A MISSION OF CONSOLATION Usefull For all afflicted Persons By W. S LONDON Printed by W. B. for John Williams and are to be sold at the sign of the Crown in Paul's Church-yard 1653. To the READER Reader LEt the Author of this small Volume who hath practised some years in the most exact in prison school of patience invite thee unto a serious perusual hereof that you may thereby partake in some measure of the benefit of his sufferings he esteeming it a great glorie in a Christian under persecution for his conscience sake to impart to others the good uses he makes in time of his affliction that they may by such example apprehend the Cross to be the lighter and so take it up with more alacrity and chearfulness and also conceive the miseries assigned us here on earth the less insupportable This Mission of Consolation this small first born child for so it is will after you have well view'd it smile upon you like a pleasant Infant full of health and tell you that it is no Paradox to say there is virtue in a prison which indeed hath a Sympathy onely with virtue for untill a Person so richly endued enters the grate it lies clouded and obscured but then breaks forth and shews its splendour A prison is in my observation one of the narrow and troublesome passages which a Christian findes in the straigt way that leads to heaven Let not the spurious issue of the now adulterated press discourage you in reading for that is become an ambodexter in this age Printing with one hand Truth with another error be satisfied that this relishes not of any upstart or unsound opinion but will well become thy pocket or thy chamber if thou art afflicted or persecuted for preserveing to thy self a good conscience It shews thee in the enterance thy first estate as man the Sons of Adam full of impuritie and pollution and born in a capacitie of onely bearing sorrow and travail But in the second part it doth most admirably repair thy condition leading thee into a covenant with thy Redeemer And in the third it instructs thee how to fit and prepare thy self for so divine and heavenly society If thou findest content in reading requite the Authour with thy good wishes not further inquiring after him but let the effect of thy prayers onely finde him out W S. A MISSION OF CONSOLATION Of the covenant of sufferings as men the Sons of Adam TO the first covenant of sufferance you know we all give our voice by a natural instinct before we have scarce enjoyed so much as light for it and our eys may be said to set their mark to it before we are able to set our hands to this Article of eating in the sweat of our brows for our eys pay their sweat which is their tears for what we taste even before we be able to receive bread for it and as we grow into a state to set our hands to the covenant of labour we know there is scarce any thing we relish much that doth not cost us sweat and contention nay we are of such a constitution that we can have no kinde of delectation the which some want and suffering must not precede to affect us with the gust of it so as we are sentenced to pay a great fine of pain before hand for all those fleeting and transitory pleasures which at best do but run over our senses and so pass away and leave them again in their drouth and privation And most commonly the advance of all our pain and passion rendreth us nothing of what they negotiate So as a man when he looketh upon himself in the best reflexes his temporary wishes can make him shall finde this brand and stigmate of Adam upon on his forehead Gen. 3. 19. Thou shalt eat in the sweat of thy brows And this is a mark which God stamped upon Adam of another kinde of signification than that he set upon Cain for this directeth to all things that occur to man in this life to strike him and wound his temporal estate in some kinde or other in so much as all the Creatures do in their several manners execute this sentence upon the Sons of Adam not alowing themselves to be enjoyed by them without stinging them in some sort either with the anxietie of their appetite to them preceding fruition or the distaste of satiety following it or with vexation of a deprivement of them during the Order of their affections to them So as we may well say that every thing we finde now assaults our felicity in this life in some sort to kill it and to revive to us the memory of our covenant of sufferance we entered into as soon as we entered into light For which reason the wise man proclaimeth elegantly the tenour of it saying Eccles. 40. 1. Great travel is created for all men and a heavie yoak upon the children of Adam from the day of their coming forth of their mothers womb until the day of their burying in the mother of all their cogitations and fears of the heart imaginations of things to come and the day of their ending from him that sitteth upon the glorious state unto him that is humbled in earth and ashes Neither need we look back upon the defaced images of all conditions in the dead prints of History we have such living figures of them before our eys as must needs imprint upon our thoughts a lively character of the deplorable estate of all mortals whereby out of the ruines of houses whereof you lament the demolishments you may pick up some materials to build in your mindes this frame of the instable constructure of the greatest strength of humane happiness and thus your friends may in their fall some way support your virtue and your patience when you consider how incident it is to the vicissitudes of the world to expose unto us that changeable scene whereof Solomon reporteth this to us Eccles. 