of his Sermon to Nicodemus which was the fullest of mystery and speculation and abstracted sences of any that he ever made except that which he made immediately before his Passion all his other Sermons being more practical 4. From Jerusalem Jesus goeth into the Country of Judaea attended by divers Disciples whose understandings were brought into subjection and obedience to Christ upon confidence of the divinity of his Miracles There his Disciples did receive all comers and baptized them as John at the same time did and by that Ceremony admitted them to the Discipline and Institution according to the custom of the Doctors and great Prophets among the Jews whose Baptizing their Scholars was the ceremony of their Admission As soon as John heard it he acquitted himself in publick by renewing his former testimony concerning Jesus affirming him to be the Messias and now the time was come that Christ must increase and the Baptist suffer diminution for Christ came from above was above all and the summ of his Doctrine was that which he had heard and seen from the Father whom God sent to that purpose to whom God had set his seal that he was true who spake the words of God whom the Father loved to whō he gave the Spirit without measure and into whose hands God had delivered all things this was he whose testimony the world received not And that they might know not only what person they sleighted but how great Salvation also they neglected he summs up all his Sermons and finishes his Mission with this saying He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life and he that believeth not on the Son shall not see life but the wrath of God abideth on him 5. For now that the Baptist had fulfilled his Office of bearing witness unto Jesus God was pleased to give him his writ of ease and bring him to his reward upon this occasion John who had so learned to despise the world and all its exteriour vanities and impertinent relations did his duty justly and so without respect of persons that as he reproved the people for their prevarications so he spared not Herod for his but abstaining from all expresses of the spirit of scorn and asperity mingling no discontents interests nor mutinous intimations with his Sermons he told Herod it was not lawful for him to have his Brother's wife For which Sermon he felt the furies and malice of a woman's spleen was cast into prison and about a year after was sacrificed to the scorn and pride of a lustful woman and her immodest daughter being at the end of the second year of Christ's Preaching beheaded by Herod's command who would not retract his promise because of his honour and a rash vow he made in the gayety of his Lust and complacencies of his riotous dancings His head was brought up in a dish and made a Festival-present to the young girl who gave it to her mother a Cruelty that was not known among the Barbarisms of the worst of people to mingle banquetings with bloud and sights of death an insolency and inhumanity for which the 〈◊〉 Orators accused Q. Flaminius of Treason because to satisfie the wanton cruelty of Placentia he caused a condemned slave to be killed at supper and which had no precedent but in the furies of Marius who caused the head of the Consul Antonius to be brought up to him in his Feasts which he handled with much pleasure and insolency 6. But God's Judgments which sleep not long found out Herod and marked him for a Curse For the Wise of Herod who was the Daughter of Aretas a King of Arabia Petraea being repudiated by paction with Herodias provoked her Father to commence a War with Herod who prevailed against Herod in a great Battel defeating his whole Army and forcing him to an inglorious flight which the Jews generally expounded to be a Judgment on him for the unworthy and barbarous execution and murther of John the Baptist God in his wisdom and severity making one sin to be the punishment of another and neither of them both to pass without the signature of a Curse And Nicephorus reports that the dancing daughter of Herodias passing over a frozen lake the ice brake and she fell up to the neck in water and her head was parted from her body by the violence of the fragments shaked by the water and
represented in ceremony by the Immersion appointed to be the Rite of that Sacrament And then it is that God pours forth together with the Sacramental waters a salutary and holy fountain of Grace to wash the Soul from all its stains and impure adherences And therefore this first access to Christ is in the style of Scripture called Regeneration the New Birth Redemption Renovation Expiation or Atonement with God and Justification And these words in the New Testament relate principally and properly to the abolition of sins committed before Baptism For we are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Jesus Christ Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation to declare his Rightcousness for the remission of sins that are past To declare I say at this time his righteousness And this is that which S. Paul calls Justification by Faith that boasting might be excluded and the grace of God by Jesus made exceeding glorious For this being the proper work of Christ the first entertainment of a Disciple and manifestation of that state which is first given him as a favour and next intended as a duty is a total abolition of the precedent guilt of sin and leaves nothing remaining that can condemn we then freely receive the intire and perfect effect of that Atonement which Christ made for us we are put into a condition of innocence and favour And this I say is done regularly in Baptism and S. Paul expresses it to this sense after he had enumerated a series of Vices subjected in many he adds and such were some of you but ye are washed but ye are sanctified There is nothing of the old guilt remanent when ye were washed ye were sanctified or as the Scripture calls it in another place Ye were redeemed from your vain conversation 5. For this Grace was the formality of the Covenant Repent and believe the Gospel Repent and be converted so it is in S. Peter's Sermon and your sins shall be done away that was the Covenant But that Christ chose Baptism for its signature appears in the Parallel Repent and be baptized and wash away your sins For Christ loved his Church and gave himself for it That he might sanctifie and cleanse it with the washing of water by the Word That he might present it to himself a glorious Church not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing but that it should be holy and without blemish The Sanctification is integral the Pardon is universal and immediate 6. But here the process is short no more at first but this Repent and be baptized and wash away your sins which Baptism because it was speedily administred and yet not without the preparatives of Faith and Repentance it is certain those predispositions were but instruments of reception actions of great facility of small employment and such as supposing the person not unapt did confess the infiniteness of the Divine mercy and fulness of the redemption is called by the Apostle a being justified freely 7. Upon this ground it is that by the Doctrine of the Church heathen persons strangers from the 〈◊〉 of grace were invited to a confession of Faith and dereliction of false Religions with a promise that at the very first resignation of their persons to the service of Jesus they should obtain full pardon It was S. Cyprian's counsel to old Demetrianus Now in the evening of thy days when thy Soul'is almost expiring repent of thy sins believe in Jesus and turn Christian and although thou art almost in the embraces of death yet thou shalt be comprehended of immortality Baptizatus ad horam securus bine exit saith S. Austin A baptized person dying immediately shall live eternally and gloriously And this was the case of the Thief upon the Cross he confessed Christ and repented of his sins and begged pardon and did acts enough to facilitate his first access to Christ and but to remove the hindrances of God's favour then he was redeemed and reconciled to God by the death of Jesus that is he was pardoned with a full instantaneous integral and clear Pardon with such a pardon which declared the glory of God's mercies and the infiniteness of Christ's merits and such as required a more reception and entertainment on man's part 8. But then we having received so great a favour enter into Covenant to correspond with a proportionable endeavour the benefit of absolute Pardon that is Salvation of our Souls being not to be received till the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord all the intervall we have promised to live a holy life in obedience to the whole Discipline of Jesus That 's the condition on our part And if we prevaricate that the mercy shewn to the blessed Thief is no argument of hope to us because he was saved by the mercies of the first access which corresponds to the Remission of sins we receive in Baptism and we shall perish by breaking our own promises and obligations which Christ passed upon us when he made with us the Covenant of an intire and gracious Pardon 9. For in the precise Covenant there is nothing else described but Pardon so given and ascertained upon an Obedience persevering to the end And this is clear in all those places of Scripture which express a holy and innocent life to have been the purpose and design of Christ's death for us and redemption of us from the former estate Christ bare our sins in his own body on the tree that we being dead unto sins should live unto righteousness by whose stripes ye are healed Exinde from our being healed from our dying unto sin from our being buried with Christ from our being baptized into his death the end of Christ's dying for us is that we should live unto righteousness Which was also highly and prophetically expressed by S. Zachary in his divine Ecstasie This was the oath which he sware to our Fore-father Abraham That he would grant unto us that we being delivered out of the hands of our Enemies might serve him without fear In holiness and righteousness before him all the days of our life And S. Paul discourses to this purpose pertinently and largely For the grace of God that bringeth Salvation hath appeared to all men Teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts Hi sunt Angeli quibus in lavacro renunciavimus saith Tertullian Those are the evil Angels the Devil and his works which we deny or renounce in Baptism we should live soberly righteously and godly in this present world that is lead a whole life in the pursuit of universal holiness Sobriety Justice and Godlinèss being the proper language to signifie our Religion and respects to God to our neighbours and to our selves And that this was the very end of our dying in Baptism and the design of Christ's manifestation of
nature and manner of the present communication Only this last because it is more malicious and a declension from a greater grace is something like the fall of Angels And of this the Emperour Julian was a sad example 19. But as these are degrees immediately next and a little less so the hopes of pardon are the more visible Simon Magiss spake a word or at least thought against the Holy Ghost he thought he was to be bought with mony Concerning him S. Peter pronounced Thou art in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity Yet repent pray God if perhaps the thought of thine heart may be forgiven thee Here the matter was of great difficulty but yet there was a possibility 〈◊〉 at least no impossibility of recovery declared And therefore S. Jude bids us of some to have compassion making a difference and others save with fear pulling them out of the fire meaning that their condition is only not desperate And still in descent retaining the same proportion every lesser sin is easier pardoned as better consisting with the state of Grace the whole Spirit is not destroyed and the body of sin is not introduced Christ is not quite ejected out of possession but like an oppressed Prince still continues his claim and such is his mercy that he will still do so till all be lost or that he is provoked by too much violence or that Antichrist is put in substitution and sin reigns in 〈◊〉 mortal body So that I may use the words of Saint John These things I write unto you that ' you sin not But if any man sin we have an Advocate with the 〈◊〉 Jesus Christ the Righteous And he is a propitiation for our sins and not for ours only but for the sins of the whole world That is plainly Although the design of the Gospel be that we should erect a Throne for Christ to reign in our spirits and this doctrine of Innocence be therefore preached that ye sin not yet if one be overtaken in a fault despair not Christ is our Advocate and he is the Propitiation he did propitiate the Father by his death and the benefit of that we receive at our first access to him but then he is our Advocate too and prays perpetually for our perseverance or restitution respectively But his purpose is and he is able so to do to keep you from falling and to present you faultless before the presence of his Glory 20. This consideration I intend should relate to all Christians of the world And although by the present custom of the Church we are baptized in our infancy and do not actually reap that fruit of present Pardon which persons of a mature age in the primitive Church did for we yet need it not as we shall when we have past the calentures of Youth which was the time in which the wisest of our Fathers in Christ chose for their Baptism as appears in the instance of S. Ambrose S. Austin and divers others yet we must remember that there is a Baptism of the Spirit as well as of water and when-ever this happens whether it be together with that Baptism of water as usually it was when only men and women of years of discretion were baptized or whether it be ministred in the rite of Confirmation which is an admirable suppletory of an early Baptism and intended by the Holy Ghost for a corroborative of Baptismal grace and a defensative against danger or that lastly it be performed by an internal and merely spiritual Ministery when we by acts of our own election verifie the promise made in Baptism and so bring back the Rite by receiving the effect of Baptism that is when-ever the filth of our flesh is washt away and that we have the answer of a pure conscience towards God which S. Peter affirms to be the true Baptism and which by the purpose and design of God it is expected we should not defer longer than a great reason or a great necessity enforces when our sins are first explated and the sacrifice and death of Christ is made ours and we made God's by a more immediate title which at some time or other happens to all Christians that pretend to any hopes of Heaven then let us look to our standing and take heed lest we fall When we once have tasted of the heavenly gift and are made partakers of the Holy Ghost and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the world to come that is when we are redeemed by an actual mercy and presential application which every Christian that belongs to God is at some time or other of his life then a fall into a deadly crime is highly dangerous but a relapse into a contrary estate is next to desperate 21. I represent this sad but most true Doctrine in the words of S. Peter If after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ they are again entangled therein and overcome the latter end is worse with them than the beginning For it had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness than after they have known it to turn from the holy Commandment delivered unto them So that a relapse after a state of Grace into a state of sin into confirmed habits is to us a great sign and possibly in it self it is more than a sign even a state of reprobation and final abscission 22. The summ of all is this There are two states of like opposite terms First Christ redeems us from our vain conversation and reconciles us to God putting us into an intire condition of Pardon Favour Innocence and Acceptance and becomes our Lord and King his Spirit dwelling and reigning in us The opposite state to this is that which in Scripture is called a crucifying the Lord of Life a doing despite to the Spirit of grace a being entangled in the pollutions of the world the Apostasie or falling away an impotency or disability to do good viz. of such who cannot cease from sin who are slaves of sin and in whom sin reigns in their bodies This condition is a full and integral deletery of the first it is such a condition which as it hath no Holiness or remanent affections to Vertue so it hath no hope or revelation of a mercy because all that benefit is lost which they received by the death of Christ and the first being lost there remains no more sacrifice for sins but a certain fearful expectation of Judgment But between these two states stand all those imperfections and single delinquencies those slips and falls those parts of recession and apostasie those grievings of the Spirit and so long as any thing of the first state is left so long we are within the Covenant of grace so long we are within the ordinary limits of mercy and the Divine compassion we are in possibilities of
