little sortable to the temporal burthens of crosses and afflictions as they cannot be conceived to be the grievances we must first complain of Nothing but sin is to be found counter-marked with these notes upon it That then is the burthen you are first advised to bring in to be delivered of this weight which the world commonly laboureth and sweateth most to charge it selfe with and yet it is truly so strangely onerous as even God and Man Christ Jesus did sweat blood under the weight thereof although he carryed but the lighter halfe of it the paine onely not the pollution This is then the first oneration whereof you must intend the demission and deliverance For they who begin with calling to Christ for alleviation of temporall burthens or solicite him to transpose their loads upon their enemies setting these articles of ease and animosity before all the rest in their Petitions doe me thinks as if the Leper in the Gospel should have sued to Christ to have given him clothes to cover him onely For when we have the uncleannesse of any foule sinne upon us to intend any thing before the deliverie from that is but to beg a covering or palliation of our distresse And we know temporall commodities doe often hide and clothe the leprosie of sin but seldome contribute to the emundation and they who lift up their hands in the first place to draw down vengeance even from him to whom it belongeth doe me thinks as if the robbed and wounded Traveller in S. Luke should have desired the good Samaritan to have followed the theeves to apprehend them and deliver them to justice before he had thought of dressing his owne wound it is but such a preposterous application to pursue even Gods enemies while we have our own sins crying out and endangering our souls and crying for revenge against us under the same notion we prosecute our enemies We must all then retaine this principle that the first exoneration we must designe is to be this of the burthen of our sinnes and when we are delivered from them our crosses will prove rather our carriages then our burthens for as death is formidable in this face and aspect of the wages of sinne and that countenance may justly fright us but when we look upon it as a debt only we must pay nature before we can passe to eternall life in this view it seemeth rather officious then offensive to us in like manner when our afflictions and crosses are charged upon us as wages of our iniquities still growing in us as in the cases of Pharaoh and Antiochus then they have an intollerable heavinesse in them but when they are considered but as fees and duties we must pay in our passage through this miserable life unto a blisfull perpetuity and that all the Saints have paid them in their pilgrimage then they appear rather serviceable then formidable unto us So hereupon I may say that when our sinnes are heaped and accumulated on our crosses pressing and holding them upon us then the charge is unsufferably grievous but when our sufferings are imposed and charged upon our sinnes and that they presse our faults so hard upon our consciences as the pressure of our offences groweth intolerable and so forceth us to come creeping humbly under our loade to this promise of releefe which Christ exhibiteth to all such labourers and loaded soules then our affliction proveth an happy surcharge that hath sunke through our hearts that other sad portage of our sinnes which before peradventure did not disease us and then the heavinesse of our crosses which remaineth will comparatively with the other we are released of seeme very easie and portable as one that should rise from being bedrid with the Palsie or Sciatica after he were cured would find a little charge to carry his blankets upon his back There is such an analogy between the weight of sinne and of sufferance as between these two different heavinesses And sure the Paralitike who went back charged with his bed upon him found lesse heavinesse then when he was caryed upon his bed So when affliction that we finde hath partly contributed to our spirituall rising and recovering out of our bed-rid habits of sinne remaineth upon us we carry it so lightly as we handle it rather as a benefit then a burthen Then we find sensibly the verity of this assertion of Jugum meum suave est Mat. 11.30 My yoke is sweet and my burthen light Jere. 48.11 onus meum leve When we have found rest for our soules all other agitations are but as the Prophet saith powring us out from vessell into vessell to purge us of our dregs and faeces which we should settle in againe it may be if we were let stand And to evidence this principle that we must first begin our addresses to God with the Prodigals Pater peccavi before we sue for casting off our rags and being apparelled with conveniencies we may consider how God doth not account himselfe so much as spoken to by us even in all our clamours untill Jerem. Thren as the Prophet saith the cloud be removed that intercepted our prayer from passing For David affirmeth this experience saying Because I held my peace my bones are as it were waxen old while I cryed all the day So as you see all Davids clamours are but as dumnesse to the eares of God so long as his sinne sleepeth within his brest though his throat grow hoarse he doth but as it were strain to cry out under water while his iniquity like waters are gone over his head Hereby we see that all vociferation while our sinnes are quiet and tacent in our affections is no more audible then silence and on the contrary we may note that God accounted Moses to have made a loud exclamation when we finde he was silent his heart being not obstructed with sinne uttered a voice which penetrated the heavens while his tongue had no part in the conveyance of it Exod. 14. And Moses removed the whole red Sea more easily with this silence Psal 3. then David could draw back those few drops of iniquity he had drunk in all the ejaculations of his voyce did not pierce the cloud untill his sighes had broken through it and then after his heart had once strucke upon that key of confession of his fin in this note of I have made my sin known unto thee and mine iniquity I have not hid then every whisper of his to God is audible for we finde him professing this also Psal 55.10 In what day soever I shall invocate thee lo I have known that thou art my God In quacunque die invocavero te ecce cognovi quia Deus meus es So as here we see the divers effects of Prayer while our sins cry the louder for our silencing them no other vociferation is made but theirs which we do not utter when they have first lifted up their voice through the organ