10 and 7. I have seen servants upon horses and Princes walking upon the ground as servants And in such capital letters as these you may now reade the articles of the covenant of sufferance which man is engaged in whereof Job maketh a manifest is signed even by all the Princes of the earth for we finde this under their hands in all records of them in some part of their lives Job 14 1. Man born of a woman and living a short time is replenished with many miseries In so much that after man by sin had made miserie for himself in this life it seemeth a mercie of God to have joyned death with it before which even the light of nature is sufficient to shew the Philosophers that none can be counted happy And in order to this proof we mark that Cain he who first abused death by imploying it to make sin was thought worthy of no less a punishment than the protraction of life which he had made so afflicting by his fearing
remaining in the simplicity of his divine nature without the Word being made flesh and being as it were unmade himself as the Apostle warrants us to say by taking that flesh upon him which was become as it were mans prison so far was it from being worthy to be the receptacle of God When we consider then how God chose this way of commiserating our nature not to purg it by his power but by the very infirmity thereof by taking the passibleness of it upon him we cannot deny the suffering part to be the most beneficial property of it since God made use of that onely for the restauration of it wherefore the feeling that portion of human nature upon us which is the most ennobled by Gods election and preference cannot rightly be accounted a prejudiced condition whereupon we may conclude that the blessing of being Christians may easily reconcile us to the Obligation of being sufferers for what can be the reason why Christ when by his pains he took away the sting of sin could not also take off the points of suffering in this life which are but thorns of that plant but because his passions had infused such a quality into our pains as might produce this strange effect in our nature to make our root the less capable of bearing fruit by the excrescense and growth of these sprigs out of it for temporal afflictions spring out of sin as out of the root thereof and nothing drieth up and infecundateth so much the radicall fructifying vigor of this root as the springing up of temporal miseries and distresses so as the fruit of sin which is death is killed the soonest by the fertility of sufferings in this life Since Christ hath then by the virtue of his Crown of thorns imparted this faculty of the asperities of our life of taking off the growth as his did the guilt of sin we need not wonder why he hath left all these temporal bitternesses upon our nature which he himself took expresly to taste in our nature so as we may be said to become the more Christians the more we are called to be patients Which position we shall finde the more clearly demonstrated to us the farther we advance into the principles of Christianity Saint Paul when he wrot to the Romans in those times when in a paralel of our cases the Christians were partly immured up in prisons and partly expelled to the adjoyning fields thought it seemeth to sweeten their condition to them by representing that mortification and sufferance was their calling and profession for he asketh them as of a notorious thing whither they know not this to be the constitution of christianity saying Rom 6. 3. Are you ignorant that all we who are baptised in Christ Jesus in his death we are baptised Intimating that our first incorporation into the bodie of Christ is in effect an expiration of this world and a translation by the virtue of the death of Christ into such a sort of life as he hath patterned to us by the inception progress and consummation of his life And the Apostle presseth thus the proof of this assertion Rom. 6. 4. For we are buriâ—d together with him in baptism into death to evince this position that our mundanity is drowned and buried in our Christning and that the life of Christ which was a continued part of mortification is to be as it were our breath and animation And while we are in this spiritual manner buried in the life of Christ that is covered and inclosed with indignities and oppressions we are acting that part we took upon us in baptism where we isted our selves into that militia which was erected by him who killed death by dying and hath left the same discipline to all his souldiers to destroy death by dying to the world mortifications therefore must needs be the proper duties of that service a christian is upon and his pay is conditioned rather upon his suffering than his acting as the Apostle proceedeth to testifie For if we become complanted to the similitude of his death we shall be also of his resurrection So in a Christians case the wages of death is life for if he die here by a privatioÌ„ of the carnal life of this world he