Shepherd in the 〈◊〉 Afterwards they admitted Pictures but not before the time of Constantine for in the Council of Eliberis they were forbidden And in succession of time the scruples lessened with the danger and all the way they signified their belief to be that this Commandment was only so far retained by Christ as it relied upon natural reason or was a particular instance of the great Commandment that is Images were forbidden where they did dishonour God or lessen his reputation or estrange our duties or became Idols or the direct matter of superstitious observances charms or senseless confidences but they were permitted to represent the Humanity of Christ to remember Saints and Martyrs to recount a story to imprint a memory to do honour and reputation to absent persons and to be the instruments of a relative civility and esteem But in this particular infinite care is to be taken of Scandal and danger of a forward and zealous ignorance or of a mistaking and peevish confidence and where a Society hath such persons in it the little good of Images must not be violently retained with the greater danger and certain offence of such persons of whom consideration is to be had in the cure of Souls I only add this that the first Christians made no scruple of saluting the Statues of their Princes and were confident it made no intrenchment upon the natural prohibition contained in this Commandment because they had observed that exteriour inclinations and addresses of the body though in the lowest manner were not proper to God but in Scripture found also to be communicated to Creatures to Kings to Prophets to Parents to Religious persons and because they found it to be death to do affront to the Pictures and Statues of their Emperors they concluded in reason which they also saw verified by the practice and opinion of all the world that the respect they did at the Emperor's Statue was accepted as a veneration to his person But these things are but sparingly to be drawn into Religion because the customs of this world are altered and their opinions new and many who have not weak understandings have weak Consciences and the necessity for the entertainment of them is not so great as the offence is or may be 18. Thou shalt not take the Name of the Lord thy God in vain This our Blessed Saviour repeating expresses it thus It hath been said to them of old time Thou shalt not for swear thy self to which Christ adds out of Num. 30. 2. But thou shalt perform thy Oaths unto the Lord. The meaning of the one we are taught by the other We must not invocate the Name of God in any promise in vain that is with a Lie which happens either out of levity that we change our purpose which at first we really intended or when our intention at that instant was fallacious and contradictory to the undertaking This is to take the Name of God that is to use it to take it into our mouths for vanity that is according to the perpetual style of Scripture for a Lie Every one hath spoken vanity to his neighbour that is he hath lied unto him for so it follows with flattering lips and with a double heart and swearing deceitfully is by the Psalmist called lifting up his soul unto vanity And Philo the Jew who well understood the Law and the language of his Nation renders the sence of this Commandment to be to call God to witness to a Lie And this is to be understood only in Promises for so Christ explains it by the appendix out of the Law Thou shalt perform thy Oaths For lying in Judgment which is also with an Oath or taking God's Name for witness is forbidden in the Ninth Commandment To this Christ added a farther restraint For whereas by the Natural Law it was not unlawful to swear by any Oath that implied not Idolatry 〈◊〉 the belief of a false God I say any grave and prudent Oath when they spake a grave truth and whereas it was lawful for the 〈◊〉 in ordinary entercourse to swear by God so they did not swear to a Lie to which also swearing to an impertinency might be reduced by a proportion of reason and was so accounted of in the practice of the Jews but else and in other cases they us'd to swear by God or by a Creature respectively for they that swear by him shall be commended saith the Psalmist and swearing to the Lord of Hosts is called speaking the language of Canaan Most of this was rescinded Christ forbad all swearing not only swearing to a Lie but also swearing to a truth in common affairs not only swearing commonly by the Name of God but swearing commonly by Heaven and by the Earth by our Head or by any other Oath only let our speech be yea or nay that is plainly affirming or denying In these I say Christ corrected the licence and vanities of the Jews and Gentiles For as the Jews accounted it Religion to name God and therefore would not swear by him but in the more solemn occasions of their life but in trifles they would swear by their Fathers or the Light of Heaven or the Ground they trode on so the Greeks were also careful not to swear by the Gods lightly much less fallaciously but they would swear by any thing about them or near them upon an occasion as vain as their Oath But because these Oaths are either indirectly to be referred to God and Christ instances in divers or else they are but a vain testimony or else they give a Divine honour to a Creature by making it a Judge of truth and discerner of spirits therefore Christ seems to forbid all forms of Swearing whatsoever In pursuance of which law Basilides being converted at the prayers of Potamiaena a Virgin-Martyr and required by his fellow-souldiers to swear upon some occasion then happening answered it was not lawful for him to swear for he was a Christian and many of the Fathers have followed the words of Christ in so severe a sence that their words seem to admit no exception 19. But here a grain of salt must be taken lest the letter destroy the spirit First it is certain the Holy Jesus forbad a custom of Swearing it being great irreligion to despise and lessen the Name of God which is the instrument and conveyance of our Adorations to him by making it common and applicable to trifles and ordinary accidents of our life He that swears often many times swears false and however lays by that reverence which being due to God the Scripture determines it to be due at his Name His Name is to be loved and feared And therefore Christ commands that our communication be yea yea or nay nay that is our ordinary discourses should be simply affirmative or negative In order to this Plutarch affirms out of Phavorinus that the
more fallible in the application whether we have not mingled some little minutes of malice in the body of infirmities and how much will bear excuse and in what time and to what persons and to what degrees and upon what endeavours we shall be pardoned So that all the interval between our losing baptismal grace and the day of our death we walk in a cloud having lost the certain knowledge of our present condition by our prevarications And indeed it is a very hard thing for a man to know his own heart And he that shall observe how often himself hath been abused by confidences and secret imperfections and how the greatest part of Christians in name only do think themselves in a very good condition when God knows they are infinitely removed from it and yet if they did not think themselves well and sure it is unimaginable they should sleep so quietly and walk securely and consider negligently and yet proceed 〈◊〉 he that considers this and upon what weak and false principles of Divinity men have raised their strengths and perswasions will easily consent to this that it is very easie for men to be deceived in taking estimate of their present condition of their being in the state of Grace 5. But there is great variety of men and difference of degrees and every step of returning to God may reasonably add one degree of hope till at last it comes to the certainty and top of hope Many men believe themselves to be in the state of Grace and are not many are in the state of Grace and are infinitely fearful they are out of it and many that are in God's favour do think they are so and they are not deceived And all this is certain For some sin that sin of Presumption and Flattery of themselves and some good persons are vexed with violent fears and temptations to despair and all are not and when their hopes are right yet some are strong and some are weak for they that are well perswaded of their present condition have perswasions as different as are the degrees of their approach to innocence and he that is at the highest hath also such abatements which are apt and proper for the conservation of humility and godly 〈◊〉 I am guilty of nothing saith S. Paul but I am not hereby justified meaning thus Though I be innocent for ought I know yet God who judges otherwise than we judge may find something to reprove in me It is God that judges that is concerning my degrees of acceptance and hopes of glory If the person be newly recovering from a state of sin because his state is imperfect and his sin not dead and his lust active and his habit not quite extinct it is easie for a man to be too hasty in pronouncing well He is wrapt up in a cloak of clouds hidden and encumbred and his brightest day is but twilight and his discernings dark conjectural and imperfect and his heart is like a cold hand newly applied to the fire full of pain and whether the heat or the cold be strongest is not easie to determine or like middle colours which no man can tell to which of the extremes they are to be accounted But according as persons grow in Grace so they may grow in confidence of their present condition It is not certain they will do so for sometimes the beauty of the tabernacle is covered with goats hair and skins of beasts and holy people do infinitely deplore the want of such Graces which God observes in them with great complacency and acceptance Both these cases say that to be certainly perswaded of our present condition is not a Duty Sometimes it is not possible and sometimes it is better to be otherwise But if we consider of this Certainty as a Blessing and a Reward there is no question but in a great and an eminent Sanctity of life there may also be a great confidence and fulness of perswasion that our present being is well and gracious and then it is certain that such persons are not deceived For the thing it self being sure if the perswasion answers to it it is needless to dispute of the degree of certainty and the manner of it Some persons are heartily perswaded of their being reconciled and of these some are deceived and some are not deceived and there is no sign to distinguish them but by that which is the thing signified a holy life according to the strict rules of Christian Discipline tells what persons are confident and who are presumptuous But the certainty is reasonable in none but in old Christians habitually holy persons not in new Converts or in lately lapsed people for concerning them we find the Spirit of God speaking with clauses of restraint and ambiguity a perhaps and who knoweth and peradventure the thoughts of thy heart may be forgiven thee God may have mercy on 〈◊〉 And that God hath done so they only have reason to be confident whom God hath blessed with a lasting continuing Piety and who have wrought out the habits of their precontracted vices 6. But we find in Scripture many precepts given to holy persons being in the state of Grace to secure their standing and perpetuate their present condition For He that endureth unto the end he only shall be saved said our Blessed Saviour and He that standeth let him take heed lest he fall and Thou standest by Faith be not high-minded but fear and Work out your Salvation with fear and trembling Hold fast that 〈◊〉 hast and let no man take the crown from thee And it was excellent advice for one Church had lost their first love and was likely also to lose their crown And S. Paul himself who had once entred within the veil and seen unutterable glories yet was forced to endure hardship and to fight against his own disobedient appetite and to do violence to his inclinations for fear that whilest he preached to others himself should become a cast-away And since we observe in holy story that Adam and Eve fell in Paradise and the Angels fell in Heaven it self stumbling at the very jewels which pave the streets of the celestial Jerusalem and in Christ's family one man for whom his Lord had prepared a throne turned Devil and that in the number of the Deacons it is said that one turned Apostate who yet had been a man full of the Holy Ghost it will lessen our train and discompose the gayeties of our present confidence to think that our securities cannot be really distinguished from danger and uncertainties For every man walks upon two legs one is firm invariable constant and eternal but the other is his own God's Promises are the objects of our Faith but the events and final conditions of our Souls which is consequent to our duty can at the best be but the objects of our Hope And either there must in this be a less certainty or
