Didst thou conceive my son that grace would put thee into a constant and pepetually-invariable condition of soul whiles thou art in this earthly warfare Didst thou ever hear or read of any of Gods prime Saints upon earth that were unchangeable in their holy dispositions whiles they continued in this region of mutability Look upon the man after Gods own heart thou shalt finde him sometimes so courageous as if the spirits of all his Worthies were met in his one bosom How resolutely doth he blow off all dangers trample on all enemies triumph over all cross events Another while thou shalt finde him so dejected as if he were not the man One while The Lord is my Shepherd I shall lack nothing Another while Why art thâ—â— so sad my soul and why art thou so disquieted within me One while I will not be afraid for ten thousands of the people that have set themselves against me round about Another while Hide me under the shadow of thy wings from the wicked that oppress me from my deadly enemies who compass me about One while Thy loving kindness is before mine eyes and I have walked in thy truth Another while Lord where are thy loving kindnesses Yea dost thou not hear him with one breath professing his confidence and lamenting his desertion Lord by thy favour thou hast made my mountain to stand strong Thou didst hide thy face and I was troubled Look upon the chosen vessel the great Apostle of the Gentiles one while thou shalt see him erecting trophies in himself of victory to his God In all these things we are more then conquerours through him that loved us Another while thou shalt finde him bewailing his own sinful condition Oh wretched man that I am who shall deliver me from the body of this death One while thou shalt finde him caught up into the third heaven and there in the Paradise of God another while thou shalt finde him buffeted by the messenger of Satan and sadly complaining to God of the violence of that assault Hear the Spouse of Christ whether the Church in common or the faithful soul bemoaning her self I opened to my Beloved but my Beloved had withdrawn himself and was gone my soul failed when he spake I sought him but I could not finde him I called him but he gave me no answer Thus it will be with thee my Son whiles thou art in this frail flesh the temper of thy soul will be like her partner subject to vicissitudes Shouldst thou continue always in the same state I should more then suspect thee This is the difference betwixt Nature and Grace That Nature is still uniform and like it self Grace varies according to the pleasure of the giver The Spirit breathes when and where it listeth When therefore thou findest the gracious spirations of the holy Ghost within thee be thankful to the infinite munificence of that blessed Spirit and still pray Arise O North and come thou South winde â—blowe upon my garden that the spices thereof may slow out But when thou shalt finde thy soul becalmed and not a leaf stirring in this garden of thine be not too much dejected with an ungrounded opinion of being destituted of thy God neither do thou repine at the seasons or measures of his bounty that most free and infinitely-beneficent agent will not be tied to our terms but will give what and how and when he pleaseth Onely do thou humbly wait upon his goodness and be confident that he who hath begun his good work in thee will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ. § 10. Complaint of unregeneration and deadness in sin answered It is true thou saist if God had begun his good work in me he would at the last for his own glories sake make it up But for me I am a man dead in sins and trespasses neither ever had I any true life of grace in me some shew indeed I have made of a Christian profession but I have onely beguiled the eyes of the world with a meer pretence and have not found in my self the truth and solidity of those heavenly vertues whereof I have made a formal ostentation It were pity my son thou shouldst be so bad as thou makest thy self I have no comfort in store for hypocrisie no disposition can be more odious to the God of truth in so much as when he would express his utmost vengeance against sinners he hath no more fearful terms to set it forth then I will appoint him his portion with the hypocrites Were it thus with thee it were more then high time for thee to resolve thy self into dust and ashes and to put thy self into the hands of thine Almighty Creatour to be moulded anew by his powerful Spirit and never to give thy self peace till thou findest thy selfâ— renewed in the spirit of thy minde But in the mean while take heed lest thou be found guilty of mis-judging thine own soul and mis-prising the work of Gods Spirit in thee God hath been better to thee then thou wilt be acknown of Thou hast true life of grace in thee and for the time perceivest it not It is no heed to take of the doom thou passest upon thy self in the hour of temptation When thy heart was free thou wert in another minde and shalt upon better advice return to thy former thoughts It is with thee as it was with Euâ—ychus that fell down from the third loft and was taken up for dead yet for all that his life was in him We have known those who have lien long in trances withovt any perception of life yea some as that subtil Joannes Duns Scotus have been put into their graves for fully dead when as yet their soul hath been in them though unable to exert those faculties which might evince her hidden presence Such thou mayest be at the worst yea wert thou but in charity with thy self thou wouldst be found in a much better condition There is the same reason of the natural life and the spiritual Life where it is is discerned by breathing sense motion Where there is the breath of life there must be a life that sends it forth If then the soul breathes forth holy desires doubtless there is a life whence they proceed Now deny if thou canst that thou hast these spiritual breathings of holy desires within thee Dost thou not many a time sigh for thine own insensateness Is not thine heart troubled with the thoughts of thy want of grace Dost thou not truly desire that God would renew a right spirit within thee Take comfort to thy self this is the work of the inward principle of Gods Spirit within thee as well may a man breathe without life as thou couldst be thus affected without grace Sense is a quick discrier of life pinch or wound a dead man he feels nothing but the living perceiveth the easiest touch When thou hast heard the fearful