sufferance out of any of which I hope in God there is not any of you would agree to be ejected even upon this contract of being raised from Josephs chaine up to his chariot and dominion in Aegypt The first is as you are men the second as you are Christians and the third as you are Catholikes A MISSIVE OF CONSOLATION CHAP. I. Of the Covenant of Suffering as Men the Sonnes of Adam TO the first Covenant of sufferance you know we all give our voice by a naturall instinct before we have scarce enjoyed so much as light for it and our eyes 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 browes for our eyes pay their sweat which is their teares 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 kind 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 doe but run over our senses and so passe away and leave them againe in their drouth and privation And most commonly the advance of all our paine and passion rendreth us nothing of what they negotiate So as a man when he looketh upon himselfe in the best reflexes his temporary wishes can make him shall find this brand and stigmate of Adam upon his forehead Gen. 3.10 Thou shalt eate in the sweat of thy brows In sudore vultûs tui vescêris pane And this is a mark which God stamped upon Adam of another kind of signification then that he set upon Cain for this directeth all things that occur to man in this life to strike him and wound his temporall estate in some kind or other insomuch as all the creatures do in their severall manners execute this sentence upon the sons of Adam not allowing 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 the vexation of a deprivement of them during the ardour 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 entred into as soon as we entred into light For which reason the a Ecclesiasticus 40.1 Great travell is created to all men and a heavy yoke upon the children of Adam from the day of their coming forth of their mothers wombe untill the day of their burying in the mother of all their cogitations and fears of the heart imagination of things to come and the day of their ending from him that sitteth upon the glorious seat unto him that is humbled in earth and ashes Wiseman proclaimeth elegantly the tenour of it saying Occupatio magna creata est omnibus hominibus jugum grave super filios Adam à die exitus de ventre matris 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 usque in diem sepulturae in matrem omnium cogitationes corum timores cordis adinventio expectationis dies finitionis à residente super sedem gloriosam usque ad humiliatum in terrâ cinere Neither need we look back upon the defaced images of all conditions in the dead prints of story we have such living figures of them before our eyes as must needs imprint upon our thoughts a lively character of the deplorable state of all mortals Whereby out of the ruines of those houses whereof you lament the demolishments you may pick up some materials to build in your minds this frame of the instable constructure of the greatest strengths of humane happinesse Eccles 10. I have seen servants upon horses Princes walking on the ground as servants and thus your friends may in their fall some way support your vertue and your patience when you consider how incident it is to the vicissitudes of this world to expose unto us that changeable Scene whereof Solomon reporteth this to us Vidi servos in equis principes ambulantes super terram quasi servos And in such capitall Letters as these you may now read 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 find 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 replenishâ—d with many miseries Homo natus ex muliere vivens brevi tempore repletur multis miseriis In so much as after man by sinne had made misery for himselfe in this life it seemeth a mercy 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 proofe we may remarke that he who first abused death by imploying it to make sinne was thought worthy of no lesse a punishment then the protraction of life which he had made so afflicting by his fearing to dye and thus he was made his own torturer by the ignorance of the evill of life and of the good of death which he had so much demcrited the knowing of for his brothers goodnesse was thought worthy to be quickly relieved by death and his malice was adjudged to the paine of apprehending it and to the supplice of a long life With good cause then may this be well reflected on that the first vertuous and godly man was quickly removed out of this hedge of thornes his father had set and re-conveyed 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 yet such is Gods Wisdome as he can extract medicines out of all the Brambles thistles our earth is over-run with and minister them to our infirmity for he applieth even those griefes and sorrowes which sinne introduced to the expulsion of sinne it selfe So as this is an operation worthy of Gods invention by the labour and exercising of the body to enlarge the freedome of the soule even by this unfortifying of her prison in which she is kept the closer the stronger the dolectation of our senses groweth upon us Therefore the distancing of the conveniencie of the flesh dilateth the commodities and freedome of the spirit so as it is a divine artifice which God useth by hanging weights of sufferings and pressures upon our senses to wind up rather
