Selected quad for the lemma: world_n

Word A	Word B	Word C	Word D	Occurrence	Frequency Band	MI	MI Band	Prominent
world_n	bear_v	faith_n	overcome_v	4,249	5	9.4129	5	true

Text snippets containing the quad

ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A86270	Repentance and conversion, the fabrick of salvation: or The saints joy in heaven, for the sinners sorrow upon Earth. Being the last sermons preached by that reverend and learned John Hewyt, D.D. Late minister of St. Gregories by St. Pauls. With other of his sermons preached there. Dedicated to all his pious auditors, especially those of the said parish. Also an advertisement concerning some sermons lately printed, and presented to be the doctors, but are disavowed by Geo. Wild. Jo. Barwick.	Hewit, John, 1614-1658.; Wilde, George, 1610-1665.; Barwick, John, 1612-1664.	1658 (1658)	Wing H1637; Thomason E1776_1; ESTC R209722	86,537	249

heads bring them down as low as the centre of the earth on the contrary like balloones full of wind the more they are pressed down the higher they rise and as it happens in the agitation of a violent tempest the same wave breaking makes them sink into the deeps and keeping it self whole and swelling carries them again up into the clouds And their presumption like a kind of folly drowning at once both memory and sense of their misfortunes you see them raise themselves again in their own good opinions and rejoyce in the light of their understandings they gaze upon themselves in the splendor of their vertues and lose themselves in the subtilty of their inventions and to make themselves happy to depend on no other decree then that of their own wills to call in no other help then the strength of their own souls Our life sayes one we have from God but that we live well and holy is to be attributed to ourselves We must sayes another demand our fortune of God but we must seek for wisdome in our selves Every one sayes another hath riches of his own acquisition for if it were given him from God he should deserve no commendations Never any of the wise-men gave thanks to God for making him vertuous so that by this reckoning of theirs those people who were lately charged with misfortunes are now found free from faults They that are most miserable upon earth think themselves most worthy of heaven They who cannot defend themselves from the least creatures think they have themselves and every thing else in their power They who for the tooth-ache made vowes to Aesculapius for the health of their cattle and the conservation of their corn sacrificed to Pan and Ceres do not hold themselves obliged to render thanks to God for the vertues and excellent qualities that spring and grow in their souls That the Pagans who are strangers to the Covenant and ignorant of the way of God destitute of the light of his Holy Word should be thus carried and tost by so contrary opinions in the judgement of their own condition it seems nothing strange But that they that call themselves Christians seeing shine in their climate these two great lights the Gospel and the Law that they should go stumbling as in the twylight and groping like men without their eyes and without power either in themselves of knowing the greatness of their miseries or without themselves of knowing the vertue of the grace and infinity of the mercies of God that they should go halting on both sides sometime raising themselves to heaven by their own poor merits at another time sinking down as low as hell in despair even by distrust of the gift of God and of the other side rendring themselves alike unworthy and throwing themselves into such a distance of his favour this seems openly to verifie the complaint of the Evangelist Joh. 1.5 that light hath shined in darkness but the darkness comprehended it not that his light came into the world but that the world rather loved darkness then light So that it becomes no wonder if reaping the fruit of what they so much loved they have also for their part errour uncertainty and astonishment the ordinary companions of the night And if whereas the truly faithful who by the light of the Law acknowledging their demerits and by the light of the Gospel embracing the merits of the Redeemer of the World say with Job I know that my Redeemer liveth with the Apostle 2 Tim. 2.12 I know on whom I have believed with the wel-beloved disciple 1 Jo. 3.19 We know that we are of God these men dazled with a vain opinion of their own vertues and undervaluing the redemption of the Lord Jesus say We know not whither we shall go we know not if we believe we know not whether we shall be saved But if herein they would acknowledge their blindness there were some hope of bringing them back to the light but they are so far from this that in this uncertainty and wandring of their troubled souls they find no infirmity but on the contrary this is that which they say We see and to say truth they take a pleasure in their errour as if it were in the brightest clarity and upon these floting waves and uncertainties they establish the highest perfection of their faith Attributing also to the fairest of all the vertues the three most vitious and abject passions that are to be found in all corrupted nature which are Ignorance Uncertainty and Fear keeping in blindness that which should guide us through the darkness of this world and whose principal action is to see for by faith they of old have seen the promises and saluted them afar of Heb. 11.13 not staggering through unbelief but like Abraham that was strengthned by faith not fearful and trembling but being born of God to overcome the world 1 Joh. 5.4 What brave exploits can be expected from a Champion that must fight a combat after his eyes be put out or his soul filled with fear and astonishment Cursed are they that call evil good and good evil bitter to be sweet and sweet bitter darkness to be light and light darkness Isai 5.20 To this it is that we would now send back these Doctors of darkness that we might once be rid of them and by the lively clarity of Jobs faith make you follow and consider the true object where ours should rest and there to search for her true nouriture and advancement if we were not for the present hindred by that bold sacriledge whereby they seek to make holy Scripture a party to their wicked design and to be the cryer for their dishonest gain making it as much as they can belie her own nature which is to be the light and sure guide of soules to make it serve for a cloak to the night and as a fantosm for astonishments wherewith they perplex consciences They say their doctrine is that of Ecclesiastes Eccl. 9.1 who saith that the righteous and the wise and their works are in the hand of God and yet no man knoweth either love or hatred that is before them but all things are kept in uncertainty for the time to come If these were the words of Ecclesiastes they had some appearance of reason in them but that which makes most express for their opinion is not the words of the wise but the additions and false expositions of the vulgar Version whereof they make use and of which by an unparallelled boldness they correct the Originals For this last clause that all things are kept in uncertainty for the time to come is not at all in the Hebrew Text and the rest is only coucht in these terms The just and the wise and their works are in the hand of God and no man knoweth either love or hatred that is before them Where you see what a violence is used to draw out of these words a certain conclusion against

