which are now chronick or inveterate of many years continuance and very deep reaching from head to feet into such a posture of healing and into such healers hands as may be best able and honest on which account as these Souldiers who can do nothing against the truth and Law against Church and State but for them will deserve great honour and rewards from the Nation and its Parliaments full and free So people must blame themselves if they chuse for Healers or Physitians such men as are neither for wisdom and skill nor for courage or conscience nor for honesty or vertue nor for good example or reputation or yet for well-gotten estates of any value or publique interest nor ever probable to heal others since themselves are sick and sore either of fear and guilt or of Schism and Faction or of superstition and sacriledge or of Rebellion and Anarchy or of the itch of novelty and mange of popularity or of the plague of immorality and debauchery From such Healers both Civil Sacred and Military so unhealed so unwholesome so infectious so destructive to Church and State to Law and Gospel to Justice and Religion good Lord deliver the daughter of my people 5 Lastly Not only these unskilful or unfaithful or unwilling persons of publique influence are blamable for not healing the hurts of a Nation when they have authority and opportunity as well as power or for healing so slightly that things are never the better nay worse and worse But further there lyes no small sin and blame upon the Patient the people or community First when they are not conscienciously careful what Physitians or Surgeons they make choice of and put themselves with their lives estates liberties and lawes bodies and souls into their hands but adventure upon every pragmatique Emperick and confident Undertaker Next when this is done commendably as truly I am prone to believe it was in the first Elections of the long Parliament if they could have quietly kept together without tumultuating factions and fatal divisions for people then not to acquiesce as they ought under God in their skill and honesty onely following them with such modest Petitions as are necessary and such complaints as are comely also with their prayers to God for a blessing But for the populacy then to cluck into parties and conspiracies according to the cunning of some Agitators for novelty and factors for troubles then to break out into tumultuary rudenesses and seditious menaces and at last to become dictators to their Physitians and like gouty feet to threaten the head and shoulders and hands if they be not cured of their anguish after their own fancy not after the Rules of Art and Law of Health These are so far from being Healers that they are the greatest hinderers of their own and others publique health in the world yea the venome and acrimony of these fretting and turbulent humors subtilly diffused among the divided vulgar and by their means re-infused into the publique hurts and real grievances cannot but strangly increase the malignity of distempers throughout the whole habit of the body which {non-Roman} {non-Roman} {non-Roman} {non-Roman} {non-Roman} pestilent and depraved state of the generality of the people divided and distracted like Demoniacks or possessed with fears and jealousies with envies and hatred with hopes and other unreasonable passions is much harder to be cured and more dangerous to the publique than the disaffection or inflammation the discontent or ambition of any one part of the body which is easily corrected or counter-ballanced with the Antidote as it were of all other sound parts which are far the major number When therefore a sick Nation hath done its duty in the choice of its Healers The way is to assert the Honor and Authority of those orderly Physicians not to suffer any intruding Empyricks or extruding Mountebanks by fraud or force to drive these away that way may be made for their cruel activity and unsatiable gain It will prove an endless and costly cure which permits it self to every one that hath a minde to be tampering The best way is patiently to submit to their own Parliamentary choice and to Gods dispensation by their means In this way there is hope if people can be still they may see the Salvation of God Patients will make mad work if they may controle and cudgel their Physicians Although it is possible that the crying sins committed in a Nation may be such that no outward means can cure its sores and maims especially if the noblest and most vital parts of the body being cut off or grievously wounded there be a clamor of blood unjustly shed crying to heaven for vengeance which vengeance if a Nation will hope to escape and be healed they must be sure not to adopt the sin by after silence or Smotherings But rather so publickly to expiate it in wayes of Repentance as it may not be imputed to the whole Nation and their Posterity As the desperate Jews imprecated His blood be upon us and our children in the case of Christs being put to death by envy and faction by popular clamors and Statepolicies when against all justice of God and man yea against the sence and conscience of Pilate none of the justest judges he was condemned to dye to gratifie a popular and military importunity to which some Scribes and Pharises Hypocrites together with some covetous and