performeth the condition of life everlasting For which reason S. Paul who was the great commander of the Gentiles in this militancy wherby this kinde of dying death is swallowed up in Victory hath left us his discipline in 1 Cor. 15. I die dayly and he giveth us those orders To be the followers of him as he was of Christ whom he began not to follow untill he was overthrown in the command he had in this world and was as it were resuscitated by the same hand that had killed him We may remember he was revived by what is destructive to this life by being almost famished and illuminated by this worlds darkness and restored to corporal light onely to see how much he vvas to suffer for that Name for which all the sufferings he had in his head were to be imployed but in a manner far differing from this design for they were assigned to be enjoyed by himself not to be dispensed to others by his hand so as this seemeth the gratification of his Christianity the having of all that treasure of crosses he had prepared for other Christians appropriated to his own use whereof he grew so sensible as in gratitude to this his preference he returned his I do exceedingly abound in joy in all our tribulation But let us look upon his master and ours Christ Jesus in his own time of tribulation and we may represent him to our selves in the first instant of his conception accepting this Order from his father which he gave to his follower S. Paul of Acts 9. 15. I will shew him how great things he must suffer for my Name before the Gentiles and Kings and the children of Israel In which commission he laboured three and thirty years wherein all we are acquainted with of his life is either laborious or incommodious or in extremity dolorous and painfull It seems the holy Ghost did not think any thing worthy to stand upon record for Christ that was not eminently suffering and therefore passed over in silence those parts of his life which we may suppose to have been the least distressfull If we look upon his way that is drawn out to us from his cradle to his Cross we shall finde that he fore-saw in all ages more than the persons themselves who are under them can do He truly bore all our labours and our griefs All the anxieties and contristations that now oppress you were in a sharper degree pressing upon his heart and since he was content to aggravat all his sufferings by taking on him the sense of your grievances may not you very easily alleviate all your heavinesses by taking into your minde the resentment of sufferings which were designed for your succor in your
to die and thus he was made his own torturer by the ignorance of the evil of life and of the good of death which he had so much demerited the knowing of for his brothers goodness was thought worthy to be quickly relieved by death and his malice was adjudged to the pain of apprehending it and to the supplice of a long life With good cause then may this be well reflected on that the first virtuous and godly Abel man was quickly removed out of this hedg of thorns his father had set and reconveyed towards Paradise and the first impious murtherer was sentenced to live in the pungencie and asperity of these pricks and bryars of the earth But such is Gods wisdom as he can extract medicines out of all the Brambles and Thistles our earth is over-run with and minister them to our infirmity for he applieth even those griefs and sorrows which sin introduced to the expulsion of sin in it self so as this is an operation worthy of Gods invention by the labour and exercising of the bodie to enlarg the freedom of the soul even by this unfortifying of her prison in which she is kept the closer the stronger the delectation of our senses groweth upon us Therefore the distancing of the conveniencie of the flesh dilateth the commodities and freedoms of the spirits so as it is a divine artifice which God useth by hanging weights of sufferings and pressures upon our senses to winde up rather than to clog our spirits which are the motions and resorts of the whole frame and in probation of of this experiment David saith Psal. 4. 1 In tribulation thou hast enlarged me And it is most observeable that God ministred this receipt drawn out of thorns to all those Sons of Adam whose mindes he meant to purge and clarifie for all the holy Patriarks took this detersive potion of bitterness and affliction in this life and it deserveth our attention to note how the nearer the time drew to the manifestation of the Son of God who was designed the man of sorrow the passions of gods children grew the bitterer and the sharper for the Patriarks were exercised by divers mortifications which were not capital they staid upon the distresses of their life some of the Prophets as they approached to this fulness of the time of passion tasted by anticipation of the cup of death in which they were all but figures of Christs cup-bearers as Esay Jeremy Zachary and others and so those sufferings which in time were the least distant from Christ as those we finde recorded in the Maccabees came also the nearest to the horror and acerbity of the passions of Christ and Christians for they went not straight to death but turned about to take a compass of tortures to make death bitter to those they could not make it terrible