of Heaven and these devout Jews here whom it pitied to see the glory of Zion laid in the dust wept when they remembred it Appl. What shall we say then of those who now in the time of our Church and Kingdoms calamity when God seems to call to us as sometimes Jehu did Who is on my side who When the Church cries to us as sometimes she did Is it nothing to you all ye that passe by the way have ye no regard behold and see if ever sorrow were like my sorrow yet neither in heed to his voice nor in pity to her complaints will they humble themselves by fasting and prayer to cry to Heaven for mercy upon her but rather when God calls to mourning they are a revelling they drink wine in bowles and anoint themselves with precious oyntments but remember not the afflictions of Joseph wherefore I have sworn by my self saith the Lord God of hosts I abhor the excellency of Jacob Amos 6.6 8. And let such read the 22 Chapter of Isaiah vers 12 13 14. and tremble at the close of it Surely this iniquity shall not be purged from you till you dye Ye would take it in foul disgrace to be called hard-hearted Jews yet these were more compassionate of the Churches miseries then are many of you these wept when they remembred Zion How then shall not our hearts agonize under Gods displeasure and our bedewed cheeks trickle down with tears for the miseries of our Church and State seeing the Heavens themselves have with waterish eyes long wept for our calamities not with dews but showers of compassion all the summer long and still now in winter keep their gloomy face to reproove the hardness of our obdurate hearts that can neither weep for our own nor pity the miseries of others O insensate hearts Is it nothing to you that you all passe by Zions sorrow wherewith the Lord hath afflicted her in the day of his fierce anger The senceless creatures groan and travel in a fellow-feeling pain but you when your own members suffer and perish O where are the sounding of your bowels are they quite restrained The earth trembles at the voice of God the Sea saw him and was afraid and the rocks cleft at our Saviours passion and shall men be so obdurate as not to be moved nor split asunder at a Church and a Kingdoms passion If rocks be more affected then we O God take away from us these obdurate hearts of flesh and give us hearts of stone that seeing we cannot with innocent yet we may with hearts broken by repentance for all these sins that have pulled down those judgments upon our heads by these waters of Babylon sit down and weep when we remember thee O Zion And so I have done with the words in their literal sense and proceed now to them Secondly in their moral sense of which briefly In this sense St. Hilary St. Augustine Hugo de Sancto Victore Hugo Cardinalis with many others have taken these words nor in this do we offer any violence to the truth of the history but only digest gesta in exemplum scripta in doctrina as saith St. Hilary the passages into example and Scripture into doctrine The soul we all know hath four several states 1. Of innocence 2. Of a lapsed condition 3. Of renovation by grace 4. Of expectation of glory And going along with her from her first instant of creation to the last of eternity we shall find all of them in the Text. 1. That of innocence but implied so as that captivity supposeth a foregoing freedom this freedom was that of our created holiness which we enjoyed in Paradise that new Jerusalem that vision of peace but God knows we stay'd not long there before we were carried captive by the devil into Babylon from Paradise into the world from our country into exile from liberty into servitude from glory into disgrace from pleasure into grief from happiness into misery from integrity into corruption from life into death and therefore Merito illic sedemus merito flemus there we deservedly sit and weep as Hugo Victorinus concludes and that is the second state 2. The souls lapsed condition figured in Babylon and the waters of Babylon That Babylon properly signifies a City of confusion and that mystically here is meant this sinful world is agreed on by a general suffrage of Fathers and therefore consonantly they make the waters of Babylon to be bona temporalia so Hugo Cardinalis temporal