cannot without Trouble mind many things at once therefor God cannot To us clear testimony of this is given by him that cannot err nor deceive and if a Sparrow fall not to the ground without our heavenly Father certainly such grand Occurrences do not happen without his Government And he that understands the Reasons of his own Religion will not need to be contended with about this matter Religion teacheth all Men to look upon God as the prime Origin of all Things and Prayer and Praise are the two principal Services of it and we therefore pray to God for Mercies that we want and praise him for those we enjoy because we believe they issue from him and are disposed by him These things are equally argumentative in all Cases but there are some that carry their own Convictions with them had Men no great sense of Religion to induce them to a consonant belief Sometimes Rescues from Evils carry such clear Signatures of Divine Efficiency upon them that no Man can well be unobservant thereof but be strongly prompted to confess with the Egyptian Sorcerers in another case This is indeed the Finger and Power of God And truly I know not why I may not entitle this so to him upon these two accounts I. In respect of the then present Deliverance from this Consumption For my part I have often thought I could see as clear Signatures of God's merciful Interposition in stopping the Fire as Traces of his Anger in the progress of it I know not but the one had evil Instruments to promote it but I am sure the other in some places had none to obstruct it And as if God purposely intended to remark his Mercy in it you may yet see it stopped in places where one would not only judge it unlikely but next to impossible it should do so among rotten dry weak Buildings which should rather invite a Flame than give check to it But so Mercy recovered its Empire over Justice and it pitied the Almighty to triumph in farther Executions His Compassions said it was enough and fixed Bounds to the proud Flames and signalized themselves as much in the Rescue as Justice had before in the Execution II. In respect of the sudden Recovery and Rebuilding of the City again He that in the midst of such Desolations and Ruins should have predicted the Restoration of this City to that Glory it is now in in seven years time would hardly have escaped the Censure of a false Prophet but been thought to tell things as far exceeding Belief and Hope as Ezekiel did when he prophesied Life to dry Bones And for this I dare appeal to the sober sense of all that hear me among whom I am very confident few ever hoped to live to see half of that perfection which we now for a great while have been joyful Spectators of But so God inspired Men with Zeal and Industry and blessed their Labour to almost incredible measures and henceforth the Men of this City must appear Men of great Spirits to whom nothing is impossible nothing difficult especially when God saith Amen to their Resolutions But I must not forget to let you know in the midst of these Blessings what moved God to effect them the Text tells us clearly his Mercy nay Mercies in the plural nay his bowel tender Mercies as the Original imports And I would fain know what can be set up in competition with it Alass how vain how groundless how much their own confutation and shame are all those Thoughts that shall make God a Debtor to Man and enable Man upon any Merit in himself to challeng Blessings from him I have been always apt to believe and yet am That those that stand upon Terms with God have least reason to do so and those furthest from meriting any thing at his hands that pretend a possibility of doing so I never yet saw or heard any that when it came to the Test durst stand to it Tutissimum est saith the great Advocate for it It is safest to renounce our own and relie on Christ's Merits And All Men when they come to dye do so too And I think that an ill Doctrine to maintain in Life that all Men renounce and flie from at Death God knows and he that best knows hath told us That Man at his best state is altogether Vanity and at his worst is a Lye and much worse His Righteousness is so very little that it can claim no Blessing and his Wickedness so very great that it deserves nothing but Cursing And how improper and unbecoming it is for such a thing to strut it out and Stand upon Terms with God judge ye But my Brethren let other Men talk at what vain Rates they will I am sure we have enough to reduce us to humility and shame and that is by reflecting upon the Sins and Debaucheries of this Generation I pointed at this before and therefore shall not now cloy you with ungrateful Reputations I only beg as the Prophet doth verse 40. of this Chapter Let us search and try our ways and if we do we shall not need any other Method to preserve us from Vanity We shall soon find enough to humble rather than exalt us The only difficulty upon this Search will be to resolve whether our Sins have not surmounted God's Mercies and whether we have not confronted the Miracles of Divine Kindness with almost as great Miracles of our own Unworthiness Do you thus requite the Lord O foolish People and unwise And dost thou O Lord work Deliverances for such Both these are equally strange equally surprising Let the one be matter of our Humility and the other the magnifying of thy Mercy Not unto as O Lord not unto us but unto thy Name be the praise for thy Truth and for thy Mercies sake Let the People praise thee O God Let all the People praise thee O let the whole Nation extoll and magnifie thee