as you may reade in the execution of the mother and her seven children the very dawning of the day of passion which was coming on gave them this light of fortitude It seemeth this weight of sufferance and sorrow was always in so natural a motion upon the children of God that it moved the faster the nearer it came to the centre the man of sorrow who being the Son of God by nature was the centre of all the Sons by grace and adoption and therefore all the bloudy sacrifices of the Law of nature and ceremonial tended and pointed to him as their last term and direction in order whereunto S. Paulinus sticketh not to say that Christ from the begining of all ages suffereth and triumpheth in all the Churches persecutions in Abel he is killed by a brother in Noah he is derided by a Son in Abraham he is a Pilgrim in Isaac a Victim and in Jacob a Servant in Joseph he is sold in Moses left a Derelict in the Prophets he is stoned starved and vilefied So as all the lines of holy passions drawn from the circumference of all ages tend and resort to this centre of the man of sorrow the Lamb of God slain from the beginning of the world These evidences may prove unto us clearly enough the first bond or covenant of sufferances we are entered into as men and even in that notion we seem to be implicit christians since he who suffered sufficiently for us all maketh all virtuous afflictions referraable to him it had been very easie for me to have exhibited a more precise manifest of this our first designation to sufferings under the notion of men there are so many excellent draughts of it stamped by the moralists or naturalists of all ages but I chose to deflect a little from the letter of the Text that I might make the inferences rather stongly usefull than critically uniform and therefore as I have already stepped beyond the out court of the Gentiles into part of the temple I will not call back to Philosophy to borrow any demonstrations of this principle wherein the proofs are so acumulate as all Sects of Philosophers which differ so much concerning the point of the good mans life concur in the confession of the multiplicity of the ills thereof but I shall not as I said walk aside into the gardens and flowry beds of the Gentiles because I conceive it more proper for your state to have some wholesome confection to take than a nosegay of the flowers of Philosophy to smell to onely in these unhealthful times for the larg contemplations of of the miseries of human nature is not a receipt direct and express enough for your present exigencies for that is but as a good air of meditation that may be sufficient for such as are but in light ordinary indispositions of fortune but your distempers require some more forceable application of comfort by taking into your mindes the strongest obligations to patience and longanimity I will therefore pass on to the other two assignments of suffering which are upon you as Christians and leave this our single humanity sealed with Jobs signature Job 14. 22. His flesh while he lives shall have sorrow and his soul shall mourn upon himself Of the covenant of suffering as Christians the Sons of Christ WHat we have said of our first obligation may well extenuate all we are bound to suffer by the second for when we behold the infelicity of of our condition as we are men we may well wonder more that we are preferred to be Christians than that we are continued to be sufferers for sure if God had consulted with Adam after he saw his own nakedness and the anexture of all the miseries thereunto whither he would have bowed the heavens have come down to repair this his ruinous condition by his investing his miserable human nature he would have answered with the humble Centurion Matth. 8. 8. Lord I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof but onely say the word and I shall be healed Seeing he who made all by one word could have redintegrated Adam with a word
sword of Herod that parted so many mothers and children pierced her soul even while she possessed her childe she may well be judged to have out-suffered any of them in their own losses for she had the grief of being the occasion of all them upon her heart so as the sword that was drawn directly against her soul though the stroke did not light upon it as it was aimed yet it may be thought to have wounded her in a sharper manner than it did any it fell bloudily upon for her exquisite charity must needs feel all their anguishes and passions who were thus afflicted as personating her Thus we see how she began her possession of her Son with the sorrows of a multitude of mothers inflicted on her and if we look upon her being dispossest of her Son there we shall see the sword piercing her soul in so horrid a manner as the pains which all the daughters of Jerusalem ever had in the birth or death of their children were but shadows of her torture whereupon S. Bernard saith Neither tongue can express nor heart can conceive the dolours wherewith the holy bowels of this Mother were excruciated Now blessed Virgin you pay with rigorous interest that pain which nature was not allowed to exact of you in your delivery the pangs which you felt not in the birth of your Son are infinitely replicated upon you at his death when we consider the Mother of