judgements of God denounced against sinners and laid home to the conscience hast thou not found thy heart pierced with them hast thou not shrunk inward and secretly thought How shall I decline this dreadful damnation When thou hast heard the sweet mercies of God laid forth to penitent sinners hath not thy heart silently said Oh that I had my share in them When thou hast heard the Name of Christ blasphemed hast thou not felt a secret horrour in thy bosom All these argue a true spiritual life within thee Motion is the most perfect discoverer of life He that can stir his limbs is surely not dead The feet of the soul are the Affections Hast thou not found in thy self an hate and detestation of that sin whereinto thou hast been miscarried Hast thou not found in thy self a true grief of heart for thy wretched indisposition to all good things Hast thou not found a secret love to and complacency in those whom thou hast thought truly godly and conscionable Without a true life of grace these things could never have been Are not thine eyes and hands many times lifted up in an imploration of mercy Canst thou deny that thou hast a true though but weak appetite to the means and further degrees of grace What can this be but that hunger and thirst after righteousnesse to which our Saviour hath pronounced blessednesse Discomfort not thy selfe too much son with the present disappearance of grace during the hour of thy temptation it is no otherwise with thee then with a â—ree in winter-season whose sap is run down to the root wherein there is no more shew of the life of vegetation by any buds or blossomes that it might put forth then if it were stark dead yet when the Sun returnes and sends forth his comfortable beames in the spring it burgens out afresh and bewraies that vitall juyce which lay long hidden in the earth No otherwise then with the hearth of some good huswife which is towards night swept up and hideth the fire under the heap of her ashes a stranger would think it were quite out here is no appearance of light or heat or smoak but by that time she hath stirred it up a little the bright gleeds shew themselves and are soon raised to a flame Stay but till the spring when the Sun of righteousnesse shall call up thy moisture into thy branches stay but till the morning when the fire of grace which was raked up in the ashes shall bee drawne forth and quickned and thou shalt find cause to say of thy heart as Iacob said of his hard lodging Surely the Lord is in this place and I knew it not Onely doe thou not neglecting the meanes wait patiently upon Gods leasure stay quietly upon the bank of this Bethesda till the Angel descend and move the water §. 11. Complaint of the insensibleness of the time and meanes of conversion I could gladly thou saist attend with patience upon God in this great and happy work of the excitation of grace were I but sure I had it could I be but perswaded of the truth of my conversion but it is my great misery that here I am at a sad and uncomfortable losse for I have been taught that every true convert can designe the time the place the meanes the manner of his conversion and can shew how neare hee was brought to the gates of death how close to the very verge of hell when God by a mighty and out-stretched arme snacht him away in his own sensible apprehension from the pit and suddenly rescued him from that damnation and put him into a new state of spirituall life and undefaisible salvation All which I cannot do not finding in my selfe any such sudden and vehement concussion and heart-breaking any such forcible and irresistible operation of Gods Spirit within me not being able to design the Sermon that converted me or those particular approaches that my soule made towards an hardly-recovered desperation My son it is not safe for any man to take upon him to set limits to the wayes of the Almighty or to prescribe certain rules to the proceedings of that infinite Wisedome That most free and all-wise agent will not be tyed to walk alwaies in one path but varies his courses according to the pleasure of his own will One man hee cals suddenly another by leasure one by a kinde of holy violence as hee did S. Paul another by sweet solicitations as Philip Nathaniel Andrew Peter Matthew and the rest of the Apostles One man he drawes to heaven with gracious invitations another he drives thither by a strong hand we have known those who having mispent their yonger times in notoriously lewd and debauched courses living as without God yea against him have been suddenly heart-stricken with some powerfull denunciation of judgement which hath so wrought upon them that it hath brought them within sight of hell who after long and deep humiliation have been raised up through Gods mercy to a comfortable sense of the divine favour and have proceeded to a very high degree of regeneration and lived and died Saints But this is not every mans case Those who having from their infancy been brought up in the nurture and feare of the Lord and from their youth have been trained up under a godly and conscionable Ministery where they have been continually plyed with the essectuall means of grace Precept upon precept line upon line here a little and there a little and have by an insensible conveyance received the gracious inoperations of the Spirit of God though not without many inward strifes with temptations and sad fits of humiliation for their particular failings framing them to all holy obedience these cannot expect to finde so sensible alterations in themselves As well may the child know when he was naturally born as these may know the instant of their spirituall regeneration and as well may they see the grasse to grow as they can perceive their insensible increase of grace It is enough that the child attaining to the use of reason now knowes that he was born and that when wee see the grasse higher then we left it we know that it is growne Let it then suffice thee my son to know that the thing is done though thou canst not define the time and manner of doing it Be not curious in matter of particular perceptions whiles thou mayst be assured of the reality truth of the grace wrought in thee Thou seest the skilfull Chirurgion when hee will make a fontinell in the body of his patient he can do it either by a sudden incision or by a leasurely corrasive both sort to one end and equally tend towards health trust God with thy self and let him alone with his own work what is it to thee which way he thinks best to bring about thy salvation § 12. Complaint of irresolution and uncertainâ—y in matter of our election answered All were safe thou saist if onely
