he so much delights would be covered the loving kindness he exercises in the Earth and the tender mercies wherewith he fills it would be concealed so that his present Government would want that considerable piece of honour which it especially chuseth and prefers it For his mercy rejoyceth against Judgment and accordingly he hath taken care these kinder Attributes should have fairest impressions on mans Soul and be the clearest testimonies of him whereas Judgment being his strange act hath lesser prints of it on our hearts and raises doubts concerning him No man wonders or is in amaze at the goodness and benignity of God whenever he hears it but is startled at his severity and calls for his saddest thoughts to resolve it into the sinful and guilty state of man Without this gracious Manu-tenency there could be no condition of things Kingdoms and Empires could grow up to no flourish nor settle in any greatness the prosperity of them which is so great a glory of Providence were an impossibility the whole Scene would represent nothing but Judgments till all run into an universal desolation and many of the most remarked methods of Judgment it self lost most of the freer motions of mans will had been concluded and shut up by them which afford so large a ground to Providences both of Mercy and Judgment God as an Instance of his Justice essayed the use of an universal destruction in the Flood of Noah when he repented he had made man as if he had done a dishonour to his own Holiness in bringing forth a Nature that should defile it self and all it touched and that he might relieve against a mischief as it were unexpected and right himself makes haste to destroy that degenerate Nature with the parts of the Creation most used and corrupted by it But then as if he disallowed the experiment determines against it for the future and restores the seeds of mankind he had to that purpose preserved to much of their former condition and renews the Charter of their Dominion over the Creatures This piece of Sacred History represents to us in a Land-skip thus flourished to take our apprehensions this truth That God with a Salve to that Holiness in honour to which he delivered things to so great a ruine would now conserve the world under his patience and long-suffering and not roll it up any more in an universal devastation till that greatest and last of Judgments in which he will absolve the whole Scheme of his Justice and fill up whatever seems wanting in it now CHAP. XVIII Of the variety God uses in the manner of the execution of his Judgments BEsides the freedom the supreme Ruler of the world uses in fixing his Judgments upon some parts of time and not upon others there are also the various kinds and measures of his debates and the Crisis of them when they end in destruction which to observe may much further inlarge our thoughts in this Contemplation and the Duty of it As then in Creation God hath formed vast bodies of the same kind wherein we see a great deal of one thing together by which he teaches us that immense power that never spends it self so hath he also multiformed his productions into an endless variety that we may behold that infinity of understanding that is not tyed to one shape of things Thus his Judgments are sometimes cast into one Element or Globe of fire swelling like the huge mountains covering all like a great Deep such were those on Sodom and Gomorrah on the old world teaching us Justice is not poor in any of its revenges Again it uses several lesser and diverse evils that we may know every thing is ready to its purposes of wrath and carries stings of punishment against sinners Both these sometimes are single made up intire in themselves solitary Wars Plagues Famines at other times they meet together in one great Configuration and are constellated Lastly sometimes they rise up to their height as it were in an instant at other times they are ordered into a train and succession and this being the most ordinary Tenour of Judgments and with which we of this Nation have been much acquainted let us reflect more freely upon it At such a time the hand of God keeps upon the Table and his operations are like several limbs of a body that are drawn one after another and then the whole seen or like a suit of Hangings wrought by their pieces and then placed together or unfolded by degrees and the whole at last presented or like an excellent Discourse that passes out of the mind in single sheets and then meets in the intire Work or like the Creation that by the steps of six days came to its Sabbath Thus Gods procedure upon Pharaoh was by a gradation of Judgment that compleated its figure in a succession The Angel in the Revelation proclaimed a woe to the world because of the Angels yet to sound and one woe made haste that another to come quickly might have place As Ezekiels waters they rise higher and higher till they are a River not to be passed over Noahs Flood prevailed by degrees till every thing perished that had not an Ark for its safety By all these God shews himself he weighs the hills in seales and the mountains in a ballance he makes one Judgment so great as to fill the Earth with it self For what can more speak his immensity He comprehends the dust of the Earth in a measure that is he imploys little things to great purposes The dust that is easily scattered when divided is yet great and considerable when gathered to a proportion Out of the mouth of Babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger Judgments small in themselves yet gathering to one another are able to give a final determination to the sum of affairs By a succession in Judgments he makes a fairer impression of himself which is better done by a leasurely proceeding and continuation of his hand like the rain that distils and enters deeper then the sudden storms that haste away Slay them not lest my people forget consume them in wrath God lodges himself in mens Souls when they are still under his rod whereas a nine days wonder swallows up a sudden execution Hereby he teaches as in his Word a line here and there here a little and there a little These gradual motions are essays of mans repentance lesser strokes being as warnings to prevent greater God moves the Pillars of a Nation first that the concussion felt may admonish their weakness when his angry touch is upon them and every man from his place seek resettlement in his favour For the words of God finding so little regard he thinks fit to give them an Emphasis by his Rod and the accent is still deeper that it may take the more place or if men are incorrigible and God resolve to settle upon any Age and make it the