are God's tokens marks upon the body of insected persons and declare the malignity of the disease and bid us all beware of those determined crimes 6. Thirdly But then in these and all other accidents we must first observe from the cause to the effect and then judge from the effect concerning the nature and the degree of the cause We cannot conclude This family is lessened beggered or extinct therefore they are guilty of Sacrilege but thus They are Sacrilegious and God hath blotted out their name from among the posterities therefore this Judgment was an express of God's anger against Sacrilege the Judgment will not conclude a Sin but when a Sin infers the Judgment with a legible character and a prompt signification not to understand God's choice is next to stupidity or carelesness Arius was known to be a seditious heretical and dissembling person and his entrails descended on the earth when he went to cover his feet it was very suspicious that this was the punishment of those sins which were the worst in him But he that shall conclude Arius was an Heretick or Seditious upon no other ground but because his bowels gushed out begins imprudently and proceeds uncharitably But it is considerable that men do not arise to great crimes on the sudden but by degrees of carelesness to lesser impieties and then to clamorous sins And God is therefore said to punish great crimes or actions of highest malignity because they are commonly productions from the spirit of Reprobation they are the highest ascents and suppose a Body of sin And therefore although the Judgment may be intended to punish all our sins yet it is like the Syrian Army it kills all that are its enemies but it hath a special commission to fight against none but the King of Israel because his death would be the dissolution of the Body And if God humbles a man for his great sin that is for those acts which combine and consummate all the rest possibly the Body of sin may separate and be apt to be scattered and subdued by single acts and instruments of mortification and therefore it is but reasonable in our making use of God's Judgments upon others to think that God will rather strike at the greatest crimes not only because they are in themselves of greatest malice and iniquity but because they are the summe total of the rest and by being great progressions in the state of sin suppose all the rest included and we by proportioning and observing the Judgment to the highest acknowledge the whole body of sin to lie under the curse though the greatest only was named and called upon with the voice of thunder And yet because it sometimes happens that upon the violence of a great and new occasion some persons leap into such a sin which in the ordinary course of sinners uses to be the effect of an habitual and growing state then if a Judgment happens it is clearly appropriate to that one great crime which as of it self it is equivalent to a vicious habit and interrupts the acceptation of all its former contraries so it meets with a curse such as usually God chuses for the punishment of a whole body and state of sin However in making observation upon the expresses of God's anger we must be careful that we reflect not with any bitterness or scorn upon the person of our calamitous Brother left we make that to be an evil to him which God intends for his benefit if the Judgment was medicinal or that we increase the load already great enough to sink him beneath his grave if the Judgment was intended for a final abscission 7. Fourthly But if the Judgments descend upon our selves we are to take another course not to enquire into particulars to find out the proportions for that can only be a design to part with just so much as we must needs but to mend all that is amiss for then only we can be secure to remove the Achan when we keep nothing within us or about us that may provoke God to jealousie or wrath And that is the proper product of holy fear which God intended should be the first effect of all his Judgments and of this God is so careful and yet so kind and provident that fear might not be produced always at the expence of a great suffering that God hath provided for us certain prologues of Judgment and keeps us waking with alarms that so he might reconcile his mercies with our duties Of this nature are Epidemical diseases not yet arrived at us prodigious Tempests Thunder and loud noises from Heaven and he that will not fear when God speaks so loud is not yet made soft with the impresses and perpetual droppings of Religion Venerable Bede reports of S. Chad that if a great gust of Wind suddenly arose he presently made some holy ejaculation to beg favour of God for all mankind who might possibly be concerned in the effects of that Wind but if a Storm succeeded he fell prostrate to the earth and grew as violent in Prayer as the Storm was 〈◊〉 at Land or Sea But if God added Thunder and Lightning he went to the Church and there spent all his time during the Tempest in reciting Litanies Psalms and other holy Prayers till it pleased God to restore his favour and to seem to forget his anger And the good Bishop added this reason Because these are the extensions and stretchings forth of God's hand and yet he did not strike but he that trembles not when he sees God's arm held forth to strike us understands neither God's mercies nor his own danger he neither knows what those horrours were which the People saw from mount Sinai nor what the glories and amazements shall be at the great day of Judgment And if this Religious man had seen Tullus Hostilius the Roman King and Anastasius a Christian Emperor but a reputed Heretick struck dead with Thunderbolts and their own houses made their urns to keep their ashes in there could have been no posture humble enough no Prayers devout enough no place holy enough nothing sufficiently expressive of his fear and his humility and his adoration and Religion to the almighty and infinite power and glorious mercy of God sending out his Emissaries to denounce war with designs of peace A great Italian General seeing the sudden death of Alfonsus Duke of Ferrara kneeled down instantly saying And shall not this sight make me religious Three and twenty thousand fell in one night in the Assyrian Camp who were all slain for Fornication And this so prodigious a Judgement was recorded in Scripture for our example and affrightment that we should not with such freedom entertain a crime which destroyed so numerous a body of men in the darkness of one evening Fear and Modesty and universal Reformation are the purposes of God's Judgments upon us or in our neighbourhood 8. Fifthly Concerning Judgments happening to a Nation or a Church the
Breach of publick faith desending Pirates and the like When a publick Judgment comes upon a Nation these things are to be thought upon that we may not think our selves acquitted by crying out against Swearing and Drunkenness and Cheating in manufactures which unless they be of universal dissemination and made national by diffusion are paid for upon a personal score and the private infelicities of our lives will either expiate or punish them severely But while the People mourns for those sins of which their low condition is capable sins that may produce a popular Fever or perhaps the Plague where the misery dwells in Cottages and the Princes often have indemnity as it was in the case of David yet we may not hope to appease a War to master a Rebellion to cure the publick Distemperatures of a Kingdom which threaten not the People only or the Governours also but even the Government it self unless the sins of a more publick capacity be cut off by publick declarations or other acts of national Justice and Religion But the duty which concerns us all in such cases is that every man in every capacity should enquire into himself and for his own portion of the Calamity put in his own symbol of Emendation for his particular and his Prayers for the publick interest in which it is not safe that any private persons should descend to particular censures of the crimes of Princes and States no not towards God unless the matter be notorious and past a question but it is a sufficient assoilment of this part of his duty if when he hath set his own house in order he would pray with indefinite significations of his charity and care of the publick that God would put it into the hearts of all whom it concerns to endeavour the removal of the sin that hath brought the exterminating Angel upon the Nation But yet there are sometimes great lines drawn by God in the expresses of his anger in some Judgments upon a Nation and when the Judgment is of that danger as to invade the very Constitution of a Kingdom the proportions that Judgments many times keep to their sins intimate that there is some National sin in which either by diffusion or representation or in the direct matter of sins as false Oaths unjust Wars wicked Confederacies or ungodly Laws the Nation in the publick capacity is delinquent 12. For as the Nation hath in Sins a capacity distinct from the sins of all the People inasmuch as the Nation is united in one Head guarded by a distinct and a higher Angel as Persia by Saint Michael transacts affairs in a publick right transmits insluence to all particulars from a common fountain and hath entercourse with other collective Bodies who also distinguish from their own particulars so likewise it hath Punishments distinct from those infelicities which vex particulars Punishments proportionable to it self and to its own Sins such as are Change of Governments of better into worse of Monarchy into Aristocracy and so to the lowest ebb of Democracy Death of Princes Infant Kings Forein Invasions Civil Wars a disputable Title to the Crown making a Nation tributary Conquest by a Foreiner and which is worst of all removing the Candlestick from a People by extinction of the Church or that which is necessary to its conservation the several Orders and Ministeries of Religion and the last hath also proper sins of its own analogy such as are false Articles in the publick Confessions of a Church Schism from the Catholick publick Scandals a general Viciousness of the Clergy an Indifferency in Religion without warmth and holy fires of Zeal and diligent pursuance of all its just and holy interests Now in these and all parallel cases when God by Punishments hath probably marked and distinguished the Crime it concerns publick persons to be the more forward and importunate in consideration of publick Irregularities and for the private also not to neglect their own particulars for by that means although not certainly yet probably they may secure themselves from falling in the publick calamity It is not infallibly sure that holy persons shall not be smitten by the destroying Angel for God in such deaths hath many ends of mercy and some of Providence to serve but such private and personal emendations and Devotions are the greatest securities of the men against the Judgment or the evil of it preserving them in this life or wasting them over to a better Thus many of the Lord's champions did fall in battel and the armies of the 〈◊〉 did twice prevail upon the juster People of all Israel and the Greek Empire hath declined and shrunk under the fortune and power of the Ottoman Family and the Holy Land which was twice possessed by Christian Princes is now in the dominion of unchristened Saracens and in the production of these alterations many a gallant and pious person suffered the evils of war and the change of an untimely death 13. But the way for the whole Nation to proceed in cases of epidemical Diseases Wars great Judgments and popular Calamities is to do in the publick proportion the same that every man is to do for his private by publick acts of Justice Repentance Fastings pious Laws and execution of just and religious Edicts making peace quitting of unjust interests declaring publickly against a Crime protesting in behalf of the contrary Vertue or Religion and to this also every man as he is a member of the body politick must co-operate that by a Repentance in diffusion help may come as well as by a Sin of universal dissemination the Plague was hastened and invited the rather But in these cases all the work of discerning and pronouncing concerning the cause of the Judgment as it must be without asperity and only for designs of correction and emendation so it must be done by Kings and Prophets and the assistence of other publick persons to whom the publick is committed Josua cast lots upon Achan and discovered the publick trouble in a private instance and of old the Prophets had it in commission to reprove the popular iniquity of Nations and the consederate sins of Kingdomes and in this Christianity altered nothing And when this is done modestly prudently humbly and penitently oftentimes the tables turn immediately but always in due time and a great Alteration in a Kingdome becomes the greatest Blessing in the world and fastens the Church or the Crown or the publick Peace in bands of great continuance and security and it may be the next Age shall feel the benefits of our Sufferance and Repentance And therefore as we must endeavour to secure it so we must not be too decretory in the case of others or disconsolate or diffident in our own when it may so happen that all succeeding generations shall see that God pardoned us and loved us even when he smote us Let us all learn to fear and walk humbly The Churches of Laodicea and the Colossians suffered
he did and the expresses of his power saying He saved others himself he cannot save others saying Let him come down from the Cross if he be the King of the Jews and we will believe in him and others according as their Malice was determined by phancy and occasion added weight and scorn to his pains and of the two Malefactors that were crucified with him one reviled him saying If thou be the CHRIST save thy self and us And thus far the Devil prevailed undoing himself in riddle provoking men to do despite to Christ and to heighten his Passion out of hatred to him and yet doing and promoting that which was the ruine of all his own Kingdom and potent mischiefs like the Jew who in indignation against Mercury threw stones at his Image and yet was by his Superiour judged idolatrous that being the manner of doing honour to the Idol among the Gentiles But then Christ who had upon the Cross prayed for his enemies and was heard of God in all that he desired felt now the beginnings of success For the other Thief whom the present pains and circumstances of Jesus's Passion had softned and made believing reproved his fellow for not fearing God confessed that this death happened to them deservedly but to Jesus causelesly and then prayed to Jesus Lord remember me when thou comest into thy Kingdom Which combination of pious acts and miraculous Conversion Jesus entertained with a speedy promise of a very great felicity promising that upon that very day he should be with him in Paradise 33. Now there were standing by the Cross the Mother of Jesus and her Sister and Mary Magdalen and John And Jesus being upon his Death-bed although he had no temporal estate to bestow yet he would make provision for his Mother who being a Widow and now childless was likely to be exposed to necessity and want and therefore he did arrogate John the beloved Disciple into Marie's kindred making him to be her adopted Son and her to be his Mother by fiction of Law Woman behold thy son and Man behold thy Mother And from that time forward John took her home to his own house which he had near mount Sion after he had sold his inheritance in Galilee to the High Priest 34. While these things were doing the whole frame of Nature seemed to be dissolved and out of order while their LORD and Creator suffered For the Sun was so darkened that the Stars appeared and the Eclipse was prodigious in the manner as well as in degree because the Moon was not then in Conjunction but full