Let them say alway Blessed be the Lord who hath pleasure in the prosperity of his Servants who hath not punished us as we deserved but in his Judgment remembred his Mercy and saved us for his Mercy and Compassion's sake But I have one thing more yet for which to entitle God and his Mercy to our preservation and that is the implacable Rage and Malice of our Enemies against us Of this we have fresh and daily Evidences and by the way I do not know but we may be obliged to them for it They pull of their Vizard and by this tell us what they are and what we are to expect and to whom also to fly for protection from them When Disappointments do but the more inrage them when to be defeated in one hellish Project makes them more earnest in another when nothing will reconcile them nothing discourage them we have just cause to say It is of God that we are not consumed to report in earnest that of the Psalmist Unless God keep the City the
to be Virtues and Merits But therefore I think these Doctrines and consonant Practices condemnation enough of that Religion and sufficient warrants for all that either love their Souls or their Safety to be watchful against all those that are bigotted into a mad Zeal for it Those Men that can Fire Cities and dance in the Light of their Flames are I am sure far enough from the Spirit of JESUS whose Name they usurp and had better derive themselves from Nero that Monster of Men or incarnate Devil But I would not be accounted severe to any If these things were but accidental Miscarriages and not the natural Issues of some Mens Principles Or were not we I do not know for what reason sliding insensibly into a good Opinion and Belief of their Innocency ready to acquit them from their Crimes and to think kindly of them I had wholly waved this reflective Period But since it is quite otherwise I think it not amiss nor very excentrick to my Duty to give a Caution against them and only say if we warm that Viper again in that Bosom which it hath formerly several times so dangerously wounded we become Accessaries to our own Ruin and must be pitied only with that compassion that belongs to silly and incredulous Fools I am for Mercy and Compassion Kindness and Charity to all but I do not know how to commend it then when it shall be made advantage of to effect our own Ruin IV. But fourthly I have greater Enemies to caution against and more dangerous for wicked Men could have no advantage against us did not we our selves give it them nor would God permit this Sword of his to wound us did not we by our Sins incense and provoke him to do so It is these that put the Sword into our Enemies Hand and it is these that arm evil Men against us And certainly when God not only threatens but lets us actually feel the sad and bitter Effects of these we have mighty great Arguments against them and shall make a sad Use of God's Methods and our own Experiences if yet we retain a Kindness for them It was our Saviours advice to the Man recovered from his sad Infirmity Joh. 5.14 Go and Sin no more lest a worse thing come unto thee and it was mighty proper and like to take effect For they that have felt by a true Experience what an evil and bitter thing it is to sin against God one would think were in a fair way to conversion but they that severely suffer for their Sins and yet go and sin again their Salvation is next to impossible And methinks these things might easily be applied to us and our present Circumstances That our former Sins have occasioned that Punishment which we come now to remember we have been told and would we believe our own selves might be assured May we not then nay should we not take heed of that whose Consequences we have experienced to be so tremendous If we would have the same Judgment repeated we know the Method and may pursue it but certainly if we be wise shall not do so If we dread the one we ought to hate the other If we deprecate the like Punishment we ought to abominate that which caused it If we execrate the Instruments that immediately inflicted the Destruction sure we ought to do so too to those Sins that enabled them to do so And if we lament our Sins and bewail our Misery this Day to any real Purposes of Religion or Acceptance this will be the Effect of so doing without which this Day and the Service of it will be but Pageantry and Hypocrisie which will expose us to God's Fury and not entitle us to his Mercy cause us to fear we shall be consumed instead of praising him that we are not as we now may as the Second General of the Text intimates to us I confess this is not so pertinent to the Design of this Day but blessed be God it is proper for us and therefore I shall for a Close consider it Three Things I have proposed on this Head and I beg patience while I speak to them The Theme is grateful and I hope we shall not grow weary to hear our own Blessings I. The first is to consider our Rescue from these Flames we are not consumed and blessed be God we can speak it upon better Reasons than the Prophet in the Text could That we are not consumed our own happy Experiences tell us and this Religious Convention effectually attests We are yet alive to praise God as I hope we shall this Day But this is too little for us to say It is too mean a Recognition to say we are not consumed we can say also we are happily recovered not only escaped from Death but restored to the happy strength and vigour of our former Life Our City is recovered to its former Grandeur nay as it commonly happens in Resurrections to greater Glory No Man that hath