distracted and uncertain when they have spoken like wise men in some things that Spirit of Truth and Wisdom not inhabiting them they fall into the wildnesses of mad men and the impertinencies of Fools whence all the superstition that hath been in the world hath continually sprung In Scripture all things are full and to the height but in others scanty and below the true elevation For though they speak at any time that is great and worthy God considered by it self yet not like his Servant Job They know not nor can pronounce the great Tetragrammaton the Eusebeia of the Gospel nor the true Evangelick Righteousness and soberness What they discourse is either so thin and airy through Philosophick attenuation that it loses its weight and substance its usefulness and intelligibility to common capacity or else it is too thick and gross Scripture knows only to speak plainly yet most divinely Of most things that have only some imperfect resemblances and half expressions Scripture is only able to interpret to them their Prophetick Dreams of Divine matters as Daniel to Nebuchadnezzar which by its explanations become excellent sense Lastly holy Oracles are the natural Soil the native Country of all Divine truths transplanted from them into more rigid and barren ground they lose their first sweetness or as Colonies sent from it they forget their Mother-City the true Jerusalem and by length of time grow first strange then inimick till by a captivation and recovery of them as spoils taken by the Sword and Bow of Original truth they are reduced instructed in their own descent and restored to their noble alliances Thus Religion draws home all those branches and stems of it self from those artificial Roots upon which they grew weakly or degenerated through the unnaturalness of the moisture conveyed to them from false Principles although if they might have had their own force and vigour they would have meliorated the worse but being over-power'd they lose their own excellency But from this general Discourse of Scripture we return to the particular case the fulness and sufficiency of it to teach every man concerning the Judgments of God what he is to know and to do touching their revolutions in the world Herein the Fundamental Doctrines plain Precepts Promises Comminations there to be found lead us to actions great and serious even as the Judgments themselves which are the most solemn of Providences all procedures of Justice carrying along with them highest gravity and requiring a suitable reverence And because we see them best in Examples which are admonitions taken out of words and printed into things we upon whom the ends of the world are come are made to sit upon the shoulders of former times through the favour of Scripture-history beholding the Saints of God in their holy humble and heavenly demeanour in bad times and their happy issue out of temptation On the other side the miscarriage of obstinate men with their sad Fates that whoso is wise to observe those things and prudent to know them may understand The ways of the Lord are right and that men upright and straight in themselves may walk in them but transgressors whose feet are crooked their motions indirect and they froward in all their paths cannot hold themselves on so strait a line but fall therein CHAP. II. An Explanation of the Nature of Judgments THe Judgments of God are like another Volumn of his Woâ—ks fitted first for our contemplation As the invisible things of him from the Creation of the world are clearly seen being understood by the things that are made even his eternal power and Godhead so are the same arrayed in justice and righteousness apparent in those that are as it were unmade and decreated in his wrath For seeing that immense Essence cannot be comprehended in his own Globe of light and purity we need all the refractions he is pleased to make of himself that we may understand him These of his wrath which is holiness provoked by sin declare that part of his glory and there is no speech or language where their voice is not heard For their line is gone out through all the Earth and their words to the ends of the world In them hath he set a Tabernacle for his Justice which rejoyceth as a strong man to run his race and the acts of it in their season are new every morning For they are as the light that goeth forth Before we enter into the Rational parts of this Discourse let us stand and behold the state and order of Judgments as in Theory 1. Judgments are those evils that exceed the standard vanity and vexation of spirit that are the every days complaint of the whole Creation rational sensitive and insensate in their several kinds of deploration of themselves For these are the Covenant made with all things after the Fall and as it were the very terms and conditions upon which they stand in the world and not new things under the Sun to move wonder and search Yea that death and dissolution into which every thing below the Heavens sinks either by degrees or unawares and is lost in that dark amounts not to the nature of what we call Judgment but moves with life in such a kind of even vicissitude as day and night and inter-changes with as little noise But Judgments are the hand of God lifted up to shew a greater indignation The former are indeed the angry prints and Characters of a setled Justice that rests and fixes upon that radical pravity and evil of mans nature and keeps pace and constant motion with the continual actuations of it But as there is a difference between the distempered state and corruption of Mankind with its scintillations as from a perpetual fire and more notorious enormities so is there between the unintermitted discipline that chastises man as a Creature out of the first favor and grace with God and those more terrible approaches when he comes out of his place and does his strange work upon sinners that they dye not the common deaths of men Yet in both these viz. natural corruption and constant infelicity lye the seeds and matter which being either suddenly blown up or by degrees gathered together swell high in an instant or with leisure grow to a sum corresponding each other For as depraved Nature breaks out into outragious impiety or by repeated acts of it self rises to its measure so it is answered by God with sudden Thunder-claps of his wrath or the bringing out those Treasures that by daily additions have been amassed and are issued out in the just seasons appointed by him In the mean time as there are many excellent Rules of Religion and Morality consistent with the one which do not only govern particular persons who are Heroick herein but spread themselves by wholsome Laws and Counsels upon Communities and adorn the Chronicle of that Age of which they have first been the stability so are there great accounts of the goodness of