and it was noted by Phlegon the freed man of the Emperor Hadrian by Lucian out of the Acts of the Gauls and Dionysius while he was yet a Heathen excellent Scholars all great Historians and Philosophers who also noted the day of the week and hour of the day agreeing with the circumstances of the Cross. For the Sun hid his head from beholding such a prodigy of sin and sadness and provided a veil for the nakedness of Jesus that the women might be present and himself die with modesty 35. The Eclipse and the Passion began at the sixth hour and endured till the ninth about which time Jesus being tormented with the unsufferable load of his Father's wrath due for our sins and wearied with pains and heaviness cried out My God my God why hast thou forsaken me and as it is thought repeated the whole two and twentieth Psalm which is an admirable Narrative of the Passion full of Prayer and sadness and description of his pains at first and of Eucharist and joy and prophecy at the last But these first words which it is certain and recorded that he spake were in a language of it self or else by reason of distance not understood for they thought he had called for Elias to take him down from the Cross. Then Jesus being in the agonies of a high Fever said I thirst And one ran and filled a spunge with vinegar wrapping it with hyssop and put it on a reed that he might drink The Vinegar and the Spunge were in Executions of condemned persons set to stop the too violent issues of bloud and to prolong the death but were exhibited to him in scorn mingled with gall to make the mixture more horrid and ungentle But Jesus tasted it only and refused the draught And now knowing that the Prophecies were fulfilled his Father's wrath appeased and his torments satisfactory he said It is finished and crying with a loud voice Father into thy hands I commend my spirit he bowed his head and yielded up his spirit into the hands of God and died hastning to his Father's glories Thus did this glorious Sun set in a sad and clouded West running speedily to shine in the other world 36. Then was the veil of the Temple which separated the secret Mosaick Rites from the eyes of the people rent in the midst from the top to the bottom and the Angels Presidents of the Temple called to each other to depart from their seats and so great an Earthquake happened that the rocks did rend the mountains trembled the graves opened and the bodies of dead persons arose walking from their coemeteries to the Holy City and appeared unto many and so great apprehensions and amazements happened to them all that stood by that they departed smiting their breasts with sorrow and fear and the Centurion that ministred at the execution said Certainly this was the Son of God and he became a Disciple renouncing his military imployment and died a Martyr 37. But because the next day was the Jews Sabbath and a Paschal Festival besides the Jews hastened that the bodies should be taken from the Cross and therefore sent to 〈◊〉 to hasten their death by breaking their legs that before Sun-set they might be taken away according to the Commandment and be buried The souldiers therefore came and brake the legs of the two Thieves but espying and wondring that Jesus was already dead they brake not his legs for the Scripture foretold that a bone of him should not be broken but a souldier with his lance pierced his side and immediately there streamed out two rivulets of Water and Bloud But the Holy Virgin-Mother whose Soul during this whole passion was pierced with a sword and sharper sorrows though she was supported by the comforts of Faith and those holy Predictions of his Resurrection and future glories which Mary had laid up in store against this great day of expence now that she saw her Holy Son had suffered all that our necessities and their malice could require or inflict caused certain ministers with whom she joyned to take her dead Son from the Cross whose Body when she once got free from the nails she kissed and embraced with entertainments of the nearest vicinity that could be expressed by a person that was holy and sad and a Mother weeping for her dead Son 38. But she was highly
and pleasure 2. Love desires to do all good to its beloved object and that is the greatest love which gives us the greatest blessings And the Sacrament therefore is the argument of his greatest love for in it we receive the honey and the honey-comb the Paschal Lamb with his bitter herbs Christ with all his griefs and his Passion with all the salutary effects of it 3. Love desires to be remembred and to have his object in perpetual representment And this Sacrament Christ designed to that purpose that he who is not present to our eyes might always be present to our spirits 4. Love demands love again and to desire to be beloved is of it self a great argument of love And as God cannot give us a greater blessing than his Love which is himself with an excellency of relation to us superadded so what greater demonstration of it can he make to us than to desire us to love him with as much earnestness and vehemency of desire as if we were that to him which he is essentially to us the author of our being and our blessing 5. And yet to consummate this Love and represent it to be the greatest and most excellent the Holy Jesus hath in this Sacrament designed that we should be united in our spirits with him incorporated to his body partake of his Divine nature and communicate in all his Graces and Love hath no expression beyond this that it desires to be united unto its object So that what Moses said to the men of Israel What nation is so great who hath God so nigh unto them as the Lord our God is in all things for which we call upon him we can enlarge in the meditation of this Holy Sacrament for now the Lord our God calls upon us not only to be nigh unto him but to be all one with him not only as he was in the Incarnation flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone but also to communicate in spirit in grace in nature in Divinity it self 7. Upon the strength of the premisses we may sooner take an estimate of the Graces which are conveyed to us in the reception and celebration of this Holy Sacrament and Sacrifice For as it is a Commemoration and representment of Christ's Death so it is a commemorative Sacrifice as we receive the symbols and the mystery so it is a Sacrament In both capacities the benefit is next to infinite First For whatsoever Christ did at the Institution the same he commanded the Church to do in remembrance and repeated rites and himself also does the same thing in Heaven for us making perpetual Intercession for his Church the body of his redeemed ones by representing to his Father his death and sacrifice there he sits a high Priest continually and offers still the same one perfect sacrifice that is still represents it as having been once finished and consummate in order to perpetual and never-failing events And this also his Ministers do on earth they offer up the same Sacrifice to God the sacrifice of the Cross by prayers and a commemorating rite and representment according to his holy Institution And as all the effects of Grace and the titles of glory were purchased for us on the Cross and the actual mysteries of Redemption perfected on earth but are applied to us and made effectual to single persons and communities of men by Christ's Intercession in Heaven so also they are promoted by acts of Duty and Religion here on earth that we may be workers together with God as S. Paul expresses it and in virtue of the eternal and all-sufficient Sacrifice may offer up our prayers and our duty and by representing that sacrifice may send up together with our prayers an instrument of their graciousness and acceptation The Funerals of a deceased friend are not only performed at his first interring but in the monthly minds and anniversary commemorations and our grief returns upon the fight of a picture or upon any instance which our dead friend desired us to preserve as his memorial we celebrate and exhibite the Lora's death in sacrament and symbol and this is that great express which when the Church offers to God the Father it obtains all those blessings which that sacrifice purchased Themistocles snatch'd up the son of King Admetus and held him between himself and death to mitigate the rage of the King and prevailed accordingly Our very holding up the Son of God and representing him to his Father is the doing an act of mediation 〈◊〉 advantage to our selves in the virtue and efficacy of the Mediatour As Christ is a Priest in Heaven for ever and yet does not sacrifice himself afresh nor yet without a sacrifice could he be a Priest but by a daily ministration and intercession represents his sacrifice to God and offers himself as sacrificed so he does upon earth by the ministery of his servants he is offered to God that is he is by Prayers and the Sacrament represented or offered up to God as sacrificed which in effect is a celebration of his death and the applying it to the present and future necessities of the Church as we are capable by a ministery like to his in Heaven It follows then that the celebration of this Sacrifice be in its proportion an instrument of applying the proper Sacrifice to all the purposes which it first designed It is ministerially and by application an instrument propitiatory it is Eucharistical it is an homage and an act of adoration and it is impetratory and obtains for us and for the whole Church all the benefits of the sacrifice which is now celebrated and applied that is As this Rite is the remembrance and ministerial celebration of Christ's sacrifice so it is destined to do honour to God to express the homage and duty of his servants to acknowledge his supreme dominion to give him thanks and worship to beg pardon blessings and supply of all our needs And its profit is enlarged not only to the persons celebrating but to all to whom they design it according to the nature of Sacrifices and Prayers and all such solemn actions of Religion 8. Secondly If we consider this not as the act and ministery of Ecclesiastical persons but as the duty of the whole Church communicating that is as it is a 〈◊〉 so it is like the Springs of Eden from whence issue many Rivers or the Trees of celestial Jerusalem bearing various kinds of Fruit. For whatsoever was offered in the Sacrifice is given in the Sacrament and whatsoever the Testament bequeaths the holy Mysteries dispense 1. He that 〈◊〉 my 〈◊〉 and drinketh my bloud abideth in me and 〈◊〉 in him Christ in his Temple and his resting-place and the worthy Communicant is in Sanctuary and a place of protection and every holy Soul having feasted at his Table may say as S. Paul 〈◊〉 live yet not I but Christ liveth in me So that to live is Christ Christ is
Purity the meek persons of Content and Humility yet vicious and corrupted palats find also the gust of death and Coloquintida The Sybarites invited their women to their solemn sacrifices a full year before the solemnity that they might by previous dispositions and a long foresight 〈◊〉 with gravity and fairer order the celebration of the rites And it was a reasonable answer of Pericles to one that ask'd him why he being a Philosophical and severe person came to a wedding trimmed and adorned like a Paranymph I come adorned to an adorned person trimmed to a Bridegroom And we also if we come to the marriage of the Son with the Soul which marriage is celebrated in this sacred Mystery and have not on a wedding garment shall be cast into outer darkness the portion of undressed and unprepared souls 12. For from this Sacrament are excluded all unbaptized persons and such who lie in a known sin of which they have not purged themselves by the apt and proper instruments of Repentance For if the Paschal Lamb was not to be eaten but by persons pure and clean according to the sanctifications of the Law the Son of God can less endure the impurities of the Spirit than God could 〈◊〉 the uncleannesses of the Law S. Paul hath given us instruction in this First let a man examine himself and so let him eat For he that eats and drinks unworthily eats and drinks damnation to himself not discerning the Lord's body That is although in the Church of Corinth by reason of the present Schism the publick Discipline of the Church was neglected and every man permitted to himself yet even then no man was disobliged from his duty of private Repentance and holy preparations to the perception of so great a mystery that the Lord's body may be discerned from common nutriment Now nothing can so unhallow and desecrate the rite as the remanent affection to a sin or a crime unrepented of And Self-examination is prescribed not for it self but in order to abolition of sin and death for it self is a relative term and an imperfect duty whose very nature is in order to something beyond it And this was in the Primitive Church understood to so much severity that if a man had relapsed after one publick Repentance into a 〈◊〉 crime he was never again readmitted to the holy Communion and the Fathers of the Council of 〈◊〉 call it a mocking and jesting at the Communion of our Lord to give it once again after a Repentance and a relapse and a second or third postulation And indeed we use to make a sport of the greatest instruments of Religion when we come to them after an habitual vice whose face we have it may be wetted with a tear and breathed upon it with a sigh and abstained from the worst of crimes for two or three days and come to the Sacrament to be purged and to take our rise by going a little back from our sin that afterwards we may leap into it with more violence and enter into its utmost angle This is dishonouring the body of our Lord and deceiving our selves Christ and Belial cannot cohabit unless we have left all our sins and have no fondness of affection towards them unless we hate them which then we shall best know when we leave them and with complacency entertain their contraries then Christ hath washed our feet and then he invites us to his holy Supper Hands dipt in bloud or polluted with unlawful gains or stained with the spots of flesh are most unfit to handle the holy body of our Lord and minister nourishment to the Soul Christ loves not to enter into the mouth full of cursings oathes blasphemies revilings or evil speakings and a heart full of vain and vicious thoughts stinks like the lake of Sodom he finds no rest there and when he enters he is vexed with the unclean conversation of the impure inhabitants and flies from thence with the wings of a Dove that he may retire to pure and whiter habitations S. Justin Martyr reckoning the predispositions required of every faithful soul for the entertainment of his Lord says that it is not lawful for any to eat the Eucharist but to him that is washed in the laver of regeneration sor the remission of sins that believes Christ's Doctrine to be true and that lives according to the Discipline of the Holy Jesus And therefore S. Ambrose refused to minister the holy Communion to the Emperor Theodostus till by publick Repentance he had reconciled himself to God and the society of faithsul people after the furious and cholerick rage and slaughter committed at Thessalonica And as this act was like to cancellating and a circumvallation of the holy mysteries and in that sence and so far was a proper duty sor a Prelate to whose dispensation the rites are committed so it was an act of duty to the Emperor of paternal and tender care not of proper authority or jurisdiction which he could not have over his Prince but yet had a care and the supravision of a Teacher over him whose Soul S. Ambrose had betrayed unless he had represented his indisposition to communicate in expressions of Magisterial or Doctoral authority and truth For this holy Sacrament is a nourishment of spiritual life and therefore cannot with effect be ministred to them who are in the state of spiritual death it is giving a Cordial to a dead man and although the outward rite be ministred yet the Grace of the Sacrament is not communicated and therefore it were well that they also abstained from the rite it self For a fly can boast of as much priviledge as a wicked person can receive from this holy Feast and oftentimes pays his life sor his access to sorbidden delicacies as certainly as they 13. It is more generally thought by the Doctors of the Church that our Blessed Lord administred the Sacrament to Judas although he knew he sold him to the Jews Some others deny it and suppose Judas departed presently after the sop given him before he communicated However it was Christ who was Lord of the Sacraments might dispense it as he pleased but we must minister and receive it according to the rules he hath since described but it becomes a precedent to the Church in all succeeding Ages although it might also have in it something extraordinary and apter to the first institution for because the fact of Judas was secret not yet made notorious Christ chose rather to admit him into the rites of external Communion than to separate him with an open shame for a fault not yet made open For our Blessed Lord did not reveal the man and his crime till the very time of ministration if Judas did communicate But if Judas did not communicate and that our Blessed Lord gave him the sop at the Paschal Supper 〈◊〉 at the interval between it and the institution of his own it is certain that
