when he that should be your best and greatest friend he that alone can rescue and deliver you out of your enemies hands for him to become your enemy himself Lord what killing news must this be to any soul that will but seriously consider it You read in the 5th of Daniel that King Belshazzar made a great debauch for no less than a thousand of his Lords and as they were busie in taking up of their cups and praising the gods of gold and of silver of brass of wood and of stone at the same instant came forth fingers of a mans hand and wrote over against the candlesticks upon the plaister of the wall of the Kings palace and the King saw the part of the hand that wrote then the Kings countenance was changed and his thoughts troubled him so that the joints of his loins were loosed and his knees smote one against another v. 4 5 6. O! so will yours do you will be in a dreadful twitter when God declares himself your enemy as here he did to him Your heart will fail and the very powers of nature will dissolve within you And therefore among all the Lamentations of Jeremiah though they are every one exceeding sad yet methinks there 's none so dismal as that in Lam. 2.5 where the Prophet complains The Lord was as an enemy and yet this was but as an enemy neither but even that was sufficient the Prophet tells you to increase the mourning and lamentation in the Daughter of Judah As well it might for it totally alters all the methods of Gods Providence towards a people and puts as it were another nature into the Almighty For he that is love it self is turned all into anger God is angry says the Psalmist with the wicked every day Psal 7.11 The greatest consternation and among the greatest persons that ever was heard of in any History in the world I believe by persons especially of their quality is that which you read in Rev. 6.15 16. for the Text tells you That the Kings of the earth and the great men and the rich men and the chief captains and the mighty men hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains What! the King of the earth and the rich men nay the chief Captains and the mighty men take to their heels and run away and hide themselves at this fearful rate and not only to do thus but to invocate the very mountains and rocks in which they hid to fall on them and hide them yet more securely why what 's the matter what 's the cause of this mighty prodigious consternation Why nothing else but that the Lord was their enemy and the great day of his wrath and anger was come and they were not able to stand it And do you think to be able to stand when such mighty men as these must fly to corners Do not therefore alter the methods of his Providence nor change the procedure of the Almighty towards you For though he professes that fury is not in him Isa 27.4 yet he also tells you that he will make his fury smoke against the wicked Now consider this all you that forget God lest be tare you away and there be none to deliver Psal 50.22 Thirdly Consider that till you come out of your wicked estate you are under the curse of God and all the prayers of the Church are against you You come hither and think to have a share in the Churches absolution but you are mistaken it belongs not to you read the Absolution and you will see that we are to declare and pronounce to the Lord people being penitent the absolution and remission of their sins but what 's that to you we are to declare That God pardoneth and absolveth all them which truly repent and unfeignedly believe his Gospel But what 's this to you whiles you remain wicked will not repent unfeignedly believe nor perform the conditions of Absolution In Numb 22 and 23. chap. you may see a wicked King bribing a wicked Prophet to curse the people of God the History is of Balack and Balaam but as Balaam said to Balack How shall I curse whom God hath not cursed Chap. 23.8 so must I say to you how can we bless whom God hath not blessed What do you think that Commination Prov. 24.24 of which we have spoken already is to go for nothing Would you have us to undergo the curse of God and the curse of men to bless those that are accursed of God I 'le not flatter ye they are cursed Ministers that undertake so cursed a work What would you have us to debauch the blessings and curses of God and betray and pervert the uses of our highest trust For we are to pronounce none blessed no nor cursed neither on earth but such as we have a sure ground to believe from the word of God will receive the same sentence from our great Master the God of Heaven whose Ministers we are in this dreadful administration and what shall we bless the wicked which the whole Book of God tells us the Lord abhors Or curse the righteous in whom the Scriptures assure us is all his delight How shall we answer and justifie these Censures at the Bar of Christs Tribunal And would to God the Guides and Governours of our Church would lay this thing more seriously to heart than I doubt they do And consider Christ gave them not the power of the Keys to accommodate their lusts of pride envy covetousness nor that they should cast or shut good men out of the Church and let or keep the wicked in as I also doubt is sometimes done For this is utterly to subvert and over-turn the whole design of the Gospel For the design of the Gospel in all the Institutions thereof is that Christs Church might be a pure Spouse unto him not a beastly and impudent Harlot Pray you read Revel 22.15 and you will see what manner of persons they are that Christ shuts out or excommunicates Without says that great Text are dogs and sorcerers and whoremongers and murtherers and Idolaters and whosoever loveth and maketh a lye And if we should shut out all these from our Church I mean all those that are publickly and notoriously such as certainly it is our duty to do I fear we should have but pitiful thin Congregations How therefore we shall answer to Christ the letting in these dogs into his fold of the Church and our so industriously keeping his sheep out is if I mistake not our highest concernment to consider But I proceed As those you see that are in a wicked estate are our enemies to God and as such are under the curse of God so the Prayers of the Church are against them Let God arise and let his enemies be scattered was the ancient standing Prayer of the Church of God But how dismal is that Petition of the Royal Prophet Psal 59.5 where he prays the Lord God of hosts the
