that excellent and great Saying Prov. 14. 14. A good Man shall be satisfied from himself He needs look no further But if he desires to see the same Vertue propagated and diffused to those about him it is for their sakes not his own It is his Charity that wishes and not his Necessity that requires it For Solitude and Singularity can neither daunt nor disgrace him unless we could suppose it a disgrace for a man to be singularly good But a vicious Person like the basest sort of Beasts never enjoys himself but in the Herd Company he thinks lessens the shame of Vice by sharing it and abates the Torrent of a common Odium by deriving it into many Channels And therefore if he cannot wholly avoid the Eye of the Observer he hopes to distract it at least by a multiplicity of the Object These I confess are poor Shifts and miserable Shelters for a Sick and a Self-upbraiding Conscience to fly to and yet they are some of the best that the Debauchee has to chear up his Spirits with in this World For if after all he must needs be seen and took notice of with all his Filth and Noisomeness about him he promises himself however that it will be some allay to his Reproach to be but one of many to march in a Troop and by a preposterous kind of Ambition to be seen in bad Company 5. The fifth and last Cause that I shall mention inducing Men to take pleasure in the Sins of others is a certain peculiar unaccountable Malignity that is in some Natures and Dispositions I know no other Name or Word to express it by But the thing it self is frequently seen in the Temporal Concerns of this World For are there not some who find an inward secret Rejoycing in themselves when they see or hear of the loss or calamity of their Neighbour though no imaginable Interest or Advantage of their own is or can be served thereby But it seems there is a base Wolvish Principle within that is fed and gratified with another's Misery and no other Account or Reason in the World can be given of its being so but that it is the Nature of the Beast to delight in such things And as this occurrs frequently in Temporals so there is no doubt but that with some few persons it acts the same way also in Spirituals I say with some few persons for thanks be to God the common known Corruption of humane Nature upon the bare stock of its Original Depravation does not usually proceed so far Such an one for instance was that Wretch who made a poor Captive renounce his Religion in order to the saving of his Life and when he had so done presently run him through glorying that he had thereby destroyed his Enemy both Body and Soul But more remarkably such was that Monster of Diabolical Baseness here in England who some years since in the Reign of King Charles the First suffered Death for Crimes scarce ever heard of before having frequently boasted that as several Men had their several Pleasures and Recreations so his peculiar Pleasure and Recreation was to destroy Souls and accordingly to put men upon such Practices as he knew would assuredly doe it But above all the late Saying of some of the Dissenting Brotherhood ought to be proclaimed and celebrated to their Eternal Honour who while there was another New Oath preparing which they both supposed and hoped most of the Clergy would not take in a most insulting manner gave out thereupon That they were resolved either to have our Livings or to Damn our Souls An Expression so fraught with all the Spight and Poyson which the Devil himself could infuse into Words that it ought to remain as a Monument of the Humanity Charity and Christianity of this sort of men for ever Now such a Temper or Principle as these and the like Passages doe import I call a peculiar Malignity of Nature since it is evident that neither the inveterate Love of Vice nor yet the long Practice of it and that even against the Reluctancies and Light of Conscience can of it self have this devilish effect upon the Mind but as it falls in with such a villainous preter-natural Disposition as I have mentioned For to instance in the Particular Case of Parents and Children let a Father be never so Vitious yet generally speaking he would not have his Child so Nay it is certain that some who have been as corrupt in their Morals as Vice could make them have yet been infinitely solicitous to have their Children soberly vertuously and piously brought up So that although they have begot Sons after their own likeness yet they are not willing to breed them so too Which by the way is the most pregnant demonstration in the World of that Self-condemning Sentence that is perpetually sounding in every great Sinner's Breast and of that inward grating dislike of the very thing he practises that he should abhorr to see the same in any one whose Good he nearly tenders and whose Person he wishes well to But if now on the other side we should chance to find a Father corrupting his Son or a Mother debauching her Daughter as God knows such Monsters have been seen within the four Seas we must not charge this barely upon an high Predominance of Vice in these persons but much more upon a peculiar Anomaly and Baseness of Nature If the Name of Nature may be allowed to that which seems to be an utter cashiering of it a Deviation from and a