enemies We shall then see every step they make more distinctly than when our judgment is mudded and blinded we are able to do Hence is it that you find the Apostle Paul praying so earnestly for the Ephesians that the eyes of their understanding might be enlightned Ephes 1.18 for he knew that they had a wily Devil to deal with and that he and his wicked instruments would find out such a world of tricks and arts and shifts that unless the eye of their understanding were enlightned that they might judg rightly of things and see through all their deceitful veils and pretences it was impossible but they should be deceived but this detects their deceit and discovers all their juglings so that you are not taken in their snares How many little tricks and arts have the Popish party played upon us within this year and half last past Into how many various forms and shapes have they cast their designs on purpose to deceive you First a Popish plot then a Presbyterian plot and now the Prentices plot and yet all three Plots theirs and all tending to one and the self-same end the destruction of the Protestant Religion For like lines in a Circumference though by their art they seem to make them come from never such opposite parts yet they all meet in the Center Their first Plots primarily aimed at cutting off the King which the wisdom of God and the courage of the Parliament hath yet preserved and because the Gentlemen of the Nation and true lovers and honourers of their King their Country and the Protestant Religion put out themselves in Parliament in the Country and every where at so bold and daring a rate they suspended the perpetrating of their Villany on the Person of his Majesty and new shaped and painted their second Plot principally against them knowing that if they were but out of the way that always interposed and flung themselves between danger and his Majesty they should soon recover the point again and compass their first design of killing the King as they would themselves and therefore under the notion of Presbyters and Presbyters plotting against the Royal life which above all things they studied to preserve they would have destroyed those Gentlemen though if you look their Meal-tub List you will not find one of forty of them Presbyterians But such is their Villany and such the Debauchery of the age for that Villany to work upon that they and their Partizans reckon every one a Presbyterian and Fanatick that hath not one cloven foot at least Now the Methods of this Plot were all to be managed by Subornations that those Worthies might have fallen as transgressors by the weight of the Law as by the arts of wicked Jezabel righteous Naboth did and when their cursed hand had been in every man should have been made a Presbyterian that had ought to lose For to be rich to be wise to be faithful qualifications that in our Ancestors days were wont to create esteem are with this wicked crew become the highest crimes Men of honour conscience and true worth that will rather perish than betray their God their King and their Country are in this Plot the very Butt of all their fury In 2 Sam. 3.33 you find King David lamenting over dead Abner thus Died Abner as a fool dieth But had this Prodigious wickedness took we must have lamented all the excellent men of the Kingdom at another rate and not only said Died these as fools die but died these as Knaves as Rogues as Villains die We must have lamented thus Died all these as transgressors as Rebels as Traytors die what by the hand of Justice and by the stroke of the Law It was one aggravation of our Saviours sufferings That he made his grave with the wicked and that he was numbered with the transgressors as every soul must needs be that falls by the hands of false Witnesses For the Judg will tell you that he must pronounce sentence according to the Verdict and the Jury will tell you that they must give their Verdict according to the Evidence So that if God had not most miraculously prevented many worthy Souls in the whole Nation had been cut off by a few suborned Villains Nor was this Plot calculated only against their Lives but against their Fortunes against their Honours and against their Posterity For they would have affected the child unborn with it A Villany of such a reaching magnitude as if it were layed in the very depths of Hell as undoubtedly it was The Wife could not here have lamented the loss of her Husband alone nor the Children the loss of their Father alone as in other deaths they use to do but must have lamented their own losses also That 's in my opinion a very sore threatning that the Lord speaks concerning Jehojakim the son of Josiah King of Judah in Jer. 22.18 They shall not lament for him saying Ah my Brother or Ah my Sister they shall not lament for him saying Ah Lord or Ah his glory For so mourners used to compassionate one another So in like manner here one child could not condole with another for the loss of their worthy Father but all condole their own losses the Brother that might have said to the Sister and the Sister to the Brother Ah Brother and Ah Sister what a dear and matchless Father have we lost how gracious was he in his Speech how courteous in his carriage how sound in his Counsels how prudent in his Reprooss and so have run over all the charms of his whole conversation and that would have gone on in their Lamentations Ah what a glory was he to our Family what a glory to his Friends what a glory to his Country must now have cried out O Brother and O Sister how hath our Father undone us how hath he destroyed our Fortunes ruined our Family and laid our very blood under a Legal attaint And certainly in this regaad as well as others are these kind of men stiled in Scripture the sons of Belial and therefore you find among the instructions that Jezabel gave in her Letters to the Elders of the City for the cutting off of Naboth that this was one That they should set two men sons of Belial before him to bear witness against him saying thou didst blaspheme God and the King But for ever blessed be God that they digged this pit as low as Hell yet his gracious hand followed and found them out and hath enabled us to sing that they are fallen into it themselves and to him alone be the glory thereof For this Plot was detected by the immediate hand of Heaven and not by man For it lay too deep for humane wisdom to fathom it it was only the Almighty that could and did find it out And therefore this second Plot failing on comes their third and if England be wise their last Plot that ever they shall make upon us and this if we may