God of Israel that he would not be merciful to any wicked transgressors So that you see the Church which by their prayers helps to open the door of mercy to sinners shuts it upon the wicked by their prayers and prays against them in terminis for what David prays for here is the prayers of the Church Be not merciful O God to any wicked transgressors Nay you find Deborah and Barack not content to pray that God would not be merciful to such but expresly pray for their perishing For in their Song of Thanksgiving in the 5th of Judges upon the occasion of Jaels slaying Sisera they conclude it thus So let all thine enemies perish O God And if you remain some of them all this prayer must needs reach you And the holy Psalmist makes the like prayer in Psal 68.2 for there he prays thus As wax melteth before the fire so let the wicked perish at the presence of God What then are you mad to perish and will you abide in that estate that must end in perishing and where the prayers of the Church of God binds you over to perishing Be exhorted therefore from this consideration to come out of that perishing and destructive estate wherein you are that the prayers of the Church of God may be engaged for and not against you For this prayer of theirs will be heard Psal 110.1 The Lord said unto my Lord sit thou at my right hand until I make thine enemies thy footstool And this saying of the Lord is quoted no less than six times in the New Testament so that you may lay your souls upon the certainty of it and what would you be made the footstool of Christ to be trampled upon and trodden down to the lowest Hell for be as proud and be as opinion'd of your selves as you will here 's your portion if you remain Gods enemies What did you not hear but just now in what a tremble the Kings of the earth the great the rich the mighty men were in that were enemies to God and are you mad to be in that fearsul distraction too Did you not hear how they run from Mountain to Rock to hide themselves Pride your selves therefore as you will and trample on your Brethren as long as you will your Plumes must come down with a vengeance for 't is said by him that will never alter the word that is gone out of his mouth you must be made an everlasting footstool and must be trodden under foot eternally if you live and die in that condition Wherefore as you love your selves and as you love your souls come out of that condition that exposeth you to so much hazard and wherein you must perish it may be here but to be sure for ever hereafter And thus much for the Considerations come we now to a second Branch of the Exhortation Secondly Is it so that wicked persons are Plotters and the only Plotters that the world has in it then be exhorted to judg rightly of things do not follow a giddy heady humour that would make you pass a precipitate judgment but weigh things well in your mind and be not rash and hasty to pass your sentence before you have considered it It may be you may be under the mistake that Ahab King of Israel was for in 1 King 18. you read of one of the greatest mistakes and between two of the greatest men that you find in all the Scriptures for it was between the Prophet Elijah and King Ahab and about this very point that we are upon For in the 17th verse it is said That when Ahab saw Elijah that he said unto him Art thou the troubler of Israel A pretty rough complement at the very first meeting and I do verily believe that it was Ahabs judgment and that his lend ungodly Courtiers and the worser part of his Clergy had persuaded him fully into an opinion that this great and holy Prophet was he and only he that troubled Israel But let us see what Elijah answers to this charge and that you have in the very next verse thus And he answered I have not troubled Israel but thou and thy fathers house in that ye have forsaken the commandments of the Lord and thou hast followed Balaam A very home and smart answer Wherefore here must needs be a great mistake somewhere for the King charges the Prophet and the Prophet the King the King makes the Prophet to be the troubler of Israel but the Prophet denies the charge and makes the King to be so and so he was indeed for Elijah proves him so From which we may learn that it is not impossible but that even in our days the troublers of Israel may be filed to a wrong account But you will say Was not Elijah the troubler of Israel when St. James tells you That he earnestly prayed that it might not rain and it rained not in Israel for the space of three years and six months Jam. 5.17 I answer no you calculate amiss as all men do that go not to the beginning of accounts for they were the troublers of Israel that counselled those guilts and sins that brought these judgments upon their heads not the holy Prophet that prayed this is a false and deceitful computation like theirs that cry out on Forty one and the miseries that Forty one brought upon the Nation but not a word of the wickedness of the preceding years that brought those miseries of Forty-one upon us not a word of those Persecutions for Conscience sake that made so many thousands of good Protestants chuse rather to leave their native Country to leave their Friends their Relations their Livelihoods Trades and Occupations and go with their Wives and little ones to dwell in the vast and howling Wildernesses of America than to live here any longer and that the poor Pagans were more kind and tender to them than we their fellow Protestants Not a word of those barbarous and inhumane stigmatizings brandings gaggings Pillorings shameless whippings and cutting off ears inflicted with other oppressive judgments and proceedings by the High Commission and Star-Chamber Courts Judicatories fitter for Spain than for England Turks than Christians by which the Liberties Fortunes and Properties of the People of England were invaded at pleasure I am loth to proceed on this unpleasing Subject or else I could speak of the discontinuance of Parliaments not a word of the Massacre in Ireland which was plotted before but perpetrated in Forty one where not Two or three hundred nor Two or three thousand only but Three hundred thousand Men women and Children were murthered in cold blood or otherwise destroyed and ruined in less than two years time as saith Sir John Temple in his History of that Massacre Not a word of all these and a thousand mischiefs besides that brought the Calamities of 41 but 41 41 is croaked out every where Ay would to God I could not say in too many Pulpits too as if it were the