ambitious Priests had exalted the credulous and cruel common people who are prone to triumph in the Tragick executions and ruines of their betters and Superiours as a kinde of victory over the others greatness and a levelling of eminent honor to their own meanness and baseness 6. But It is now time for me in order to give way to the pains of my learn'd and reverend Successor and to avoid the tyring of your patience at the first Stage when you are to go a second It is time I say for me to bring up the Rear and to present you in the Sixth particular with the vera sanandi methodus the true method of publick cures of healing the hurts of the Daughter of my people in Church or State For the precipitant preposterous or presumptuous neglect of which these Medicasters are here blamed reproached and threatned by the Spirit of God with whose Philanthropy as with every good man that politick and indeed pious because charitable maxime beares sway Salus publica suprema lex The welfare of the whole in all its integral members and essential parts as compacted by the constitution and order of the publick polity is the supream Law rule measure and end of all just Councels and honest actions which aym at the health or healing of a Nation As {non-Roman} {non-Roman} {non-Roman} {non-Roman} {non-Roman} is {non-Roman} {non-Roman} {non-Roman} {non-Roman} {non-Roman} Beauty is the due proportion of parts with decent colour So {non-Roman} {non-Roman} {non-Roman} {non-Roman} {non-Roman} Health consists
A SERMON PREACHED In St. Pauls Church London before the Right Honourable the Lord Major Lord General Aldermen Common Council and Companies of the Honourable City of London February 28. 1659. BEING A day of solemn Thanksgiving unto God for Restoring of the Secluded Members of Parliament to the House of Commons The Common Council And preserving the City and a Door of Hope thereby opened The fulness and freedom of future Parliaments The most probable means under God for healing the hurts and recovering the health of these three Brittish Kingdomes By JOHN GAVDEN D.D. Ezek. 21.26 27. Thus saith the Lord Remove the Diadem and take off the Crown this shall not be the same exalt him that is low and abase him that is high I will overturn overturn overturn it and it shall be no more untill he come whose it is and I will give it him Restat ut pauciores pluribus cedant hoc uno stant popularia imperia aliter casura H. Gro. Hist. Bet. l. 17. pag. 150. LONDON Printed for Andrew Crook at the Green Dragon in Pauls Church-yard 1660. Aleyn Major A Common Council holden the 29. of February 1659. Ordered that the thanks of this Court be given to Dr. Gauden who preached Yesterday before them at St. Pauls Church And that he from this Court be desired to print this Sermon SADLER To the right Honourable THOMAS ALEYN Lord Mayor of the City OF London THE Court of Aldermen and Common-Counsel AS by your Desire I was induced to preach the following Sermon so by your Order in Common Council I was requested to print what I preached I have obeyed you in both and supererogated in the later adding something prepared but omitted for want of time and a respect due to your expectation of a second and better course on that Festival This I have done not only as compliant with your Christian Commands but as solicitous to conform all my endeavours to the publick Good of your City and our common Countrey which a great part of the Church of Christ and many precious souls as well as mens bodies Lives Liberties Honours and Estates are embarqued All which have for our sins been long engaged in a tempest of War and sea of Blood nor have they been able to make any fair Port or happy Haven these many years since they lost their Pilots and Compass their King and Parliaments by the various Euroclydons of mens passions Lusts and Interests which have tossed them to and fro with every wind made great waste of all that is precious for Religion Justice and Honour besides Estates and Lives of men in the three Kingdomes threatning all either with speedy and utter Shipwrack by forreign Invasion or an everlasting storm by domestick confusions untill the unexpected and undecerned providence of God began to open to your and the Countryes prayers some door of hope by the prudent valiant and succesfull Conduct of the present Lord General Monck from whom all good men expect all good things nor can he deceive them without deceiving and destroying himself and his Countrie Your gratitude to God for this seasonable dawning of Mercy which seems to bespeak a great calm occasion'd your solemn Convention that day and my preaching to you In which work you cannot wonder if I endeavoured to shew my self a Work-man that needed not to be afraid or ashamed being very sensible with you of the great many and long hurts of the daughter of my people both in Church and State I then freely declared them to you I deplored them with you I proposed the methods of cure to you as fully as the time will permit and as freely as became my duty to my God and my conscience As I would not injure any man or fester the times so I abhor to flatter them which is the greatest injury a Preacher can do to Church and State Some I hear were offended then late of Christs of John Baptists and Saint Pauls preaching at the plain dealing I used which possibly