death another trembles to expect it one beggs for life another will sell it dearer here one would rescue one life and loseth two there another would hide himself where he findes a merciless death here lies one bleeding and groaning and gasping parting with his soul in extremity of anguish there another of stronger spirits kills and dies at once here one wrings her hands and tears her hair and seeks for some instrument of a self-inflicted death rather then yeeld her chaste body to the lust of a bloody ravisher there another clings inseparably to a dear husband and will rather take part of the murtherers sword then let go her last embraces here one tortured for the discovery of hid treasure there another dying upon the rack out of jealousie Oh that one man one Christian should be so bloodily cruel to another Oh that he who bears the image of the merciful God should thus turn fiend to his own flesh and blood These are terrible things my son and worthy of our bitterest lamentations and just fears I love the speculation of Seneca's resolutely-wise man that could look upon the glittering sword of an executioner with erected and undazeled eyes and that makes it no matter of difference whether his soul pass out at his mouth or at his throat but I should more admire the practice whiles we carry this clay about us nature cannot but in the holiest men shrink in at the sight and sense of these tyrannous and tragical acts of death Yet even these are the due revenges of the Almighties punitive justice so provoked by our sins as that it may not take up with an easier judgement Dost thou not see it ordinary with our Physitians when they finde the body highly distempered and the blood foul and inflamed to order the opening of a vein and the drawing out of so many ounces as may leave the rest meet for correction Why art thou over-troubled to see the great Physitian of the world take this course with sinful mankinde Certainly had not this great Body by mis dieting and wilful disorder contracted these spiritual diseases under which we languish had it not impured the blood that runs in these common veins with riot and surfets we had never been so miserable as to see these torrents of Christian blood running down our chanels Now yet as it is could we bewail and abandon our former wickedness we might live in hope that at the last this deadly issue might stop and dry up and that there might be yet left a possibility of a blessed recovery § 7. The woful miseries of Pestilence allaid by consideration of the hand that smites us Thou art confounded with grief to see the pestilence raging in our streets in so frequent a mortality as breeds a question concerning the number of the living and the dead That which is wont to abate other miseries heightens this The company of participants It was certainly a very hard and sad option that God gave to King David after his sin of numbring bring the people Chuse thee whether seven yeers famine shall come unto thee in thy Land or three moneths flight before thine enemies or three days pestilence We may believe the good King when we hear him say I am in a great strait Doubtless so he was but his wise resolutions have soon brought him out Let us fall now into the hand of the Lord for his mercies are great and let me not fall into the hand of man He that was to send these evils knew their value and the difference of their malignity yet he opposes three days pestilence to seven yeers famine and three months vanquishment so much oddes he knew there was betwixt the dull activity of man and the quick dispatch of an Angel It was a favour that the Angel of death who in one night destroyed an hundred fourscore and five thousand Assyrians should in three daies cut off but seventy thousand Israelites It was a great mercy that it was no worse We read of one City shall I call it or Region of Cayro wherein eighteen hundred thousand were swept away in one years pestilence enow one would think to have peopled the whole earth and in our own Chronicles of so generall a mortality that the living were hardly sufficient to bury the dead These are dreadfull demonstrations of Gods heavy displeasure but yet there is this alleviation of our misery that we suffer more immediatly from an holy just mercifull God The Kingly Prophet had never made that distinction in his wofull choyce if he had not known a notable difference betwixt the sword of an Angell and an enemy betwixt Gods more direct and immediate infliction and that which is derived to us through the malice of men It was but a poor consolation that is given by a victorious enemy to dying Lausus in the Poet Comfort thy selfe in thy death with this that thou fallest by the hand of great Aeneas but surely we have just reason to â—aise comfort to our souls when the pains of a pestilentiall death compasse us about from the thought and intuition of that holy and gracious hand under which we suffer so as we can say with good Eli It is the Lord. It is not amisse that we call those marks of deadly infection Gods Tokens such sure they are and ought therefore to call up our eyes and hearts to that Almighty power that sends them with the faithfull resolution of holy Iob Though thou kill me yet will I trust in thee It is none of the least miseries of contagious sicknesse that it bars us from the comfortable society and attendance of friends or if otherwise repaies their love and kinde visitation with death Be not dismaid my son with this sad solitude thou hast company with thee whom no infection can indanger or exclude there is an invisible friend that will be sure to stick by thee so much more closely by how much thou art more avoided by neighbours and will make all thy bed in thy sickness and supply thee with those cordialls which thou shouldst in vain expect from earthly visitants Indeed justly doe we style this The sicknesse eminently grievous both for the deadlinesse and generality of the dispersion yet there is a remedy that can both cure and conâ—ine it Let but every man look well to the plague of his own heart and the Land is healed Can we with David but see the Angell that smites us and erect an Altar and offer to God the sacrifices of our praiers penitence obedience we shall hear him say It is enough The time was and that time may not be forgotten when in the dayes of our late Soveraigne our Mother City was almost desolated with this mortall infection When thousands fell at our side and ten thousands at our right hand upon the publique humiliation of our soules the mercy of the Almighty was pleased to command that raging disease in the height of its fury