things which as the rivers stay not but pass from one elbow of earth unto another the world passeth away and the lusts thereof 1 Joh. 2.17 or as Victorinus calls them decursiones nostrae corruptiones the decursions of our corruption and mortality which as Solomon speaks tend to the grave as the rivers into the Sea or as saith St. Augustine flumina Babyloniae sunt omnia quae hic amantur transeunt the rivers of Babylon are all transitory things whereon we set our hearts and so St. Hilarie omnia saeculi corporalium opera all secular and corporal travels which like rivers are transient without the least station for what bodily pleasure is it but when once 't is past by that time becomes none What earthly joy that dies not in the sense and perishes not in the enjoying yet are these those rivers on which the heart of man sets and fastens his delight and engulphs his care till at last they drown his soul and sink it as low as that pit which knows no bottom 3. But not so the Saints whose spiritualized souls are lifted up to a third state of graces renovation who though they do with patience wait their desired change in this flesh of sin as well as of mortality and so may be said to sit by the waters of Babylon which they account no better then the place of their short captivity yet humiliatione humiliati saith St. Augustine they sit in humiliation so Victorinus not erect by pride nor cast down by despair but humbly set so Hugo Cardinalis because they attend that misery in which they are that happiness from which they are distant Or there they sit but 't is supra flumina above the waters so the old Latine word reads it The Citizens of Babylon so drench themselves into the delights of the sinful world as they drown themselves in their pleasing but deadly waters whereas the Citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem sit higher sit above not so low as to fear drowning nor so high as not to need to weep and weep they do too as well as sit if sitting be a posture that pleaseth the body weeping I am sure is an evacuation that easeth the soul O quam fic flere juvat saith St. Hierome O what sweets are there in hallowed tears how the soul delights to melt it self into such blessed showers because when she goeth into the lowest pitch of mourning she is then lifted up into the highest rapture of joy You have heard of them that have wept for joy but not so oft of them that have rejoyced for weeping yet of all the passions the soul is owner of she is a debtor to none more for her joy then this this is her rich treasure in which she traffiques with Heaven this the rarest dissolved pearl with which she defrayes all the passages of her captivity through the valley of tears Feel'st thou sin sit down and weep there is no innocence so clear among mortal men as that which is drencht in tears Fear'st thou hell sit down and weep flames cannot burn where these drops do fall O happy weeping that redeems from eternal weeping 4. But lookest thou up to Heaven that last state of thy souls glory her Country her Kingdom her Security sit down and weep that thy Pilgrimage is prolonged that mortality is not swallowed up of life that thou art yet a stranger and a sojourner nor art thou yet joyned with those innumerable companies of Angels and the first born that are written in Heaven O when shall that time be when our souls being delivered from the Babylon of this world from the prison of this flesh from the bondage of this corruption shall be delivered into the glorious liberty of the sons of God How long Lord till these souls of ours which like streams here wander from the fountain of bliss be again re-admitted into that glorious source of immortality For this we breathe for this we groan for this each devout heart weeps when he recounts the miseries of this present exile but the happiness of Zion which we expect where all tears shall be wiped from our eyes where is no death nor sorrow nor lamentation any more but all joyes tranquillity and peace even for ever and ever To which the God of mercy for his Sons sake who is gone before us thither in his due time bring us to whom with the holy and ever-blessed Trinity three Persons and one God be all honour and glory world without end Amen FINIS