pains as might produce this strange effect in our nature to make our root the lesse capable of bearing fruit by the excrescence and growth of these springs out of it For temporall affliction springeth cut of sinne as out of the root thereof and nothing drieth up and infecundateth so much the radicall fructifying vigor of this roote as the springing up of temporall miseries and distresses so as the fruit of sinne which is death is killed the soonest by the fertility of sufferings in this life Since Christ hath then by the vertue of his Crown of thornes imparted this faculty to the asperities of our life of taking off the growth as his did the guilt of sinne we need not wonder why he hath left all these temporall bitternesses upon our nature which he himselfe took expresly to taste of 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 find the more cleerly demonstrated to us the farther we advance into the Principles of Christianity S. Paul when he wrote to the Romans in those times when in a parallel of your 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 Whether they knew 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 An ignoratis quicunque baptizati sumus in Christo Jesu in morte ejus baptizati sumus Intimating that our first incorporation into the body of Christ is in effect an expiration to this world and a translation by the vertue of the death of Christ into such a sort of life as he had pattern'd to us by the inception progresse and consummation of his life And the Apostle presseth thus the proofe of this assertion Rom. 6.4 For we are buried together with him in baptisme into death Consepulti enim sumus cum illo per baptismum in mortem to evince this position that our mundanity is drowned and buryed in our Christening 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 spirituall manner buryed in the life of Christ that is covered and inclosed with indignities oppressions we are acting that part we took upon us in Baptisme where we listed 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 then 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 Si enim complantati facti sumus similitudini mortis ejus simul resurrectionis erimus so as in a Christians case the wages of death is life for if he die here by a privation of the carnall life of this world he performeth the condition of his life everlasting For which reason S. Paul who was the great Commander of the Gentiles in this militancy where by this kind of dying death is swallowed up in victory hath left us his Discipline in Quotidie morior 1 Cor. 15. I die daily 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 was as it were resuscitated by the same hand that had killed him We may remember he was revived by what is distructive to this life by being almost famished and illuminated by this worlds darknes restored to corporall light only to see how much he was to suffer for that name for which all the sufferings he had in his head were to be imployed but in a manner farre differing from his designe for they were signed to be enjoyed by himselfe not to be dispensed to others by his hand so as this seemeth the gratification of his Christianity the having all that treasure of crosses he had prepared for other Christians appropriated to his owne use whereof he grew so sensible as in gratitude to this his preference he returned his Superabundo gaudio in omni tribulatione But let us look upon his Master I doe exceedingly abound in joy in all our tribulation and ours Christ Jesus in his owne 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 Ostendam illi quanta oporteat eum pro nomine meopati Act. 9.15 I wil shew him how great things he must suffer for my name before the Gentiles and Kings and the children of Israel ut portet nomen meum coram gentibus regibus filiis Israel In which Commission he laboured three and thirty yeeres wherein all we are acquainted with of his life is either laborious or incommodious or in extremity dolorous and painfull It seemes 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 distressefull If we look upon his way that is drawn out to us from his Cradle to his Crosse we shall finde that temporall honour and ease were so inconsistent with Gods designe upon him as he never had any proffers of them that did not speedily procure him some sharper vexation The Star that proclaimed him King at his birth presently proved his proscription to death and that the law of suffering might seem enacted in his first step into the world it was put in execution upon innocent babes whose blood as S. Augustine saith made the first tincture of Christian martyrdome so that the cryes of the mothers and the infants followed close the voyces of the Angells that glorified him When the people thought of making him King it put him presently to flye alone into the mountaines When the evill spirits proclaimed him the Son of God the Pharisees doubled their spies upon him to traduce him and sharpned their wits to ensnare him by captious questions His entring into Jerusalem with the acclamations of Hosanna hastned the persecutions of his enemies and within few dayes the voyces of the same Jerusalem strained higher in the Pharisees aire of Crucifige whereby we may conclude that hee had so entirely assigned himselfe to sufferances and passions in this life as he did not thinke it a sufficient discharge