Judas went out as soon as he was discovered and left this part of Discipline upon record That when a crime is made publick and notorious the Governours of the Church according to their power are to deny to give the blessed Sacrament till by Repentance such persons be restored In private sins or sins not known by solemnities of Law or evidence of fact good and bad are entertained in publick communion and it is not to be accounted a crime in them that minister it because they cannot avoid it or have not competent authority to separate persons whom the publick act of the Church hath not separated but if once a publick separation be made or that the fact is notorious and the 〈◊〉 of Law is in such cases already declared they that come and he that rejects them not both pollute the bloud of the everlasting Covenant And here it is applicable what God spake by the Prophet If thou wilt separate the precious thing from the vile thou shalt be as my mouth But this is wholly a matter of Discipline arbitrary and in the power of the Church nothing in it of Divine commandment but what belongs to the Communicants themselves For S. Paul reproves them that receive disorderly but gives no orders to the Corinthian Presbyters to reject any that present themselves Neither did our Blessed Lord leave any Commandment concerning it nor hath the holy Scripture given rules or measures concerning its actual reduction to practice neither who are to be separated nor for what offences nor by what authority nor who is to be the Judge And indeed it is a judgment that can only belong to God who knows the secrets of hearts the degrees of every sin the beginnings and portions of Repentance the sincerity of purposes by what thoughts and designs men begin to be accepted who are hypocrites and who are true men But when many and common men come to judge they are angry upon trisling mistakes and weak disputes they call that Sin that angers their Party or grieves their Interest they turn Charity into Pride and Admonition into Tyranny they set up a tribunal that themselves may sit higher not that their Brethren may walk more securely And then concerning sins in most cases they are most incompetent 〈◊〉 they do not know all their kinds they miscall many they are ignorant of the ingredient and constituent parts and circumstances they themselves make false measures and give out according to them when they please and when they list not they can change the balance When the matter is publick evident and notorious the man is to be admonished of his danger by the Minister but not by him to be forced from it for the power of the Minister of holy things is but the power of a Preacher and a Counsellor of a Physician and a Guide it hath in it no coercion or violence but what is indulged to it by humane laws and by consent which may vary as its 〈◊〉 Add to this that the Grace of God can begin the work of Repentance in an instant and in what period or degree of Repentance the holy Communion is to be administred no Law of God declares which therefore plainly allows it to every period and leaves no difference except where the Discipline of the Church and the authority of the Supreme power doth intervene For since we do not find in Scripture that the Apostles did drive from the communion of holy things even those whom they delivered over to Satan or other Censures we are left to consider that in the nature of the thing those who are in the state of weakness and 〈◊〉 have more need of the solemn Prayers of the Church and therefore by presenting themselves to the holy Sacrament approach towards that Ministery which is the most effectual cure especially since the very presenting themselves is an act of Religion and therefore supposes an act of Repentance and Faith and other little introductions to its fair reception and if they may be prayed for and prayed with why they may not also be communicated which is the 〈◊〉 of the greatest Prayer is not yet clearly revealed This discourse relates only to private Ministery for when I affirm that there is no command from Christ to all his Ministers to refuse whom they are pleased to call scandalous or sinners I intend to defend good people from the tyranny and arbitrary power of those great companies of Ministers who in so many hundred places would have a Judicature supreme in Spirituals which would be more intolerable than if they had in one Province 20000 Judges of life and death But when the power of separation and interdiction is only in some more eminent and authorized persons who take publick cognizance of causes by solemnities of Law and exercise their power but in some rare instances and then also for the publick interest in which although they may be 〈◊〉 yet they are the most competent and likely Judges much of the inconvenience which might otherwise follow is avoided and then it only remains that they consider in what cases it can be a competent and a proper infliction upon sinners to take from them that which is the means and ministery of grace and recovery whether they have any warrant from Christ or precedent in the Apostles practice and how far As for the sorms and 〈◊〉 of the Primitive Church they were hugely different sometimes for one cause sometimes for another Sometimes whole Churches have been excommunicated sometimes the criminal and all his houshold for his offence as it happened in the Excommunication of Andronicus and Thoas in Synesius in the year 411 sometimes they were absolved and restored by Lay Confessors sometimes by Emperors as it happened to Eusebius of Nicomedia and Theognis of Nice who were absolved by Constantine from the sentence of Excommunication inflicted by the Nicene Fathers and a Monk did excommunicate Theodosius the younger So that in this there can be no certainty to make a measure and a rule The surest way most agreeable to the precedents of Scripture and the Analogy of the Gospel is that by the word of their proper ministery all sinners should be separate from the holy Communion that is threatned by the words of God with damnation and fearful temporal dangers if themselves knowing an unrepented sin and a remanent affection to sin to be within them shall dare to profane that Body and Bloud of our Lord by so impure an address The evil is to themselves and if the Ministers declare this powerfully they are acquitted But concerning other judgments or separations The Supreme power can forbid all assembling and therefore can permit them to all and therefore can deny them or grant them to single persons and therefore when he by Laws makes separations in order to publick benefit they are to be obeyed but it is not to be endured that single Presbyters should upon vain pretences erect so high a tribunal
this instance there was a rare mixture of effects as there was in Christ of Natures the voice of a Man and the power of God For it is observed by the Doctors of the Primitive Ages that from the Nativity of our Lord to the day of his Death the Divinity and Humanity did so communicate in effects that no great action passed but it was like the Sun shining through a cloud or a beauty with a thin veil drawn over it they gave illustration and testimony to each other The Holy Jesus was born a tender and a crying Infant but is adored by the Magi as a King by the Angels as their GOD. He is circumcised as a Man but a name is given him to signifie him to be the SAVIOUR of the World He flies into Egypt like a distressed Child under the conduct of his helpless Parents but as soon as he enters the Country the Idols fall down and confess his true Divinity He is presented in the Temple as the Son of man but by Simeon and Anna he is celebrated with divine praises for the MESSIAS the SON OF GOD. He is baptized in Jordan as a Sinner but the Holy Ghost descending upon him proclaimed him to be the well-beloved of God He is hungry in the Desart as a Man but sustained his body without meat and drink for forty days together by the power of his Divinity There he is tempted of Satan as a weak Man and the Angels of light minister unto him as their supreme Lord. And now a little before his death when he was to take upon him all the affronts miseries and exinanitions of the most miserable he receives testimonies from above which are most wonderful For he was tranfigured upon Mount Tabor entred triumphantly into Jerusalem had the acclamations of the people when he was dying he darkned the Sun when he was dead he opened the sepulchres when he was fast nailed to the Cross he made the earth to tremble now when he suffers himself to be apprehended by a guard of Souldiers he strikes them all to the ground only by replying to their answer that the words of the Prophet might be verified Therefore my people shall know my Name therefore they shall know in that day that I am he that doth speak behold it is I. 10. The Souldiers and servants of the Jews having recovered from their fall and risen by the permission of Jesus still persisted in their enquiry after him who was present ready and desirous to be sacrificed He therefore permitted himself to be taken but not his Disciples for he it was that set them their bounds and he secured his Apostles to be witnesses of his suffering and his glories and this work was the Redemption of the world in which no man could have an active share he alone was to tread the wine-press and time enough they should be called to a fellowship of sufferings But Jesus went to them and they bound him with cords and so began our liberty and redemption from slavery and sin and cursings and death But he was bound faster by bands of his own his Father's Will and Mercy Pity of the world Prophecies and Mysteries and Love held him fast and these cords were as strong as death and the cords which the Souldiers malice put upon his holy hands were but symbols and figures his own compassion and affection were the morals But yet he undertook this short restraint and condition of a prisoner that all sorts of persecution and exteriour calamities might be hallowed by his susception and these pungent sorrows should like bees sting him and leave their sting behind that all the sweetness should remain for us Some melancholick Devotions have from uncertain stories added sad circumstances of the first violence done to our Lord That they bound him with three cords and that with so much violence that they caused bloud to start from his tender hands That they 〈◊〉 then also upon him with a violence and incivility like that which their Fathers had used towards Hur the brother of Aaron whom they choaked with impure spittings into his throat because he refused to consent to the making a golden Calf These particulars are not transmitted by certain Records Certain it is they wanted no malice and now no power for the Lord had given himself into their hands 11. S. Peter seeing his Master thus ill used asked Master shall we strike with the sword and before he had his answer cut off the ear of Malchus Two swords there were in Christ's family and S. Peter bore one either because he was to kill the Paschal Lamb or according to the custom of the Country to secure them against beasts of prey which in that region were frequent and dangerous in the night But now he used it in an unlawful war he had no competent authority it was against the Ministers of his lawful Prince and against our Prince we must not draw a sword for Christ himself himself having forbidden us as his kingdom is not of this world so neither were his defences secular he could have called for many legions of Angels for his guard if he had so pleased and we read that one Angel slew 185000 armed men in one night and therefore it was a vast power which was at the command of our Lord and he needs not such low auxiliaries as an army of Rebels or a navy of Pirates to 〈◊〉 his cause he first lays the foundation of our happiness in his sufferings and hath ever since supported Religion by patience and suffering and in poverty and all the circumstances and conjunctures of improbable causes Fighting for Religion is certain to destroy Charity but not certain to support Faith S. Peter therefore may use his keys but he is commanded to put up his sword and he did so and presently he and all his fellows fairly ran away and yet that course was much the more Christian for though it had in it much infirmity yet it had no malice In the mean time the Lord was pleased to touch the ear of Malchus and he cured it adding to the first instance of power in throwing them to the ground an act of miraculous mercy curing the wounds of an enemy made by a friend But neither did this pierce their callous and obdurate spirits but they led him in uncouth ways and through the brook Cedron in which it is said the ruder souldiers plunged him and passed upon him all the affronts and rudenesses which an insolent and cruel multitude could think of to signifie their contempt and their rage And such is the nature of evil men who when they are not softned by the instruments and arguments of Grace are much hardned by them such being the purpose of God that either Grace shall cure sin or accidentally increase it that it shall either pardon it or bring it to greater punishment for so I have seen healthful medicines abused by the incapacities of a