was from thier overrawness and soreness more then from my roughness As I aim to do things faithfully personally so decently and discreetly Nor do I think I am to learn of those Censorious Catos how to preach any more then they will learn of me how to buy and sell or how to fight and war No man may wonder if I dare to reprove those sins which some dare to do or approve but dare not hear of or repent The parrhesie or freedom of my speech as a man a Christian and a Preacher was such as became my feeling of the publick miseries my desire of the publick tranquility and my sense of that fidelity I ow to God to my Countrey to you and to my own soul These are not times to palliate and speak smooth or soft things Never age had fouler humours or prouder tumours more felt and more painfull more hard and less mollified These I would help to cure that so we might recover publick health together with our wits and reason our Laws and Religion our good Confidence and Government our Peace and Unanimity all which we have lost since we lost our heads in Church and State Our full and free Parliaments consisting of King Lords and Commons in which the soule and life the honour and happiness of these Nations are bound up And no part of it is more concerned then your famous sometime flourishing and still populous City in whose happiness the whole Nation will be happy and in its misery all must be miserable Since London is not only as a ponderous Byas to the great bowl which draws all parts towards it but it is as the Mistress Lady or Queen to which every Village City and Countrey of the Nation as officious Hand-maids study to present all manner of costly comlyness not only feminine as the superfluity of peace and plenty but also masculine for London like Pallas is furnished as with men of Counsel and Conduct with Treasure and Strength with all sorts of Armes and Aminition being a Camera Imperii Britanii a vast Magazine of men and money a nursery of all Arts Mechanick Ingenuous and Military a great entertainer of Learning and a noble encourager of Religion wanting nothing to make it self and the Nation happy if it have such heroick minds and honest hearts and become so rich so great and so Christian a City 'T is true like plethorick bodies great care must be had how ill humours yea and good ones too are put into motion since the first cannot well be long kept in nor may the second be purged out The first threatning dangerous inflamations the second no less dangereus Evacuations Here Prudence Order Moderation Confidence and Unanimity are required besides Zeal and Courage in order to recover your and our former health in Church and State which was made up of an admirable temper and constitution till sin tumults violence and war cast us into these Feavers Convulsions and Confusions with which
we have wrestled for many years Indeed your City ows some Reparation now payd it to the whole Nation not only for the advantages it hath from all parts but for the disadvantages which all have suffered not from the ill intentions but from some tumultuating dispositions which as Porpusses were pregnant in your sea of people when our troubles first began I hope God hath prepared blessings for you and by yours for the whole Nation by opening your eyes humbling your hearts disposing your minds and exciting your spirits to thoughts of Justice and Piety of Repentance Restitution and Peace We have had wounds and hurts enough healings and strong Delusions too many It is high time if it be Gods time to speak comfortably to Zion and tell her Warfare is accomplished to pour in the Balm of Gilead by sober and aquanimious Counsels to bind up by orderly just power what hath been long broken to make up the grand defects in our Government and to lay foundations of future peace and happiness in Righteousness and Truth That the enemies of our now Religion and this reformed Nation may not rejoyce in our continued miseries and say So would we have it I have sought to do my duty if some think I have overdone it I must crave your patrociny to assert that which by your acceptance seemed to be your sense as well as mine and is as I hope the sense of all honest and judicious men For men that are fanciful fanatick we need them not to make us happy I am sure they have made a shift to make us very miserable And if God had not in mercy set bounds to the rage of that sea and the madness of that people they would have made your City an heap of ashes and our Countrey a field of Blood It will be your Wisdom Honour and Happiness to keep in the bounds of just moderate religious and sober Counsels to aim at legal honest and tried wayes of settlement to apply to such Physicians as you find most able and faithfull so will health and salvation break forth upon you and the three Nations which is the earnest prayer Of your humble servant in Christ J. GAVDEN A SERMON PREACHED Before the Lord Mayor Aldermen c. of London IER. 8.11 For they have healed the hurt of the Daughter of my people slightly saying Peace peace when there is no peace BEing called to this publick service by the piety and civility of this great City Right honorable and worthy Auditors I could not well tell how to avoid it because it seemed so good a work nor yet upon so short warning how to accept of it being so great a work if either