Contradiction to the common Principles of Humanity For this is such a Disposition as strips the Father of the Man as makes him Sacrifice his Children to Molech and as much out-do the cruelty of a Cannibal or a Saturn as it is more barbarous and unhumane to damn a Child than to devour him We sometimes read and hear of Monstrous Births but we may often see a greater Monstrosity in Educations thus when a Father has begot a Man he trains him up into a Beast Making even his own House a Stews a Bordell and a School of Lewdness to instill the Rudiments of Vice into the unwary flexible years of his poor Children poisoning their tender minds with the irresistible authentick Venom of his base Example so that all the Instruction they find within their Father's Walls shall be only to be disciplined to an earlier Practice of Sin to be catechised into all the Mysteries of Iniquity and at length confirmed in a mature grown up incorrigible state of Debauchery And this some Parents call a teaching their Children to know the World and to study Men Thus leading them as it were by the hand through all the Forms and Classes all the Varieties and Modes of Villainy till at length they make them ten times more the Children of the Devil than of themselves Now I say if the unparallell'd Wickedness of the Age should at any time cast us upon such blemishes of Mankind as these
who per fas nefas gets as much as He can But for all this let Atheists and Sensualists satisfie themselves as they are able The former of which will find that as long as Reason keeps Her ground Religion neither can nor will lose Hers. And for the Sensual Epicure he also will find That there is a certain living spark within him which all the Drink he can pour in will never be able to quench or put out nor will his rotten abused Body have it in it's power to convey any putrefying consuming rotting Quality to the Soul No there is no Drinking or Swearing or Ranting or Fluxing a Soul out of its Immortality But that must and will survive and abide in spight of Death and the Grave and live for ever to convince such wretches to their eternal Woe That the so much repeated ornament and flourish of their former speeches God damn 'em was commonly the truest word they spoke though least believed by them while they spoke it 2dly The other thing deducible from the foregoing particulars shall be to inform us of the way of attaining to that excellent Privilege so justly valued by those who have it and so much talked of by those who have it not which is Assurance Assurance is properly that perswasion or Confidence which a man takes up of the pardon of his sins and his interest in God's favour upon such Grounds and Terms as the Scripture lays down But now since the Scripture promises eternal Happiness and Pardon of sin upon the sole condition of Faith and sincere Obedience it is evident that he onely can plead a Title to such a Pardon whose conscience impartially tells him that he has performed the required Condition And this is the only rational Assurance which a man can with any safety rely or rest himself upon He who in this Case would believe surely must first walk surely and to do so is to walk uprightly And what that is we have sufficiently marked out to us in those plain and legible lines of Duty requiring us to Demean our selves to God humbly and devoutly to our Governours obediently and to our Neighbours justly and to our selves soberly and temperately All other Pretences being infinitely vain in themselves and fatal in their Consequences It was indeed the way of many in the late times to bolster up their Crazy doating Consciences with I know not what odd Confidences founded upon inward whispers of the Spirit stories of something which they called conversion and marks of Predestination All of them as they understood them mere delusions Trifles and Fig leaves and such as would be sure to fall off and leave them naked before that fiery Tribunal which knows no other way of Iudging men but according to their works Obedience and Upright Walking are such Substantial Vital parts of Religion as if they be wanting can never be made up or commuted for by any formalities of Phantastick looks or language And the great Question when we come hereafter to be judged will not be How demurely have you looked or How boldly have you believed With what length have you prayed and With what loudness and vehemence have you preached But How holily have you lived and How uprightly have you walked For this and this only with the Merits of Christ's Righteousness will come into Account before that great Iudge who will pass Sentence upon every man according to what he has done here in the Flesh whether it be good or whether it be evil and there is no respect of Persons with Him To whom therefore be rendred and ascribed as is most due all Praise Might Majesty and Dominion both now and for evermore Amen A SERMON PREACHED Before the University AT Christ-Church Oxon. 1664. JOHN XV. 15. Henceforth I call you not Servants for the Servant knows not what his Lord doth But I have called you Friends for all things that I have heard of my father have I made known unto you WE have here an Account of Christ's friendship to his Disciples that is we have the best of