judg of Hercules by his foot and the whole by the part already detected was That since they could not cut off the King by their privy Conspiracies nor the Worthies of the Kingdom by their false Witnesses they would now go directly to work and cut off both and all by a bloody Massacre though we hope the same loving-kindness that blasted both their former attempts will also this but beware the third time is a rule that we Learned in the beginning of our days and pray God the arts of our enemies may not make us forget it now And to draw in the more company to abet this bloody work the burning Oliver and the Rump were to umbrage and initiate it on the Stage For a few loose Prentices and a number of unaccountable persons were to begin the tumult under that pretence and when the rout was up the actors themselves were to have appeared and played their part And though great discoveries have been made thereof yet many wise men doubt that we are not yet beyond the danger of it Wherefore if now after all this Justice be not done on this wicked bloody generation both King and People have reason to fear that they are under that dismal sentence denounced by the Lord on Ahab for sparing Benhadad 1 King 20.41 Thy life shall go for his life and thy people for his people I am as little for persecuting the Papists upon the account of Conscience as another But yet I must say that a man that makes it his conscience to plot my destruction and the destruction of all that 's dear and precious to me and is so restless at it that as soon as one Villany is discover'd he forms another and by repeating his Plots again and again upon me gives me such infallible assurance that he will never be quiet till he hath cut my throat I confess I think I should be a great debtor to my own safety should I not desire he might be sent to live a little further of and this is no more than what the common justice due to humane society does require and our very Laws themselves do warrant For if one private person may demand as his right the security of binding to the Peace any one that he avers on his corporal Oath he goes in danger of his life from certainly that Justice is not to be denied to a whole Nation And since no tye of Law is sufficient to bind them to the Peace here sure it is but justice to send them elsewhere that the Nation may be secured and that they may have the less cause to complain of ill usage let them in Gods name carry their estates with them And as our judging rightly of things will enable us to see more clearly through the arts of our enemies in general so will it enable you to see quite thorough their grand cheat in particular For that which they most labour to frighten us with is that unless we have their sentiments and talk and think of things as wickedly and impudently as they do that we are friends to the Fanaticks and enemies to his Majesty the first is said only to divide us from each other the last to prejudice the Government against us both As to the first I 'le only say that I do not think that it is so crying a sin as the clamor of their kind of cattle would insinuate to be friendly to Fanaticks and therefore I am not at all ashamed to confess for one that as I look upon them as the best dissenting Protestants that are most friendly to the Church of England so I look upon them as the best Church of England men that are the most friendly to dissenting Protestants and if all others would account so too I should think our selves in a truer union than any act of Conformity can make and that 's all I shall say to that charge and all that I think is worth the saying to it But as to the last I do confess that I do judg that a very great sin and therefore shall be a little longer and more particular in the examining of this charge For I do hope that every one that makes a conscience of fearing God does make a conscience also of honouring the King But I doubt there is some mistake betwixt us concerning this duty and that this wicked generation call that an honouring the King which indeed is not For I do verily believe that those Presidents of the Kingdom those Governours Princes Counsellors and Captains that consulted together to make that Royal Statute and wicked Decree That whosoever should ask any petition of any god or man for thirty days save of the King should be cast into the den of Lions Dan. 6.7 and that went to the King to ratifie and establish that Decree v. 8. did carry themselves very toppingly for the Kings friends and the only principal Royalists and loyal persons that honoured the King in that Region and so I believe did those in the 3d of Dan. that accused those honest and worthy Nonconformists that would not fall down and perform that worship that the King had commanded ver 12. And I do believe as they accounted themselves the only honourers of the King so they reckoned Daniel and the three Children for factious and disloyal Fanaticks But now I do also believe that if you will but look how God Almighty who is the true and righteous Judg accounted them you will see that those wicked Court-Parasites were under a great mistake and that Daniel and the three Children that refused to obey those unrighteous Laws and Decrees were truer friends to and honourers of the King than those that had made and pressed the execution of them If you will therefore but entertain this Exhortation to judg rightly of things you will see through all these thin and pitiful veils that these wicked Plotters spread both over their own Villany and over your integrity and will see that this is but one of their old arts and a cheat so oft repeated that nothing less than impudence would bestow the pains to lick it over afresh and impose it on the world again For did not this same spirit ever do thus Did they not make innocent Naboth an enemy to the King nay and took away his precious blood upon that account because he would not part with his Vineyard which was his Inheritance Did they not account the Prophet Jeremiah an enemy to the King because he pressed him to obey the word of the Lord in yielding to the Caldeans Did they not account those we last mentioned Daniel and the three Children enemies to the King because they would not obey those wicked and unrighteous Laws that the King had commanded Did not Haman accuse Mordecai one of the best friends the King had and all the Jews for the Kings enemies and such as did not keep the Kings Laws and upon that accusation obtained that bloody Decree which was written and