I regard the importance of the occasion which looks like a door of hope opened to the healing of these Nations and composing of their sad distractions by the counsels of a full and free Parliament and by the assistance of regular and orderly power Or if I consider as I ought in prudence the difficulty and danger of touching though in order to heal the old sores and fistulating ulcers of this Church and State which are now vetuscentia mala annosi morbi inveterate dolors obstinate evils and pertinacious maladies not only impatient to be touched freely and searched throughly but are prone to plead as the Devils in the Gospel who had possessed the poor man now a long time against all health and recovery Many men like Canters and Lazars are in love with their wounds and ulcers getting their living more easily by keeping their sores open raw and running than if they should quite heal them up I am further conscious not only to the touchiness of the times and the tenderness of many mens minds who are only for lenitives and oyles for soft smooth and supple applications even to their most desperate hurts but to that my own native parrhesia or freedom of speaking which is both customary and consciencious not that I affect unseasonable severities of speech and such rudeness under the pretence of freedom as rather exasperates the wound and inflames the humor than purgeth allays or easeth them But I profess to chuse not to preach at all than to preach timorously or precariously Vt Lugdunensem Rhetor dicturus ad aram as if I should ask men leave to be honest or were afraid to speak the Word of God to them When I am called to speak in Gods name I must be Parrhesiastes as well as Ecclesiastes I am to do it as a workman that needs not to be ashamed either for his ignorance or cowardise or indiscretion whether men will hear or forbear the whole counsel of God must be delivered in its season so as becomes the words of soberness and truth for the Church or Pulpit must not be a sanctuary for insolency or a burrow or a retreat for rudeness No however men may become our enemies for speaking the truth yet it is better so than to have God our enemy for smothering it when it is just and seasonable and such it is when necessary and soveraign to heal the hurt of a Church or State It hath been my fate frequently to offend some men when I have been most intent to serve them by Texts and Sermons which I thought most apt useful and innocent When I preached at the Court Anno 1640. upon that Heb. 12.14 Follow peace with all men and holiness without which no man shall see God When before the long Parliament at its first convening upon Zach. 8.19 Therefore love the truth and peace When at another great and epidemick Assembly upon 1 Cor. 3.19 For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God Of all three though wholsom and innocent Texts and I hope accordingly handled yet I heard some unpleasing Ecchoes and reflexions the sore and itching ears of some men in all ages are such that they will not endure {non-Roman} {non-Roman} {non-Roman} {non-Roman} {non-Roman} healing or sound and wholesom doctrine though the pain riseth from the soreness and inflammation in themselves and not from the plaister or hand which honestly applies it yet they are prone as in fell boils and acute tumors when touched though but gently to fly upon those that are next them and cry aloud O you hurt me when the hurt is within and from themselves Sound parts will endure free and rough handling such as are unsound do most want it and therefore if we will be faithful to God to our own souls and to our hearers we must not flatter their sores to their ruine but rather chuse to heal them though at present we be thought to hurt them nor shall our labor of love be in vain either in the Lord or before good men who at length will finde by experience that the wounds of a friend which let out the putrified matter of painful tumors are better than the kisses of an enemy which do infidis cicatricibus cuticulam
Ministers nor the same form of Church and State while they have so little equity so no piety or charity to each other while every petty person among the Prophets and people aims to set up a party or faction and every party designs to subdue others to set up it self and to oppress the common liberty and publick welfare which are only contained in those Laws that are made by the consent of all Estates in the Nation What peace can there be where there are so many tumults and strifes so many whispers and jealousies so many fewds and animosities in the brest and bowels of the same Nation for want of that rare Elixir of lawful and just government which only is able to compose the distracted spirits to give a just allay and temperament to all humors and parts in their due places and porportions except they be such as are indigestible to any good order and are better purged out than kept in the body Alas these pittiful partial applications these diurnal doses these horary medicaments these slight and superficial plaisters these verbal and decretal healings which some men have so gloried in and vapoured of are as ridiculous as they have been inefficacious unless these great Masters of their new arts these Galens and Hypocrates of Church and State were so in favour with some Esculapius as