things represented in the greatest of Examples In other men we see the Excellency but in Christ the Divinity of Friendship By our Baptism and Church-Communion we are made one Body with Christ but by This we become one soul. Love is the greatest of Humane Affections and Friendship is the Noblest and most Refined Improvement of Love a quality of the largest Compass And it is here admirable to observe the ascending gradation of the Love which Christ bore to his Disciples The strange and superlative greatness of which will appear from those several degrees of kindness that it has manifested to man in the several Periods of His Condition As 1 st If we consider him antecedently to his Creation while he yet lay in the barren Womb of Nothing and only in the Number of Possibilities and consequently could have nothing to recommend him to Christ's affection nor shew any thing lovely but what he should afterwards receive from the stamp of a preventing Love Yet even then did the Love of Christ begin to work and to commence in the first Emanations and purposes of goodness towards Man designing to provide matter for it self to work upon to create its own object and like the Sun in the production of some Animals first to give a being and then to shine upon it 2dly Let us take the Love of Christ as directing it self to Man actually Created and brought into the World and so all those glorious Endowments of Humane Nature in its Original State and Innocence were so many Demonstrations of the munificent goodness of Him by whom God first made as well as afterwards redeemed the world There was a Consult of the whole Trinity for the making of Man that so He might shine as a Master-piece not only of the Art but also of the kindness of his Creator with a noble and a clear understanding a rightly disposed Will and a Train of Affections regular and obsequious and perfectly conformable to the Dictates of that high and divine Principle Right Reason So that upon the whole matter he stept forth not only the work of God's hands but also the Copy of his perfections a kind of Image or representation of the Deity in small Infinity contracted into flesh and blood and as I may so speak the Preludium and first Essay towards the Incarnation of the Divine Nature But 3dly and Lastly Let us look upon man not only as created and brought into the World with all these great Advantages superadded to his Being but also as depraved and faln from them as an Out-law and a Rebel and one that could plead a Title to nothing but to the highest Severities of a Sin-revenging Justice Yet even in this estate also the Boundless Love of Christ began to have warm thoughts and actings towards so wretched a Creature at this time not onely not Amiable but highly Odious While indeed man was yet uncreated and
acting while those Principles of Activity flag No man begins and ends a long Journey with the same pace But now when Prayer has lost its due fervour and attention which indeed are the very Vitals of it it is but the Carkase of a Prayer and consequently must needs be loathsome and offensive to God Nay though the greatest part of it should be enlivened and carried on with an actual Attention yet if that Attention fails to enliven any one part of it the whole is but a joyning of the Living and the Dead together for which Conjunction the Dead is not at all the better but the Living very much the worse It is not length nor copiousness of Language that is Devotion any more than Bulk and Bigness is Valour or Flesh the measure of the Spirit A short Sentence may be oftentimes a large and a mighty Prayer Devotion so managed being like Water in a Well where you have fullness in a little compass which surely is much nobler than the same carried out into many petit creeping Rivulets with length and shallowness together Let him who prays bestow all that strength fervour and attention upon Shortness and Significance that would otherwise run out and lose it self in Length and Luxuriancy of Speech to no purpose Let not his Tongue out-strip his Heart nor presume to carry a Message to the Throne of Grace while that stays behind Let him not think to support so hard and weighty a Duty with a tired languishing and be-jaded Devotion To avoid which let a Man contract his Expression where he cannot enlarge his Affection still remembring that nothing can be more absurd in it self nor more unacceptable to God than for one engaged in the great Work of Prayer to hold on speaking after he has left off praying and to keep the lips at work when the spirit can do no more 4 ly The fourth Argument for shortness or conciseness of Speech in Prayer shall be drawn from this That it is the most natural and lively way of expressing the utmost Agonies and Out-cries of the Soul to God upon a quick pungent sense either of a pressing Necessity or an approaching Calamity which we know are generally the chief Occasions of Prayer and the most effectual Motives to bring Men upon their Knees in a vigorous Application of themselves to this great Duty A person ready to sink under his Wants has neither time nor heart to Rhetoricate or make Flourishes No Man begins a long Grace when he is ready to starve Such an one's Prayers are like the Relief he needs quick and