come nigher Queen Maries Papists and that both in their Religion and in their Civil notions As to their Religion if you will see a Queen Elizabeth Protestant if you please to look but in the Statute-Book in Anno decimo tertio Elizabethae and the 12th Chapter you will find a whole Parliament of them and upon Church work too and which is yet more upon the Ministers of the Church and there you read that to the end that the Churches in the Queens Majesties Dominions may be served with Pastors of sound Religions they enact that every person under the degree of a Bishop that shall pretend to be a Minister by reason of any other form of Institution Consecration or Ordination than what was injoined by Parliament in the days of King Edward the 6th or was then in use should declare his assent and subscribe to all the Articles of Religion which only concern the Confession of the true Christian Faith and the Doctrine of the Sacraments Here 's your tenderness of a true Queen Elizabeth Protestant that let their Ordination be what it would and their esteem for Ceremonies what it would so they would but subscribe and assent to those Articles of Religion that only concern'd the confession of Faith and the Doctrine of the Sacraments they judg'd them of a sound Religion and fit to be Pastors of our Church Which I doubt these our hot-spurs would judg fitter for a Goal if not the Gallows By which you see that Queen Elizabeths Protestants judg'd it their duty to open the Church doors as wide as might be to let honest and sound Ministers in and not according to the mode of our times and these Protestants here of ours bar the doors up by their Laws to keep them out if they declar'd their assent to the faith and doctrines of the Church only you see her Protestants admitted them and would not keep them out because they could not consent and conform to the Ceremonies thereof No they would not rob and deprive the Church of God of the gifts and graces nor of the help use and service of so many sound and able Pastors that were Orthodox in their faith because they could not comply with a few I will not call them idle and useless but I am sure very unhappy Ceremonies So that by this you may see how much our rigid Church-men are out in their Religious measures in boasting themselves for Queen Elizabeth's Protestants Nor will you find them less different from Q. Elizabeth's Protestants in their Civil concerns than you have seen them in their Religious notions For the Protestants in her time were circumstanced extreamly like to what we are now For the Papists saw that they could not carry back the Church of England to Rome unless they could cut Her off and therefore all their plots and designs were calculated against Her life then as they are against his Majesties now Only she was blessed with a thorough belief of their villany so that she was saved by faith even as to her natural life Now her Protestants perceiving there was no end of their Plots and that first or last they would have her life and there withal destroy the Protestant Religion also if by some extraordinary act they did not prevent it they did by an universal agreement enter into an Association by which they mutually engage themselves to repair to their Arms and stand by and assist each other in these three cases In case of the Queens death in case of a foreign Invasion and in case of any Popish Insurrection And in particular they obliged themselves to one another that when ever the Queen fell they would all sall on the Papists and revenge her death upon them And this put a present end to all their Plots and designs against her for ever For when they saw the people were come to a point and that conspiring against the Queens life was but conspiring against their own lives they had done with their Plottings and could live quiet like other people all the remaining part of her life This extraordinary Act Queen Elizabeth's Protestants did of themselves and in an Interval of Parliament and that age was so far from condemning it as any way factious seditious or rebellious that she her self in the very next Parliament which was held in vicessimo septimo of her Reign ratified confirmed and made it a Law and to last as long as she lived Now if you compare these our Protestants that we are here reproving with hers in this point of Civil right I doubt you will find them as unlike her Protestants as but now you did in their Religion For how barbarously did they clamor every where against their fellow Protestants the other day but for carrying on a modest and harmless Petition for the Parliaments sitting And how did they be rogue and be rebell all those worthy Gentlemen that either promoted or countenanced it How then would they have bellowed and roared if they had enter'd into such an honest Association as you see Queen Elizabeth's Protestants did Wherefore take the reproof home to your selves and do not boast your selves any more for Queen Elizabeth's Protestants if you be of that stamp for you see you are so far from being of their nature that bate but the bare name you have nothing of her Protestants in you And I am perswaded it were good for our Church if you had not so much as the name neither Thus much for Reproof Come we now to caution 2ly Is it so that wicked men are plotters and the only plotters the world has in it then First Be cautious of their company lay hold on all occasions to shun and avoid it and say with the holy Patriarch Gen. 49.6 O my soul come not thou into their secrets unto their assembly my honour be not thou united And think with him that the safety of your honour nay your very souls lyes in declining their company for what would you be in their company for you put your selves but under a constraint and too often into a snare also For if you speak they deal by you as they did by the Royal Prophet Psal 56.5 Every day says he they wrest my words And indeed it is very hard for you to comport your selves in wicked company for either you will speak too much to please them or too little to please your selves And if you be silent and sit with your tongue in your mouth then you seem to assent to all they say so that neither silent nor speaking are you safe Wherefore resolve with the Psalmist to keep agreeable company for he professes to God Almighty That he was a companion to all them that feared him and of them that kept his precepts Psal 119.63 And Kings used to keep such good company as it is no disparagement to be reckon'd their companion And think not that this caution extends it self no farther than that you should eschue the company of