seen our former Temples needs to weep now upon the sight of our latter nor lament that our present Emporium is short of the first For our Buildings are risen to a more glorious Pile and our City to a much more beautiful Frame than formerly And we need not be told this we see it daily and it is equally our wonder and our joy It will be a more seasonable Consideration to impress our Thoughts with the Author of this blessed Preservation that we may pay him sutable Recognitions for it and that is plainly enough intimated in the Text to be the Lord it is of the Lord's Mercies that we are not consumed I. That God is indeed the Author of such signal Preservations as ours and this Peoples too were is a Truth so very evident upon the Principles of Natural Religion that I must not be so rude as to go about gaining a Belief of it in this Audience All Men that have any Belief of the Being of God or his Providence in Governing the World or that have any sense of Religion and the Reasons of it cannot but have entertained a Belief of this Truth If we believe a God we must believe him to be the first great Cause which doth influence and move all the rest which neither can act without him nor contrary to his determination So that he that admits the fatal Chain and lays a necessary Train of Causes for all things that are must either drive that Chain to its first Original or he speaks nonsence and doth not understand his own Hypothesis And if we believe Divine Providence to superintend and order the Affairs of the World we must acknowledge this upon that Reason too I do not go to prove the Being of Providence in this place nor to give Reputation to that idle Epicurean Fancy upon which a Mistrust of this is founded by confuting of it It is founded upon a gross Mistake of God and degrading him to the Imperfections of Man who because he
Watchman waketh but in vain And but that he hath done the first all care of the other had been to no purpose III. And now I have but one thing more to enquire about but it is a very material and important one i. e. How these Mercies may be secured to us And how these Compassions that have been hitherto extended to us may not fail An Enquiry which it is so much the more needful to have Resolution in by how much we are subject to the same Consumptions still and have the same wicked Men as industrious to bring them upon us as ever and must be preserved by the same Compassions and Mercies if we be preserved The Designs of Sixty Six are yet pursued and its barbarous Intendments prosecuted as eagerly as ever The same Reason which incited the Cruelty then continues visible still It is this CITY next to God and his Vicegerents Safety and Care that supports the Interest of this Kingdom and Church While this is safe and flourishing in conjunction with its KING all the Attempts of Darkness supposing God's common Providence will be their own Confusions This our Enemies seem to see clearly and you may perceive their Designs have been accordingly Either to destroy the CITY or to take away the Life of the KING would put their hopes into fair possibilities but to do both would certainly assure them And therefore each have been singly and both in conjunction in aim and project Delenda est Carthago was Romes great Maxim of Policy of old and it is the same still only changing the Scene So that we as much need the same Compassions and Mercies to protect us now as ever and therefore no Enquiry can be more really concerning than how these may be assured to us still Which Enquiry I do not know how more safely and effectually to resolve than in these Two Directions 1. Be we sure to be duly thankful for the Mercies that we have already received The Persons or People that are so almost lay an obligation upon God to confer more Consult your own Breasts you will find your Charity still moves by this Rule and consult the Holy Scriptures and you shall find that God's moves also by the same 2. But above all things be we sure to add holiness to our praises to live holy and christian Lives to avoid those Sins that provoke God's Indignation and Wrath against a People and to practice those Graces which entitle them to Divine Protection and Favour To come out of the Fire refined from our former Sins and to permit our Flames to consume our Dross By this we shall comply with God's great Design in them and prevent all need of a further refining If by this the Iniquity of Jacob be purged the Fire shall be kindled against it no more Let the living Temples exceed the former in purity as much as the material ones surpass them in beauty the Inhabitants be as much better as their Habitations are more glorious and their Zeal for God Care of his Religion Concern for his Honour Obedience to his Commands be intended and heightned by these great Obligations This would render us dear and beloved of God This would cause his Angels to encamp about us and the Divine Presence to dwell among us This would make God our Sun and our Shield and entitle us to his blessing and protection too For Holiness is God's own Nature and Being and can no more be separated from his regards and Care than a Sun-beam can be cut off from its Original and cast into Hell Upon these terms we may commit our selves and our safetie unto God and need not doubt the success We may assure our selves that as his Mercies have been manifested to us so they will and that as his Compassions hitherto have not so for the future they never will fail Which God of his infinite Mercy grant for his Son Jesus Christ's sake Amen FINIS