suddain short and immediate He is like a Man in Torture upon the Rack whose Pains are too acute to let his Words be many and whose Desires of Deliverance too impatient to delay the things he begs for by the manner of his begging it It is a Common Saying If a Man does not know how to Pray let him go to Sea and that will teach him And we have a notable Instance of what kind of prayers Men are taught in that School even in the Disciples themselves when a Storm arose and the Sea raged and the Ship was ready to be cast away in the 8 th of Matthew In which Case we doe not find that they fell presently to harangue it about Seas and Winds and that dismal face of things that must needs appear all over the devouring Element at such a time All which and the like might no doubt have been very plentifull Topicks of Eloquence to a Man who should have lookt upon these things from the Shoar or discoursed of Wrecks and Tempests safe and warm in his Parlour But these poor Wretches who were now entring as they thought into the very Jaws of Death and struggling with the last Efforts of Nature upon the Sense of a departing Life and consequently could neither speak nor think any thing low or ordinary in such a Condition presently rallied up and discharged the whole Concern of their desponding Souls in that short Prayer of but three words though much fuller and more forcible than one of three thousand in the 25th Verse of the fore-mentioned Chapter Save us Lord or we perish Death makes short work when it comes and will teach him who would prevent it to make shorter For surely no Man who thinks himself just a perishing can be at leisure to be Eloquent or judge it either Sense or Devotion to begin a long Prayer when in all likelihood he shall conclude his Life before it 5 ly The fifth and last Argument that I shall produce for Brevity of Speech or Fewness of Words in Prayer shall be taken from the Examples which we find in Scripture of such as have been remarkable for Brevity and of such as have been noted for Prolixity of Speech in the discharge of this Duty 1. And first for Brevity To omit all those notable Examples which the Old Testament affords us of it and to confine our selves only to the New in which we are undoubtedly most concerned Was not this way of Praying not only Warranted but Sanctified and set above all that the Will of Man could possibly except against it by that infinitely exact Form of Prayer prescribed by the Greatest the Holiest and the Wisest Man that ever lived even Christ himself the Son of God and Saviour of the World Was it not an instance both of the truest Devotion and the fullest and most comprehensive Reason that ever proceeded from the Mouth of Man And yet withall the shortest and most succinct Model that ever grasped all the Needs and Occasions of Mankind both Spiritual and Temporal into so small a compass Doubtless had our Saviour thought fit to amplifie or be prolix He in whom were hid all the Treasures of Wisdom could not want Matter nor he who was himself the Word want Variety of the fittest to have expressed his Mind by But He chose rather to contract the whole Concern of both Worlds into a few Lines and to unite both Heaven and Earth in his Prayer as he had done before in his Person And indeed one was a kind of Copy or Representation of the other So then we see here Brevity in the Rule or Pattern let us see it next in the Practice and after that in the Success of Prayer And first we have the Practice as well as the Pattern of it in our Saviour himself and that in the most signal passage of his whole Life even his Preparation for his approaching Death In which dolorous Scene when his whole Soul was nothing but Sorrow that great moving Spring of Invention and Elocution and when Nature was put to its last and utmost stretch and so had no refuge or relief but in Prayer yet even then all this Horror Agony and Distress of Spirit delivers it self but in two very short Sentences in Matth. 26. 39. O my Father if it be possible let this Cup pass from me nevertheless not as I will but as thou wilt And
may have given thee Riches and Honour Health and Power with a Curse and if so it will be found but a poor Comfort to have had never so great a share of God's Bounty without his Blessing But has he at any time kept thee from thy Sin stopt thee in the prosecution of thy Lust defeated the malicious Arts and Stratagems of thy mortal Enemy the Tempter And does not the sense of this move and affect thy Heart more than all the former Instances of Temporal Prosperity which are but as it were the promiscuous Scatterings of his Common Providence while these are the distinguishing Kindnesses of his special Grace A truly pious Mind has certainly another kind of relish and taste of these things and if it receives a Temporal Blessing with Gratitude it receives a Spiritual one with Ecstasie and Transport David an heroick Instance of such a Temper over-looks the rich and seasonable Present of Abigail though pressed with Hunger and Travel but her Advice which disarmed his Rage and calmed his Revenge draws forth those high and affectionate Gratulations from him Blessed be thy advice and blessed be thou who hast kept me this day from shedding Bloud and avenging my self