their friends and consider not that their friends are bound to accept the trouble as themselves to accept the sickness that to tend the sick is at that time allotted for the portion of their work and that Charity receives it as a duty and makes that duty to be a pleasure And however if our friends account us a burthen let us also accept that circumstance of affliction to our selves with the same resignation and indifferency as we entertain its occasion the Sickness it self and pray to God to enkindle a flame of Charity in their breasts and to make them compensation for the charge and trouble we put them to and then the care is at an end But others excuse their discontent with a more religious colour and call the disease their trouble and affliction because it impedes their other parts of Duty they cannot preach or study or do exteriour assistences of Charity and Alms or acts of Repentance and Mortification But it were well if we could let God proportion out our work and set our task let him chuse what vertues we shall specially exercise and when the will of God determines us it is more excellent to endure afflictions with patience equanimity and thankfulness than to do actions of the most pompous Religion and laborious or expensive Charity not only because there is a deliciousness in actions of Religion and choice which is more agreeable to our spirit than the toleration of sickness can be which hath great reward but no present pleasure but also because our suffering and our imployment is consecrated to us when God chuses it and there is then no mixture of imperfection or secular interest as there may be in other actions even of an excellent Religion when our selves are the chusers And let us also remember that God hath not so much need of thy works as thou hast of Patience Humility and Resignation S. Paul was far a more considerable person than thou canst be and yet it pleased God to shut him in prison for two years and in that intervall God secured and promoted the work of the Gospel and although 〈◊〉 was an excellent Minister yet God laid a sickness upon him and even in his disease gave him work enough to do though not of his own chusing And therefore fear it not but the ends of Religion or Duty will well enough proceed without thy health and thy own eternal interest when God so pleases shall better be served by Sickness and the Vertues which it occasions than by the opportunities of Health and an ambulatory active Charity 18. When thou art resigned to God use fair and appointed means for thy Recovery trust not in thy spirit upon any instrument of health as thou art willing to be disposed by God so look 〈◊〉 for any event upon the stock of any other cause or principle be ruled by the Physician and the people appointed to tend thee that thou neither become troublesome to them nor give any sign of impatience or a peevish spirit But this advice only means that thou do not disobey them out of any evil principle and yet if Reason be thy guide to chuse any other aid or sollow any other counsel use it temperately prudently and charitably It is not intended for a Duty that thou shouldst drink Oil in stead of Wine if thy Minister reach it to thee as did Saint Bernard nor that thou shouldst accept a Cake tempered with Linseed-oil in stead of Oil of Olives as did F. Stephen mentioned by 〈◊〉 but that thou tolerate the defects of thy servants and accept the evil accidents of thy disease or the unsuccessfulness of thy Physician 's care as descending on thee from the hands of God Asa was noted in Scripture that in his sickness he sought not to the Lord but to the Physicians Lewis the XI of France was then the miserablest person in his Kingdom when he made himself their servant courting them with great pensions and rewards attending to their Rules as Oracles and from their mouths waited for the sentence of life or death We are in these great accidents especially to look upon God as the disposer of the events which he very often disposes contrary to the expectation we may have of probable causes and sometimes without Physick we recover and with Physick and excellent applications we grow worse and worse and God it is that makes the remedies unprosperous In all these and all other accidents if we take care that the sickness of the Body derive not it self into the Soul nor the pains of one procure impatience of the other we shall alleviate the burthen and make it supportable and profitable And certain it is if men knew well to bear their sicknesses humbly towards God charitably towards our Ministers and chearfully in themselves there were no greater advantage in the world to be received than upon a sick bed and that alone hath in it the benefits of a Church of a religious Assembly of the works of Charity and labour And since our Soul 's eternal well-being depends upon the Charities and Providence and Veracity of God and we have nothing to show for it but his word and Goodness and that is infinitely enough it is but reason we be not more nice and scrupulous about the usage and accommodation of our Body if we accept at God's hand sadness and driness of affection and spiritual desertion patiently and with indifferency it is unhandsome to express our selves less satisfied in the accidents about our body 19. But if the Sickness proceed to Death it is a new charge upon our spirits and God calls for a final and intire Resignation into his hands And to a person who was of humble affections and in his life-time of a mortified spirit accustomed to bear the yoke of the Lord this is easie because he looks upon Death not only as the certain condition of Nature but as a necessary transition to a state of Blessedness as the determination of his sickness the period of humane inselicities the last change of condition the beginning of a new strange and excellent life a security against sin a freedom from the importunities of a Tempter from the tyranny of an imperious Lust from the rebellion of Concupiscence from the disturbances and tempests of the Irascible faculty and from the fondness and childishness of the Concupiscible and S. Ambrose says well the trouble of this life and the dangers are so many that in respect of them Death is a remedy and a fair proper object of desires And we finde that many Saints have prayed for death that they might not see the Persecutions and great miseries incumbent upon the Church and if the desire be not out of Impatience but of Charity and with resignation there is no reason to reprove it Elias prayed that God would take his life that he might not see the evils of Ahab and Jezebel and their vexatious intendments against the
Christ and took them as testimonies of that truth for the affirmation of which the High Priest had condemned our dearest Lord and although the heart of the Priest rent not even then when rocks did tear in pieces yet the people who saw the Passion 〈◊〉 their breasts and returned and confessed Christ. 3. The graves of the dead were opened at the Death but the dead boies of the Saints that slept arose not till the Resurrection of our Lord for he was the first fruits and they followed him as instant witnesses to publish the Resurrection of their Head which it is possible they declared to those to whom they appeared in the Holy City And amongst these the curiosity or pious credulity of some have supposed Adam and Eve Abraham Isaac and Jacob who therefore were 〈◊〉 to be buried in the Land of Promise as having some intimation or hope that they might be partakers of the earliest glories of the Messias in whose 〈◊〉 and distant expectation they lived and died And this calling up of company from their graves did publish to all the world not only that the Lord himself was risen according to his so 〈◊〉 and repeated predictions but that he meant to raise up all his servants and that all who believe in him should be partakers of the Resurrection 4. When the souldiers observed that Jesus was dead out of spite and impotent ineffective malice one of them pierced his holy side with a spear and the rock being smitten it gushed out with water and 〈◊〉 streaming forth two Sacraments to refresh the Church and opening a gate that all his brethren might enter in and dwell in the heart of God And so great a love had our Lord that he suffered his heart to be opened to shew as Eve was formed from the side of Adam so was the Church to be from the side of her Lord receiving from thence life and spiritual nutriment which he ministred in so great abundance and suffered himself to be pierced that all his bloud did stream over us until he made the fountain dry and reserved nothing of that by which he knew his Church was to live and move and have her being Thus the stream of Bloud issued out to become a fountain for the Sacrament of the Chalice and Water gushed out to fill the Fonts of Baptism and Repentance The Bloud being the testimony of the Divine Love calls upon us to die for his love when he requires it and the noise of the Water calls upon us to 〈◊〉 our spirits and present our Conscience to Christ holy and pure without spot or wrinkle The Bloud running upon us makes us to be of the cognation and family of God and the Water quenches the flames of Hell and the fires of Concupiscence 5. The friends and Disciples of the Holy Jesus having devoutly composed his Body to Burial anointed it washed it and condited it with spices and perfumes laid it in a Sepulchre hewen from a rock in a Garden which saith 〈◊〉 was therefore done to represent that we were by this death returned to Paradise and the Gardens of pleasures and Divine favours from whence by the prevarication of Adam man was expelled Here he finished the work of his Passion as he had begun it in a Garden and the place of sepulchre being a Rock serves the ends of pious succeeding Ages for the place remains in all Changes of government of Wars of Earthquakes and ruder accidents to this day as a 〈◊〉 of the Sepulchre of our dearest Lord as a sensible and proper confirmation of the perswasions of some persons and as an entertainment of their pious phancy and religious affections 6. But now it was that in the dark and undiscerned mansions there was a scene of the greatest joy and the 〈◊〉 horrour represented which yet was known since the first falling of the morning stars Those holy souls whom the Prophet Zechary calls prisoners of hope 〈◊〉 in the lake where there is no water that is no constant stream of joy to refresh their present condition yet supported with certain showers and gracious visitations from God and illuminations of their hope now that they saw their Redeemer come to change their condition and to improve it into the neighbourhoods of glory and clearer revelations must needs have the joy of intelligent and beatified understandings of redeemed captives of men forgiven after the sentence of death of men satisfied after a tedious expectation enjoying and seeing their Lord whom for so many Ages they had expected But the accursed spirits seeing the darkness of their prison shine with a new light and their Empire invaded and their retirements of horrour discovered wondered how a man durst venture thither or if he were a GOD how he should come to die But the Holy Jesus was like that body of light receiving into himself the reflexion of all the lesser rays of joy which the Patriarchs felt and being united to his 〈◊〉 of felicity apprehended it yet more glorious He now felt the effects of his bitter Passion to return upon him in Comforts every hour of which was abundant recompence for three hours Passion upon the Cross and became to us a great precedent to invite us to a toleration of the acts of Repentance Mortification and Martyrdom and that in times of suffering we live upon the stock and expence of Faith as remembring that 〈◊〉 few moments of infelicity are infinitely paid with every minute of glory and yet that the glory which is certainly consequent is so lasting and perpetual that it were enough in a lower joy to make amends by its continuation of eternity And let us but call to mind what thoughts we shall have when we die or are dead how we shall then without prejudice consider that if we had done our duty the trouble and the affliction would now be past and nothing remain but pleasures and felicities eternal and how infinitely happy we shall then be if we have done our duty and how miserable if not all the pleasures of sin disappearing and nothing surviving but a certain and everlasting torment Let us carry alway the same thoughts with us which must certainly then intervene and we shall meet the Holy Jesus and partake of his joys which over-flowed his holy Soul when he first entred into the possession of those excellent fruits and effects of his Passion 7. When the third day was come the Soul of Jesus returned from Paradise and the visitation of separate spirits and re-entred into his holy Body which he by his Divine power did redintegrate filling his veins with bloud healing all the wounds excepting those five of his hands feet and side which he reserved as Trophies of his victory and argument of his Passion And as he had comforted the Souls of the Fathers with the presence of his Spirit so now he saw it to be time to bring comfort to his Holy Mother to re-establish the tottering Faith of
it self but in order to certain ends 272. 1. Why Jesus fasted Forty Dayes 128. 9. Vide Disc. of Fasting per tot Fear hallowed by Christ's fear 384. 3. It is the first of Graces 171. 5. Farewell-Sermon made by Jesus 350. 19. Flaminius condemned to Death for wanton Cruelty 168. 5. Fornication against the Law of God in all Ages 249. 37. Permitted to Strangers among the Jews ibid. Forgiving Injuries a Christian duty 252. G. GAdara built by Pompey 184. 15. Full of Sepulchres and Witches ibid. Gabriel ministers to the exaltation of his inferiours 3. 4. Galilaeans why slain by Pilate and what they were 326. 27. Garden why chosen for the place of the Agony 364. 383. 2. Gentleness a duty of Christians 323. 16. Giacchetus of Geneva his Death in the midst of his Lust 338. 5. God his Gifts effects of Predestination 156. 5. Those Gifts how to be prayed for 261 264. Consideration of his Presence a good remedy against Temptations 112. 29. The Vision of God preserveth the Blessed Souls from Sin ibid. 30. GOD's method in bringing us to him and treating us after 32. 4. He gives his Servants more than they look for 155. He gives more Grace to them that use the first well ibid. 32. 6. He rejoyces in his own works of mercy 187. 1. And in ours 227. 13. He requires not always the greatest degree of Vertue 234. 11. He is never wanting in necessaries to us 32. He changeth his purpose of the death of a Man for several reasons 308. 24. He works his ends by unlikely means 427. GOD certainly supports those in their necessities who are doing his work 68. 3. Gold and Frankincense and Myrrhe what signification they had in the gift of the Magi 34. 11. 28. 12. Grace it helps our Faculties but creates no new ones 31. 2. It works severally at several times 32. Being refused it hardens our Hearts 387. 369. Government supported by Christianity 68. 7. Gospel and the Law how they differ 193. 3. 296. 232. 3. H. HAsty persons and actions always unreasonable sometimes criminal 15. 1. Herod mock'd by the Magi 65. 1. 84. 1. His stratagem to surprize all the male children 66. The cause why he slew Zecharias 66. 5. Caesar's saying concerning him 66. 3. He felt the Divine vengeance 67. 6. His Malice near his Death defeated 67. 7. He pretended Religion to his secret design 68. 1. He slew 14000 Infants 66. 4. Fear of the Child Jesus proceeded from his mistake 70. 7. The Tetrarch overthrown by the King of Arabia 169. 