Christ standing by the Cross and seeing her Son under those Nails Thorns and Scourges and all the other Tortures With what hand can we hope to touch this dolefull figure of the blessed Virgin to give it a lively resemblance I will therefore leave it veiled with this reason upon it No figure is like to sorrow the not being pourtraictable being the nearest similitude can be made of this figure of disconsolation That which purporteth most to our purpose is that by the not being able to comprehend the immensity of the sufferings of the Mother of God we may be the less apt to apprehend any extremity in our own when she who had at least no actual sin to expiate had so much sorrow to exercise her virtue How shall we who have so much sin to satisfie for wonder at any sufferings whereof we have so much need to sanctifie us There is then no reason why we should fear to be mistaken in taking crosses for commodities indignities for honours poverty for treasures since the eternal wisdom and divine understanding hath counselled this acceptation of them not onely by his advise but by his Mothers president and his own personal investure of them He who is both the supreme goodness and the supreme power chose by those low humbled means to redeem us and by the same we must perfect our salvation the work must be finished by the same instruments by which it was begun Christ told his Disciples there were many mansions in his Fathers house but never gave them notice of any other way to any of them but this of the crosses and miseries of this world surely as he said of the mansions so may we say of the marches to them if there had been another passage he would have told it them This narrow way and straightgate is all the direction we finde either by his life his doctrine or his death Mat. 11. 12. The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence and the violent bear it away Is the word or motto belonging to the Arms of the Gospel and as Christ said no body ascendeth into heaven but he that descended out of heaven therefore he vouchsafed to come down to live out this way which he imprinted upon his sacred humanitie So that now this way lyeth so fairly marked out by the prints of his steps in his return to his eternal mansion as no bodie that looketh up to heaven can miss the seeing of it though it be not the milkie way of the Poets but the bloudy way of the Prophets and Apostles It is traced out more fairly in the firmament of a Christian which is the Gospel than the other in the material skie The life of Christ is such a sequence and connexion of bright and shineing sufferings as sheweth our souls as intelligably the way to heaven as those stars do our eys that sensible trace in the firmament We may cast our eye upon this Galaxie or constellation of humility and depression in Christs life we shall see it illustrious and shinning in an humiliation under all sorts of Creatures He humbled himself to the Angels he vouchsafed to receive comfort of an Angel as if his necessity not humility had required it When he was hungry he was pleased to take food as alms from the Angels when he could have turned stones into bread He humbled himself to man and woman remaining obedient to his Mother and Joseph He subjected himself to impious Princes to Herod Cesar Caiphas and Pilate by understanding their burthens and their judgments he submitted himself to vile and infamous servants as to Malchus and to his torturers deriders and others He yielded himself even to inanimate creatures suffering heat and cold to strike upon him and by Iron Wood Thorns and Reeds he indured to be violated and offended nay he subjected himself to his greatest enemy the Devil himself when he suffered him to carry him up to the pinnacle of the Temple So there is no creature from the sublimest to the meanest from the best to the worst to whom Christ did not humiliate himself And thus you see this arch of humiliation set as it were on another bowe in the clouds of his humanity for a sign of this covenant of sufferances wherein I have suggested to you your ingagement and this bowe of his covenant is so extended as it makes a perfect circle it reacheth from the sphere of angelical to that of inanimate substances to both which we see Christ did submit himself and so his subjection toucheth the highest and the lowest point of his own creatures which consideration of his ineffable humility must needs assure us of the admirable effect it hath produced of converting crosses into the nourishment of his body left upon earth and so to bring that which seperated his soul and his body now to be the means of reuniteing the body to the head for the cross is left in his Church to conjoyn and consociate the Members into their suffering head Christ Jesus and we may well add that this divine sign of the cross set in the heaven of his person so conspicuously remains as a sensible mark of his promise to the Church of never being drowned in any inundation of crosses failing on her Looking up therefore to the heavenly object of Christs sufferings we may be comforted by our similitude and we may rejoyce at our securitie which this covenant recapitulateth to us as often as we contemplate it in so much as there is none of you who groan under any pressure or tremble under