with my own hand These were his joyfull and glorious Trophies not that he Triumphed over his Enemy but that he Insulted over his Revenge that he escaped from himself and was delivered from his own Fury And whosoever has any thing of David's Piety will be perpetually playing the Throne of Grace with such-like Acknowledgment As Blessed be that Providence which delivered me from such a lewd Company and such a vicious Acquaintance which was the Bane of such and such a person And Blessed be that God who cast rubs and stops and hindrances in my way when I was attempting the Commission of such or such a Sin who took me out of such a Course of Life such a Place or such an Imployment which was a continual Snare and Temptation to me And Blessed be such a Preacher and such a Friend whom God made use of to speak a Word in season to my wicked Heart and so turned me out of the Paths of Death and Destruction and saved me in spight of the World the Devil and my Self These are such things as a Man shall remember with Joy upon his Death-bed such as shall chear and warm his Heart even in that last and bitter Agony when many from the very bottom of their Souls shall wish that they had never been Rich or Great or Powerfull and reflect with Anguish and Remorse upon those splendid Occasions of Sin which served them for little but to heighten their Guilt and at best to inflame their Accounts at that great Tribunal which they are going to appear before 3. In the Third and Last place We learn from hence the great Reasonableness of not only a contented but also a thankfull Acquiescence in any Condition and under the crossest and severest passages of Providence which can possibly befall us Since there is none of all these but may be the Instruments of Preventing-Grace in the hands of a mercifull God to keep us from those Courses which would otherwise assuredly end in our confusion This is most certain that there is no Enjoyment which the Nature of Man is either desirous or capable of but may be to him a direct inducement to Sin and consequently is big with Mischief and carries Death in the Bowels of it But to make the Assertion more particular and thereby more convincing let us take an Account of it with reference to the three greatest and deservedly most valued Enjoyments of this Life 1. Health 2ly Reputation And 3ly Wealth First And first for Health Has God made a Breach upon that Perhaps he is building up thy Soul upon the Ruins of thy Body Has he bereaved thee of the use and vigour of thy Limbs Possibly he saw that otherwise they would have been the Instruments of thy Lusts and the active Ministers of thy Debaucheries Perhaps thy languishing upon thy Bed has kept thee from rotting in a Gaol or in a worse place God saw it necessary by such Mortifications to quench the Boilings of a furious overflowing Appetite and the boundless Rage of an insatiable Intemperance to make the Weakness of the Flesh the Physick and Restaurative of the Spirit And in a word rather to save thee diseased sickly and deformed than to let Strength Health and Beauty drive thee head-long as they have done many thousands into Eternal Destruction Secondly Has God in his Providence thought fit to drop a Blot upon thy Name and to Blast thy Reputation He saw perhaps that the Breath of popular Air was grown Infectious and would have derived a Contagion upon thy better part Pride and Vain-glory had mounted thee too high and therefore it was necessary for Mercy to take thee down to prevent a greater fall A good Name is indeed better than Life but a sound Mind is better than both Praise and Applause had swell'd thee to a proportion ready to burst it had vitiated all thy spiritual Appetites and brought thee to feed upon the Air and to surfeit upon the Wind and in a word to starve thy Soul only to pamper thy Imagination And now if God makes use of some poynant Disgrace to prick this enormous Bladder and to let out the poysonous Vapour is not the Mercy greater than the Severity of the Cure Cover them with shame says the Psalmist that they may seek thy Name Fame and Glory transports a Man out of himself and like a violent Wind though it may bear him up for a while yet it will be sure to let him fall at last It makes the Mind loose and garish scatters the Spirits and leaves a kind of Dissolution upon all the Faculties Whereas shame on the contrary as all Grief does naturally contracts and unites and thereby fortifies the Spirits fixes the Ramblings of Fancy and so reduces and gathers the Man into himself This is the soveraign Effect of a bitter Potion administred by a Wise and Mercifull Hand And what hurt can there be in all the Slanders Obloquies and Disgraces of this World if they are but the Arts and Methods of Providence to shame us into the Glories of the next But then Thirdly and Lastly Has God thought fit to cast thy Lot amongst the Poor of this World and that either by denying thee any share of the Plenties of this Life which is something grievous or by taking them away which is much more so Yet still all this may be but the Effect of Preventing Mercy For so much mischief as Riches have done and may doe to the Souls of Men so much Mercy may there be in taking them away For does not the Wisest of Men next our Saviour tell us of Riches kept to the hurt of the owners of them Eccles. 5. 13. And does not our Saviour himself speak of the intolerable Difficulty which they cause in men's passage to