6. His reception of Christ 352. 26. Is careless of inquiring after Christ 393. 9. Herodians what they were 290. 3. Herodias Daughter beheaded with Ice 169. 6. She and Herod banished ibid. Heron the Monk abused with an illusion 61. 23. Herminigilda refused to communicate with an Arian Bishop 188. 2. Hereticks served their ends of Heresie upon Women upon whom also they served their Lust 189. 5. Heroical actions of Repentance at our Death-bed more prevalent than any other hope then left 217. 49. Health promised and consigned in the Gospel by Miracles and by an ordinary Ministery 304. 15 16. There were two High-Priests the one President of the Rites of the Temple the other of the great Council 351. 23. Honour done to us to be returned to God 9. 6. It is due to what the Supreme power separates from common usages 172. 3. How it is to be estimated 253. 5. Honourable and Sacred all one 173. S. Hilarion a great Faster 273. 2. S. Hierom's advice concerning Fasting ibid. Holy Ghost descending upon Jesus at his Baptism 94. 3. Holiness of Religious places 172. It is a great preservative of Life 302. 13. Hope of Salvation encreases according to degrees of holy walking 315. Necessary in our Prayers 267. House of John Mark consecrated into a Church 174. 5. Hosanna what it signifies 347. 6. Onely sung to God ibid. Humane Nature by the Incarnation exalted above the Angels 3. Humane infirmity to be pitied not to be upbraided 384. Humility of Jesus 14. The surest way to Heaven 37. Of the Baptist 68. It makes good men more honourable 186. Its excellencies 302. 11 12. 367. Its Properties and Acts 364. seq Humility of the young Mar. of Castilion 367. 9. Hunger after Righteousness 373. 11. Hunger and Thirst spiritual how they differ ibid. Its Acts and Reward ibid. Husbands converted by their Wives 189. 3. J. JAirus begs help of Jesus for his Daughter 185. 20. His Daughter restored to Life 186. 21. Jesus discoursing wonderfully with the Doctors 75. 1. He wrought in the Carpenter's Trade before and after Joseph's death 76. 6. Baptized by John 93. 1. Attended by good Angels in the Wilderness 95. Was angry when the Devil tempted him to dishonour God 95. 8. 101. 15. He slept in a Storm 184. 14. Preached the first Year in peace 186. 22. Appeared several times after his Resurrection 419. He was known in the breaking of Bread ibid. He had but two days of Triumph all his Life 359. 5. And they both allayed with Sorrow ibid. 360. He was used inhospitably at Jerusalem ibid. Infinitely loving 360. He received all his Disciples with a Kiss 386. 8. Civil to his Enemies and beneficial to his Friends ibid. He was stripp'd naked and why 394. 10. He came eating and drinking and why 291. He invites all to him ibid. The Pharisees report him mad 291. He refused to be made a King 319. 1. Transfigured 322. 13. He shamed the Accusers of the Adulteress 324. 20. He teaches his Disciples to pray the second time 326. 26. Refuses to judge a Title of Land ibid. Blesseth 〈◊〉 327. 30. The Price of him 349. 14. All his great Actions in his Life had a mixture of Divinity and Humanity 387. 9. He was not compelled to bear the transverse Beam of the Cross 354. 30. He wept for Lazarus 345. And over Jerusalem 347. 7. Answered the Pharisees concerning Tribute to Caesar 347. 10. Prayed against the bitter Cup 450. 20. Smitten upon the Face 351. Accused of Blasphemy before the High-Priest ibid. Of Treason bëfore Pilate 352. 26. Nailed with Four Nails 354. 31. Provided for his Mother after his Death 355. 33. Recited the two and twentieth Psalm or part of it upon the Cross ibid. He felt the first Recompence of his Sorrows in the state of Separation 426. At the Resurrection he did redintegrate all his Body but the five Wounds ibid. He arose with a glorified Body 427. But veil'd with a Cloud of common Appearance ibid. Jewish Women hoped to be the Mother of the Messias 2. 5. Jews looked to be justified by external Innocence 243. 26. They were scrupulous in Rites careless of Moral Duties 392. 7. Could not put any Man to Death at Easter 352. 26. They eat not till the Solemnities of their Festival is over 272. 1. Jezabel pretended Religion to her design of Murther and Theft 68. 1. Illusions come often in likeness
destroy himself but live and enjoy with him the pleasures of this life The Apostle told him that he should have with him eternal joys if renouncing his execrable idolatries he would heartily entertain Christianity which he had hitherto so successfully preached amongst them That answered the Proconsul is the very reason why I am so earnest with you to sacrifice to the Gods that those whom you have every where seduced may by your example be brought to return back to that ancient Religion which they have forsaken Otherwise I 'le cause you with exquisites tortures to be crucified The Apostle replied That now he saw it was in vain any longer to deal with him a person incapable of sober counsels and hardned in his own blindness and folly that as for himself he might do his worst and if he had one torment greater than another he might heap that upon him The greater constancy he shewed in his sufferings for Christ the more acceptable he should be to his Lord and Master AEgeas could now hold no longer but passed the sentence of death upon him and Nicephorus gives us some more particular account of the Proconsul's displeasure and rage against him which was that amongst others he had converted his wife Maximilla and his brother Stratocles to the Christian Faith having cured them of desperate distempers that had seised upon them 7. THE Proconsul first commanded him to be scourged seven Lictors successively whipping his naked body and seeing his invincible patience and constancy commanded him to be crucified but not to be fastned to the Cross with Nails but Cords that so his death might be more lingring and tedious As he was led to execution to which he went with a chearful and composed mind the people cried out that he was an innocent and good man and unjustly condemned to die Being come within sight of the Cross he saluted it with this kind of address That he had long desired and expected this happy hour that the Cross had been consecrated by the body of Christ hanging on it and adorned with his members as with so many inestimable Jewels that he came joyfull and triumphing to it that it might receive him as a disciple and follower of him who once hung upon it and be the means to carry him safe unto his Master having been the instrument upon which his Master had redeemed him Having prayed and exhorted the people to constancy and perseverance in that Religion which he had delivered to them he was fastned to the Cross whereon he hung two days teaching and instructing the people all the time and when great importunities in the mean while were used to the Proconsul to spare his life he earnestly begged of our Lord that he might at this time depart and seal the truth of his Religion with his bloud God heard his prayer and he immediately expired on the last of November though in what year no certain account can be recovered 8. THERE seems to have been something peculiar in that Cross that was the instrument of his martyrdom commonly affirmed to have been a Cross decussate two pieces of Timber crossing each other in the middle in the form of the letter X hence usually known by the name of S. Andrew's Cross though there want not those who affirm him to have been crucified upon an Olive Tree His body being taken down and embalmed was decently and honourably interred by Maximilla a Lady of great quality and estate and whom Nicephorus I know not upon what ground makes wise to the Proconsul As for that report of Gregory Bishop of Tours that on the Anniversary day of his Martyrdom there was wont to flow from S. Andrew's Tomb a most fragrant and precious oyl which according to its quantity denoted the scarceness or plenty of the following year and that the sick being anointed with this oyl were restored to their former health I leave to the Readers discretion to believe what he please of it For my part if any ground of truth in the story I believe it no more than that it was an exhalation and sweating sorth at some times of those rich costly perfumes and ointments wherewith his Body was embalmed after his crucisixion Though I must confess this conjecture to be impossible if it be true what my Author adds that some years the oyl burst out in such plenty that the stream arose to the middle of the Church His Body was afterwards by Constantine the Great solemnly removed to Constantinople and buried in the great Church which he had built to the honour of the Apostles Which being taken down some hundred years after by Justinian the Emperor in order to its reparation the Body was found in a wooden-Coffin and again reposed in its proper place 9. I SHALL conclude the History of this Apostle with that Encomiastick Character which one of the Ancients gives of him S. Andrew was the first-born of the Apostolick Quire the main and prime pillar of the Church a rock before the rock 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the foundation of that foundation the first-fruits of the beginning a caller of others before he was called himself he preached that Gospel that was not yet believed or entertained revealed and made known that life to his brother which he had not yet perfectly learn'd himself So great treasures did that one question bring him Master where dwellest thou which he soon perceived by the answer given him and which he deeply pondered in his mind come and see How art thou become a Prophet whence thus Divinely skilful what is it that thou thus soundest in Peter's ears We have found him c. why dost thou attempt to compass him whom thou canst not comprehend how can he be found who is Omnipresent But he knew well what he said We have found him whom Adam lost whom Eve injured whom the clouds of sin have hidden from us and whom our transgressions had hitherto made a stranger to us c. So that of all our Lord's Apostles S. Andrew had thus far the honour to be the first Preacher of the Gospel The End of S. Andrew's Life THE LIFE OF S. JAMES the Great St. Iames Major He being the Son of Zebedee was at the Command of Herod beheaded at Hierusalem Ad. 122 St. James the Great his Martyrdom Act. 12. 1 2. About that time Herod the King streched forth his hands to vex certain of the Church And he killed James the brother of John with y e sword S. James why surnamed the Great His Country and kindred His alliance to Christ. His Trade and way of Life Our Lord brought up to a Manual Trade The quick reparteé of a Christian Schoolmaster to Libanius His being called to be a Disciple and great readiness to follow Christ. His election to the Apostolick Office and peculiar favours from Christ. Why our Lord chose some few of the Apostles to be witnesses of the more private passages of his
Evangelists about his name the one stiling him by his proper name the other by his relative and paternal title To all this if necessary I might add the consent of Learned men who have given in their suffrages in this matter that it is but the same person under several names But hints of this may suffice These arguments I confess are not so forcible and convictive as to command assent but with all their circumstances considered are suffioient to incline and sway any mans belief The great and indeed only reason brought against it is what S. Augustine objected of old that it is not probable that our Lord would chuse Nathanael a Doctor of the Law to be one of his Apostles as designing to confound the wisdom of the World by the preaching of the Ideot and the unlearned But this is no reason to him that considers that this objection equally lies against S. Philip for whose skill in the Law and Prophets there is as much evidence in the History of the Gospel as for Nathanael's and much stronglier against S. Paul than whom besides his abilities in all humane Learning there were few greater Masters in the Jewish Law 3. THIS difficulty being cleared we proceed to a more particular account of our Apostle By some he is thought to have been a Syrian of a noble extract and to have derived his pedigree from the Ptolomies of Egypt upon no other ground I believe than the more analogy and sound of the name 'T is plain that he as the rest of the Apostles was a Galilean and of Nathanael we know it is particularly said that he was of Gana in Galilee The Scripture takes no notice of his Trade or way of life though some circumstances might seem to intimate that he was a Fisherman which Theoderet affirms of the Apostles in general and another particularly reports of our Apostle At his first coming to Christ supposing him still the same with Nathanael he was conducted by Philip who told him that now they had found the long-look'd for Messiah so oft foretold by Moses and the Prophets Jesus of Nazareth the son of Joseph And when he objected that the Messiah could not be born at Nazareth Philip bids him come and satisfie himself At his first approach our Lord entertains him with this honourable character that he was an Israelite indeed a man of true simplicity and integrity as indeed his simplicity particularly appears in this that when told of Jesus he did not object against the meanness of his Original the low condition of his Parents the narrowness of their fortunes but only against the place of his birth which could not be Nazareth the Prophets having peremptorily foretold that the Messiah should be born at Bethlehem By this therefore he appeared to be a true Israelite one that waited for redemption in Israel which from the date of the Scripture-predictions he was assured did now draw nigh Surprized he was at our Lord's salutation wondring how he should know him so well at first sight whose face he had never seen before But he was answered that he had seen him while he was yet under the Fig-tree before Philip called him Convinc'd with this instance of our Lord's Divinity he presently made this confession That now he was sure that Jesus was the promised Messiah the Son of God whom he had appointed to be the King and Governour of his Church Our Saviour told him that if upon this inducement he could believe him to be the Messiah he should have far greater arguments to confirm his faith yea that ere long he should behold the Heavens opened to receive him thither and the Angels visibly appearing to wait and attend upon him 4. CONCERNING our Apostles travels up and down the World to propagate the Christian Faith we shall present the Reader with a brief account though we cannot warrant the exact order of them That he went as far as India is owned by all which surely is meant of the hither India or the part of it lying next to Asia Socrates tells us 't was the India bordering upon AEthiopia meaning no doubt the Asian AEthiopia whereof we shall speak in the life of S. Thomas Sophronius calls it the Fortunate India and tells us that here he left behind him S. Matthew's Gospel whereof Ensebius gives a more particular relation That when Pantaenus a man famous for his skill in Philosophy and especially the Institutions of the Stoicks but much more for his hearty affection to Christianity in a devout and zealous imitation of the Apostles was inflamed with a desire to propagate the Christian Religion unto the Eastern Countries he came as far as India it self Here amongst some that yet retained the knowledge of Christ he found S. Matthew's Gospel written in Hebrew left here as the tradition was by S. Bartholomew one of the twelve Apostles when he preached the Gospel to these Nations 5. AFTER his labours in these parts of the World he returned to the more Western and Northern parts of Asia At Hieropolis in Phrygia we find him in company with S. Philip instructing that place in the principles of Christianity and convincing them of the folly of their blind Idolatries Here by the enraged Magistrates he was at the same time with Philip designed for Martyrdom in order whereunto he was fastned upon the Cross with an intent to dispatch him but upon a sudden conviction that the Divine Justice would revenge their death he was taken down again and dismissed Hence probably he went into Lycaonia the people whereof Chrysostom assures us he instructed and trained up in the Christian discipline His last remove was to Albanople in Armenia the Great the same no doubt which Nicephorus calls Urbanople a City of Cilicia a place miserably over-grown with Idolatry from which while he sought to reclaim the people he was by the Governour of the place commanded to be crucified which he chearfully underwent comforting and confirming the Convert Gentiles to the last minute of his life Some add that he was crucified with his head downwards others that he was flead and his skin first taken off which might consist well enough with his Crucifixion excoriation being a punishment in use not only in Egypt but amongst the Persians next neighbours to these Armenians as Ammianus Marcellinus assures us and Plutarch records a particular instance of Mesabates the Persian Eunuch first flead alive and then crucified from whom they might easily borrow this piece of barbarous and inhumane cruelty As for the several stages to which his Body removed after his death first to Daras a City in the borders of Persia then to Liparis one of the AEolian Islands thence to Beneventum in Italy and last of all to Rome they that are fond of those things and have better leisure may enquire Hereticks persecuted his memory after his death no less than Heathens did his person while