plowed as a field and Jerusalem shall become heaps and the mountain of the house as the high places of the forrest Good Father what monstrous wretches are these that for their sakes Zion should be plowed Jerusalem laid waste and the mountain of the Lords house made as a forrest What! all the beauty safety and glory of the Church and House of God totally destroyed and turned into a desolate Wilderness and all this for the sake and sins of some kind of men Good Lord whâ—â— prodigious wretches must these be that provoke the most merciful God for their sakes to deal thus strangely severe with his Church Why read the foregoing verse and you 'l find in the very front and first rank of these men if it be lawful to call them men they are such as judg for reward and truly I did well to put in that If for the Prophet Zephaniah in his 3d Chap. and 3d vers is so far from calling them men that he calls them Evening wolves which are the most hungry curst and ravenous after their prey of any Creature whatsoever so that take a man that judgeth for reward and nothing can stop him Not Religion not Reputation not King not Country nor Church nor State no considerations of Publick nor of private weal can stop his career 'T is a Beast of such a greedy canine insatiate appetite that he runs over all runs upon all runs down all And if you should come from this Word of God and say this sin will lay our Jerusalem in heaps they will but laugh at you and clap you up in Gaol Let our Jerusalem lye in heaps as long as it will and our Church be made a Wilderness if it will what care they so they can but get gain But we trust the Lord that hath had that mercy for the King and that mercy for his Protesant people to deliver them thus miraculously from the Papists hands will perfect and compleat his own Salvation and deliver us from such Evening-wolves also and according to his gracious Promise will bless us with Magistrates as at the first and counsellors as at the beginning Isa 1.26 The fourth and last Improvement of this truth That the wicked are Plotters the only Plotters that the world hath in it is of comfort to the just For if it be so that the word of truth doth determine that the wicked are the only Plotters that the world hath in it then do you be comforted in the midst of all the calumnies that are cast upon you You have great reason to take this comfort to your selves for you see the Lord himself hath determined the point on your side the wicked clamor and make a mighty noise in the world as if you were the only Plotters and disturbers thereof but you see the righteous holy Lord hath by his Heavenly Word determined the matter past all controversie for ever for you and says positively that 't is the wicked the wicked persons and they only that are the Plotters and disturbers of the World bear then their reproach with comfort for they do no more by you in this than they have done by the righteous in all ages what if you hear so eminent and righteous a soul as King David complaining that they laid to his charge things that he knew not as you see he doth Psal 35.11 Can you count it much that they will lay such things to your charge If you read the story of just and upright Job you will see that sober men and his intimate friends drew up an unjust charge against him and will you wonder the wicked enemies do the same against you You have a marvellous remarkable instance of this kind in Jer. 37. the series of it lyeth thus The Caldeans besieged Jerusalem but hearing that Pharoah King of Egypt was come forth with an Army they raised the siege The Prophet Jeremiah assured them from the Lord That for all they had raised their siege yet the Caldeans would return and take the city though he would make use of the present opportunity to leave Jerusalem and go dwell in the Country Now as he was executing this honest and innocent intent in the very Gate as he was going out he met with one of the huffing hectoring Captains of the City who took him and brought him back and charged him that he was running away to the enemy and though Jeremiah told him 't was false and that he was not going out with any such intent yet this roaring wretch would not let him go but brought him back to the Princes who the Text tells you were wroth with Jeremiah and smote him and put him in prison vers 15. and in the next Chapter they are eager to put him to death For the Princes came unto the King and said We beseech thee let this man be put to death for he weakens the hands of the men of war in the city and the hands of all the people in speaking such words unto them For this man seeks not the welfare of this people but their hurt vers 4. This was a horrible charge and yet this holy Prophet spake not one word to them nor the people neither but what he had from the mouth of the Lord so in they thrust him into a lothsome and dirty dungeon that he might die there as undoubtedly he had done had it not been for a poor Ethiopian that mediated for him and took him out from thence For the King was such a slave to those wicked Courtiers that carried all before them that he durst not interpose on the behalf of this innocent and eminent Prophet as you may read in the fifth verse Nay to such an abject nature and beneath a Prince was the spirit of this King sunk by the conduct of this cursed crew that adventuring to speak privately with Jeremiah he was so afraid lest these damned youths should hear of their Conference that he chargeth the Prophet in the 24th verse That no man should know of the words that had passed between them Well then if so great a Prophet as Jeremiah could not escape the reproach of wicked men from being charged as an enemy to nay a sugitive from the King and as one that sought not the welfare but the hurt of the people be comforted and know that you have nothing but what hath been the common lot and portion of all the people of God in the reproaches and imputations that they cast upon you Nor is the Old Testament only full of examples and instances of this kind but the New Testament likewise For the holy Apostle had the same measure of rage and reproach from these wicked Plotters as well of this kind as all others as the Prophets had In Acts 16. you find St. Paul and Silas going to prayer met a Damsel possessed with a Spirit of divination which brought her Masters much gain by southsaying this wench followed Paul and Silas crying These men are the