the Throne of Grace and his Boldness is not greater than his Welcome God recognizes the voice of his own Spirit interceding within him and his Prayers are not only followed but even prevented with an Answer 2ly A Second Instance in which this Confidence towards God does so remarkably shew it self is at the Time of some notable Tryal or sharp Affliction When a Man's Friends shall desert him his Relations disown him and all Dependencies fail him and in a word the whole World frown upon him certainly it will then be of some moment to have a Friend in the Court of Conscience which shall as it were buoy up his sinking Spirits and speak greater Things for him than all these together can Declaim against him For it is most certain that no Height of Honour nor affluence of Fortune can keep a Man from being Miserable nor indeed Contemptible when an enraged Conscience shall fly at him and take him by the Throat so it is also as certain that no Temporal Adversities can cut off those inward secret invincible Supplies of Comfort which Conscience shall pour in upon distressed Innocence in spight and in defiance of all Worldly Calamities Naturalists observe that when the Frost seizes upon Wine they are onely the slighter and more waterish parts of it that are subject to be congealed but still there is a mighty Spirit which can retreat into it self and there within its own Compass lie secure from the freezing impression of the Element round about it And just so it is with the Spirit of a Man while a good Conscience makes it firm and impenetrable An outward Affliction can no more benumb or quell it than a blast of Wind can freeze up the Bloud in a Man's Veins or a little Showr of Rain soak into his Heart and there quench the Principle of Life it self Take the two greatest Instances of Misery which I think are incident to Humane Nature to wit Poverty and Shame and I dare oppose Conscience to them both And first for Poverty Suppose a Man stripped of all driven out of House and Home and perhaps out of his Countrey too which having within our memory happened to so many may too easily God knows be supposed again yet if his Conscience shall tell him that it was not for any failure in his own Duty but from the success of anothers Villainy that all this befell him why then his Banishment becomes his Preferment his Rags his Trophies his Nakedness his Ornament and so long as his Innocence is his Repast he feasts and banquets upon Bread and Water He has disarmed his Afflictions unstung his Miseries and though he has not the proper Happiness of the World yet he has the greatest that is to be enjoyed in it And for this we might appeal to the Experience of those great and good Men who in the late Times of Rebellion and Confusion were forced into foreign Countries for their unshaken Firmness and Fidelity to the oppressed Cause of Majesty and Religion whether their Conscience did not like a Fidus Achates still bear them company stick close to them and suggest Comfort even when the Causes of Comfort were invisible and in a word verify that great saying of the Apostle in their Mouths We have nothing and yet we possess all Things For it is not barely a Man's Abridgement in his External Accommodations which makes him miserable but when his Conscience shall hit him in the Teeth and tell him that it was his Sin and his Folly which brought him under these Abridgements That his present scanty Meals are but the natural Effects of his former over full ones That it was his Taylor and his Cook his fine Fashions and his French Ragou's which sequestred him and in a word that he came by his Poverty as sinfully as some usually do by their Riches and consequently that Providence treats him with all these Severities not by way of Trial but by way of Punishment and Revenge The Mind surely of it self can feel none of the Burnings of a Fever but if my Fever be occasioned by a Surfeit and that Surfeit caused by my Sin it is that which adds Fuel to the fiery Disease and Rage to the Distemper 2 ly Let us consider also the Case of Calumny and Disgrace Doubtless the Sting of every reproachfull Speech is the Truth of it and to be conscious is that which gives an Edge and Keenness to the Invective Otherwise when Conscience shall plead not guilty to the Charge a Man entertains it not as an Endictment but as a Libel He hears all such Calumnies with a generous Unconcernment and receiving them at one Ear gives them a free and easie Passage through the other They fall upon him like Rain or Hail upon an oiled Garment they may make a Noise indeed but can find no Entrance The very Whispers of an acquitting Conscience will drown the Voice of the loudest Slander What a long Charge of Hypocrisie and many other base Things did Iob's Friends draw up against him But he regarded it no more than the Dunghill which he sate upon while his Conscience enabled him to appeal even to God Himself and in Spight of Calumny to assert and hold fast his Integrity And did not Ioseph lie under as black an Infamy as the Charge of the highest Ingratitude and the