parent of as great Religion as the good women make their fancy their softness and their passion 12. Our Blessed Lord appeared next to Simon and though he and John ran forthtogether and S. John outran Simon although Simon Peter had denied and forsworn his Lord and S. John never did and followed him to his Passion and his death yet Peter had the savour of seeing Jesus first Which some Spiritual persons understand as a testimony that penitent 〈◊〉 have accidental eminences and priviledges sometimes 〈◊〉 to them beyond the temporal graces of the just and innocent as being such who not only 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 against the remanent and inherent evils even of repented sins and their aptnesses to relapse but also because those who are true Penitents who understand the infiniteness of the Divine mercy and that for a sinner to pass from death to 〈◊〉 from the state of sin into pardon and the state of Grace is a greater gift and a more excellent and improbable mutation than for a just man to be taken into glory out of gratitude to God and indearment 〈◊〉 so great a change added to a fear of returning to such danger and misery will re-enforce all their industry and double their study and 〈◊〉 more diligently and watch more carefully and redeem the 〈◊〉 and make amends for their omissions and oppose a good to the former evils beside the duties of the 〈◊〉 imployment and then commonly the life of a holy Penitent is more holy active zealous and impatient of Vice and more rapacious of Vertue and holy actions and arises to greater 〈◊〉 of Sanctity than the even and moderate affections of just persons who as our Blessed Saviour's expression is 〈◊〉 no Repentance that is no change of state nothing but a perseverance and an improvement of degrees There is more joy in heaven before the Angels of God over 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 that 〈◊〉 than 〈◊〉 ninety nine just persons that need it not for where sin hath abounded there doth grace super abound and that makes joy in Heaven 13. The Holy Jesus having received the affections of his most passionate Disciples the women and S. 〈◊〉 puts himself upon the way into the company of two good men going to Emmaus with troubled spirits and a reeling faith shaking all its upper building but leaving some of its foundation firm To them the Lord discourses of the necessity of the Death and Resurrection of the 〈◊〉 and taught them not to take estimate of the counsels of God by the designs and proportions of man for God by ways contrary to humane judgment brings to pass the purposes of his eternal Providence The glories of Christ were not made pompous by humane circumstances his Kingdom was spiritual he was to enter into Felicities through the gates of Death he refused to do Miracles before 〈◊〉 and yet did them before the people he confuted his accusers by silence and did not descend from the Cross when they offered to believe in him if he would but 〈◊〉 them to be perswaded by greater arguments of his power the miraculous circumstances of his Death and the glories of his Resurrection and by walking in the secret paths of Divine election hath commanded us to adore his footsteps to admire and revere his Wisdom to be satisfied with all the events of Providence and to rejoyce in him if by Afflictions he makes us holy if by Persecutions he supports and enlarges his Church if by Death he brings us to life so we arrive at the communion of his Felicities we must let him chuse the way it being sufficient that he is our guide and our support and our exceeding great reward For therefore Christ preached to the two Disciples going to 〈◊〉 the way of the Cross and the necessity of that passage that the wisdom of God might be glorified and the conjectures of man ashamed But whilest his discourse lasted they knew him not but in the breaking of bread he discovered himself For he turned their meal into a Sacrament and their darkness to light and having to his Sermon added the Sacrament opened all their discerning faculties the eyes of their body and their understanding too to represent to us that when we are blessed with the opportunities of both those instruments we want no exteriour assistence to guide us in the way to the knowing and enjoying of our Lord. 14. But the Apparitions which Jesus made were all upon the design of laying the foundation of all Christian Graces for the begetting and establishing Faith and an active Confidence in their persons and building them up on the great fundamentals of the Religion And therefore he appointed a general meeting upon a mountain in Galilee that the number of witnesses might not only disseminate the same but establish the Article of the Resurrection for upon that are built all the hopes of a Christian and if the dead rise not then are we of all men most miserable in quitting the present possessions and entertaining injuries and affronts without hopes of reparation But we lay two gages in several repositories the Body in the bosome of the earth the Soul in the 〈◊〉 of God and as we here live by Faith and lay them down with hope so the 〈◊〉 is a restitution of them both and a state of re-union And therefore although the glory of our spirits without the body were joy great enough to make compensation for mere than the troubles of all the world yet because one shall not be glorified without the other they being of themselves incomplete substances and God having revealed nothing clearly concerning actual and complete felicities till the day of Judgment when it is promised our bodies shall rise therefore it is that the Resurrection is the great Article upon which we rely and which Christ took so much care to prove and ascertain to so many persons because if that should be disbelieved with which all our felicities are to be received we have nothing to establish our Faith or entertain our Hope or satisfie our desires or make retribution for that state of secular inconveniences in which by the necessities of our nature and the humility and patience of our Religion we are engaged 15. But I consider that holy Scripture onely instructs us concerning the life of this world and the life of the Resurrection the life of Grace and the life of Glory both in the body that is a life of the whole man and whatsoever is spoken of the Soul considers it as an essential part of man relating to his whole constitution not as it is of it self an intellectual and separate substance for all its actions which are separate and removed from the body are relative and incomplete Now because the Soul is an incomplete substance and created in relation to the Body and is but a part of the whole man if the Body were as eternal and incorruptible as the Soul yet the separation of the one from the other would be
as now it is that which we call natural death and supposing that God should preserve the Body for ever or restore it at the day of Judgment to its full substance and perfect organs yet the man would be dead for ever if the Soul for ever should continue separate from the Body So that the other life that is the state of Resurrection is a re-uniting Soul and Body And although in a Philosophical sence the Resurrection is of the Body that is a restitution of our flesh and bloud and bones and is called Resurrection as the entrance into the state of Resurrection may have the denomination of the whole yet in the sence of Scripture the Resurrection is the restitution of our life the renovation of the whole man the state of Re-union and untill that be the man is not but he is dead and onely his essential parts are deposited and laid up in trust and therefore whatsoever the Soul does or perceives in its incomplete condition is but to it as embalming and honourable funerals to the Body and a safe monument to preserve it in order to a living again and the felicities of the intervall are wholly in order to the next life And therefore if there were to be no Resurrection as these intermedial joys should not be at all so as they are they are but relative and incomplete and therefore all our hopes all our felicities depend upon the Resurrection without it we should never be persons men or women and then the state of Separation could be nothing but a phantasm trees ever in blossome never bearing fruit corn for ever in the blade eggs always in the shell a hope eternal never to pass into fruition that is for ever to be deluded for ever to be miserable And therefore it was an elegant expression of S. Paul Our life is hid with Christ in God that is our life is passed into custody the dust of our body is numbred and the Spirit is refreshed visited and preserved in celestial mansions but it is not properly called a Life for all this while the man is dead and shall then live when Christ produces this hidden life at the great day of restitution But our faith of all this Article is well wrapt up in the words of S. John Beloved now we are the Sons of God and it doth not yet appear what we shall be but we know that when he shall appear we shall be like him for we shall see him as he is The middle state is not it which Scripture hath propounded to our Faith or to our Hope the reward is then when Christ shall appear but in the mean time the Soul can converse with God and with Angels just as the holy Prophets did in their Dreams in which they received great degrees of favour and revelation But this is not to be reckoned any more than an entrance or a waiting for the state of our Felicity And since the glories of Heaven is the great fruit of Election we may consider that the Body is not predestinate nor the Soul alone but the whole Man and until the parts embrace again in an essential complexion it cannot be expected either of them should receive the portion of the predestinate But the article and the event of future things is rarely set in order by Saint Paul But ye are come into the mount Sion and to the City of the living God the heavenly Jerusalem and to an innumerable company of Angels To the general assembly and Church of the first born which are written in heaven and to God the Judge of all and then follows after this general assembly after the Judge of all appears to the spirits of just men made perfect that is re-united to their bodies and entring into glory The beginning of the contrary Opinion brought some new practices and appendent perswasions into the Church or at least promoted them much For those Doctors who receding from the Primitive belief of this Article taught that the glories of Heaven are fully communicated to the Souls before the day of Judgment did also upon that stock teach the Invocation of Saints whom they believed to be received into glory and insensibly also brought in the opinion of Purgatory that the less perfect Souls might be glorified in the time that they assigned them But the safer opinion and more agreeable to Piety is that which I have now described from Scripture and the purest Ages of the Church 16. When Jesus appeared to the Apostles he gave them his Peace for a Benediction and when he departed he left them Peace for a Legacy and gave them according to two former promises the power of making Peace and reconciling Souls to God by a ministerial act so conveying his Father's mercy which himself procured by his Passion and actuates by his Intercession and the giving of his Grace that he might comply with our infirmities and minister to our needs by instruments even and proportionate to our selves making our brethren the conduits of his Grace that the excellent effect of the Spirit might not descend upon us as the Law upon Mount Sinai in expresses of greatness and terrour but in earthen vessels and images of infirmity so God manifesting his power in the smalness of the instrument and descending to our needs not only in giving the grace of Pardon but also in the manner of its ministration And I meditate upon the greatness of this Mercy by comparing this Grace of God and the blessing of the Judgment and Sentence we receive at the hand of the Church with the Judgment which God makes at the hour of death upon them who have despised this mercy and neglected all the other parts of their duty The one is a Judgment of mercy the other of vengeance In the one the Devil is the Accuser and Heaven and earth bear witness in the other the penitent sinner accuses himself In that the sinner gets a pardon in the other he finds no remedy In that all his good deeds are remembred and returned and his sins are blotted out in the other all his evil deeds are represented with horrour and a sting and remain for ever In the first the sinner changes his state for a state of Grace and only smarts in some temporal austerities and acts of exteriour mortification in the second his temporal estate is changed to an eternity of pain In the first the sinner suffers the shame of one man or one society which is sweetned by consolation and homilies of mercy and health in the latter all his sins are laid open before all the world and himself confounded in eternal amazement and confusions In the judgment of the Church the sinner is honoured by all for returning to the bosome of his Mother and the embraces of his heavenly Father in the judgment of vengeance he is laughed at by God and mocked by accursed spirits and perishes without pity In this he is prayed for by none