to partake of his Diety and so by the words of their mouthes or shadows of their bodies or touch of their garments to rebuke the Feavors of the body politick and immediately to cure as by miracle what they have so long tampered about to very ill purpose But as an ilfavored Physitian is an ill omen to his patient especially if he look ill from his being ill there being no great hope that the Physitian should cure others who doth not or cannot cure himself so the busie Practitioners on the Daughter of their people should do well first to commend their skill to the publique by giving some good experiments on their selves by curing their own corrupt hearts or crazy heads by recovering themselves from those vertigos megrims and falling sicknesses with which they have been so oft afflicted let them wash their own foul hands and cleanse their double minds let them cease to do evil and learn to do good Let them do all things not arbitrary ad libitum libidinem but as exact Physitians Apothecaries per pondus mensuram by weight and measure by the rule and standard of the Laws of God and man which give or restore or preserve to every one what is their own by such purchase donation descent and honest industry wherein their rights are made good by Law and which they have no way forfeited by any injury to the publique of which the Laws of the Land and lawful Magistrates are the only lawful Judges Let them not think by a little Fasting-spittle to cure the hurts of Church and State nor yet by their solemne feasts This is the fast and this the feast the Lord hath chosen comely for true relion and wholesome for the Nation To loose the bands of wickedness to undo heavy burthens to break every yoak of unrighteous decrees and acts to restore what is unjustly that is without law taken away from any man to do as they would be done unto to deal justly to all men to shew mercy even in deserved Justice and after all to walk humbly with God This do O ye Physitians of my people and you shall live This do and the daughter of my people shall live being throughly healed of the wounds she hath received in the house of her seeming friends For it was not an open Enemy of the heathens round about which hath done her all this hurt But her own Children Let them cease from being rebellious Children companions of Adulterers Robbers and Murtherers return to that duty they owe to their God and their civil Parents to their Country and their Church or to that pitty and compassion they ow to their Children and posterity whose teeth will certainly be set on edge by the sower grapes their fathers have eaten Jer. 31.29 Then shall health spring forth speedily righteousness shall go before and the glory of the Lord be thy rearward Then shall they be as Fathers and sons too of the Nation who shall build the old wast places repair the breaches and raise up the foundations of many generations which have been overthrown overthrown overthown after they had continued firme for many ages as to the stability of Church and State under Gods indulgence and the care of good Magistrates But since these Tamperers are so justly and severely reproached by God and the Prophet for their slight healing which was indeed none at all the more cruel by how much they were more cunning to keep the daughter of my people in continual pain and themselves in constant practice and pay It will not be amiss more particularly to examine in the sence of Gods Spirit and his Prophet whence this malice or mistake had its rise how this slight healing did befall the daughter of his people and how it is to be avoided as much as death and hell and devil First it comes by unskilful Empiricks such as neither understand the Science of Physick nor the Art of Chyrurgery neither the cause nor the symptoms nor the proper and specifick medicines for such hurts and diseases as Church and State may labor under which possibly may be as many as the natural bodies of men are subject to if a man had a true Anatomy of the parts and constitution with all accidental distempers incident to the body Politick from within or without When men of little or no literature of as little experience in matters of policy and prudence of mean capacity and education of small minds and narrow souls do undertake the cure who are easily deluded and gulled byassed and swerved with fair words specious pretences and partial yea private interests especially if these novel interests have any smack or tincture fucus or form of more than ordinary godliness when these easie shallow and inconsultive men of giddy heads and rash hands full of childish credulity and popular formalty come to the helm of Church and State to rule and steer all they look more to the spreading of their sails than to that due balast and lading or to that right cynosure and compass of Law and Justice which God and their Country have prescribed Gonsalvo whom Guicciardine calls the great Captain of his time was wont to say that a General or cheif Commander of an army had need have thirty years experience to breed him accomplished to all the abilities requisite to such a place on whose prudent conduct the lives of so many men depend Yea and whole Nations too truly no less time is needfull to train up a compleat Counsellor of State a meet Physitian for the daughter of my people It is