lewdest Villainy could fasten upon him Yet his Conscience raised him so much above it that he scorned so much as to clear himself or to recriminate the Strumpet by a true Narrative of the Matter For we read nothing of that in the whole Story Such Confidence such Greatness of Spirit does a clear Conscience give a Man always making him more solicitous to preserve his Innocence than concerned to prove it And so we come now to the 3 d. and last Instance in which above all others this Confidence towards God does most eminently shew and exert it self and that is at the Time of Death Which surely gives the grand Opportunity of trying both the Strength and Worth of every Principle When a Man shall be just about to quit the Stage of this World to put off his Mortality and to deliver up his last Accounts to God at which sad Time his Memory shall serve him for little else but to terrify him with a frightfull Review of his past Life and his former Extravagances stripped of all their Pleasure but retaining their Guilt What is it then that can promise him a fair Passage into the other World or a comfortable Appearance before his dreadfull Judge when he is there Not all the Friends and Interests all the Riches and Honours under Heaven can speak so much as a Word for him or one Word of Comfort to him in that Condition they may possibly reproach but they cannot relieve him No at this disconsolate Time when the busie Tempter shall be more than usually apt to vex and trouble him and the Pains of a dying Body to hinder and discompose him
and the Settlement of worldly Affairs to disturb and confound him and in a word all Things conspire to make his sick Bed grievous and uneasie Nothing can then stand up against all these Ruines and speak Life in the midst of Death but a clear Conscience And the Testimony of that shall make the Comforts of Heaven descend upon his weary Head like a refreshing Dew or Shower upon a parched Ground It shall give him some lively Earnests and secret Anticipations of his approaching Joy It shall bid his Soul go out of the Body undauntedly and lift up its Head with Confidence before Saints and Angels Surely the Comfort which it conveys at this Season is something bigger than the Capacities of Mortality mighty and unspeakable and not to be understood till it comes to be felt And now who would not quit all the Pleasures and Trash and Trifles which are apt to captivate the Heart of Man and pursue the greatest Rigors of Piety and Austerities of a good Life to purchase to himself such a Conscience as at the Hour of Death when all the Friendships of the World shall bid him adieu and the whole Creation turn its Back upon him shall dismiss his Soul and close his Eyes with that blessed Sentence Well done thou good and faithfull Servant enter thou into the Ioy of thy Lord For he whose Conscience enables him to look God in the Face with Confidence here shall be sure to see his Face also with Comfort hereafter Which God of his Mercy grant to us all To whom be rendred and ascribed as is most due all Praise Might Majesty and Dominion both now and for evermore Amen FINIS BOOKS newly printed for Tho. Bennet at the Half Moon in St. Paul's Church-Yard A Thenae Oxoniensis Or an exact History of all the Writers and Bishops who have had their Education in the University of Oxford from 1500 to the end of 1690. Representing the Birth Fortunes Preferments and Death of all those Authors and Prelates the great Accidents of their Lives with the Fate and Character of their Writings The Work being so Compleat that no Writer of Note of this Nation for near two hundred years past is omitted In Two Volumes in Fol. Twelve Sermons preached upon several Occasions by R. South D. D. Six of them never before printed Vol. First in Octavo Sermons and Discourses upon several Occasions by G. Stradling D. D. late Dean of Chichester Never before printed together with an Account of the Author Dr. Pocock's Commentary on the Prophets Ioel Micah Malachi c. in Fol. A Critical History of the Text and Versions of the New Testament wherein is firmly Established the Truth of those Acts on which the Foundation of Christian Religion is laid In Two Parts By Father Simon of the Oratory Together with a Refutation of such Passages as seem contrary to the Doctrine and Practice of the Church of England in Quarto Newly printed for Randall Taylor Animadversions upon Dr. Sherlock's Book entitled A Vindication of the Holy and Ever Blessed Trinity c. Together with a more Necessary Vindication of that Sacred and Prime Article of the Christian Faith from his New Notions and false Explications of it Humbly dedicated to His Admirers and to Himself the Chief of them by a Divine of the Church of England See the First Vol. p. 29 and 30. * Major Iohn Weyer see Ravillac Rediviv The Words of a great Self-opiniator and a bitter Reviler of the Clergy * A Preaching Colonel of the Parliament-Army and a Chief Actor in the Murder of K. Charles the First Notable before for having killed several after Quarter given them by others and using these Words in the doing it Cursed be he who does the work of the Lord negligently He was by Extraction a Butcher's Son and accordingly in his Practices all along more a Butcher than his Father