God contemporary with the other and rich acts of his bounty which do most eminently bless whole Nations as well as persons and recommend the times current over them to posterity as prosperous and happy but all the whole world is neither acquitted from this guilt of universal corruption nor exempted from the misery so closely woven into every state of it This condition of the world hath given occasion to great inquiries how it lapsed into it some resolution of which is hereafter intended but now we observe how much even this differs from the more tumultuous and dissoluted appearance of things under Judgment when a resemblance of the Garden of Eden becomes a Wilderness and what we now call Prosperity is clouded with over-ruling adversity We come into the world and finding it as it is in its most constant estate think it was never better till by way of negation removing the evils we perceive to be such and viâ eminentiae measuring how much higher things might have been we ascend in our thoughts to the first perfection But Judgments without any such circuit or elaboration are down-right proofs of wrath and misery and that things are not as they were designed to be 2. The intention of this Discourse is especially to observe Judgments as they comprehend Nations and infold Communities For though God visits obscurest persons and Families with them yet they renown themselves by their large spread upon greater pieces of the world and the stretch of themselves upon Thrones Cities and Countries over which they draw the line of confusion and desolation in so much that their descriptions are proportionable to that general dissolution of all things at the end of the world of which they are indeed smaller Maps and preparatory introductions The Prophet foretelling these speaks in a language proper to the day of Judgment when the mountains shall tremble out of their places and the foundations of the earth discover themselves the Sun and Moon resign their light and the Stars forsake their Orbs and fall from their Heaven All which solemnities are borrowed to represent the down-fall and judgment of particular places and Kingdoms While we consider them thus they are upon a hill and fitter for general observation as being more publick and instructions from them more comprehensive though the same reasons have place and like admonitions arise from the hand of God however it plants it self or grounds its work if the motions of it fall under our view and offer themselves to our notice 3. These Evils arise sometimes from Nature turned out of its course and losing that poise God hath with greatest wisdom given it from whence come all those inequalities and intemperatures that produce Famines Pestilences Earthquakes Storms and Deluges For when all things were setled by God in number weight and measure for the advantage of the world and welfare of the whole Creation there necessarily follows when they are disordered ruine and misery according to the degrees of the disorder both through the cessation of that benefit their right course carried with it and also through the violence of causes out of their places and those exorbitant motions which are the fury and rage of Nature Besides these there are also the terrible conflicts of the lusts and passions of men striving upon the great Sea of the world roaring like Thunder flashing like Lightning tearing more greedily then Tempests and that put all things into greater Convulsions then Earthquakes There are no greater evils upon Mankind then those of which he himself is the Engineer Blood War Rapine and Terror devouring without mercy are bred in his own bowels and executed by himself being the combates of those fiery exhalations which arise from his unruly Soul From whence come wars and fightings among you Come they not hence Even from your lusts that war in your members And these often introduce as suddenly and inevitably those Famines and Pestilences which come more kindly out of the hand of what in this case we style Nature Throughout Scripture and all History we find God in justice using man against himself and creating him the severest enemy of his own kind He prosecutes peccant Cities Nations by some others that are fitted to bring to pass his righteous ends being no less under him then the several Creatures that seem more immediately his instruments and the reins of which are acknowledged in his hand to turn them every way as he pleases 4. All these we define to be Judgments that is They come upon the world through the design and counsel of the supreme Cause of all things God himself and are neither Revolutions that arriving at such a Period must needs shew themselves like Eclipses in such a Nodus or accidental and eventual things that through long tosses of them hither and thither fall out and happen to be and by constant throwing of them hit sometimes thus sometimes otherwise But they are the most mature and sage determinations of an infinite mind and understanding that though he cuts the lines of his own motions often and labyrinths them through one another so that we can find no certain path yet will he at last adjust all he disposes to the conviction of the whole world And yet we stay not here but pursue the sense of this awful word Judgments in which the Scripture comparing spiritual and divine things with themselves so much delights They are the execution of a just and righteous Sentence of God upon the evil actions of man according to Laws of unquestionable equity wherein his own glory and the truest peace of the whole Creation lye together concerned the establishment of Order and Government requiring so necessarily the punishment of sin so that they are neither the displays of his meer pleasure or the Arcana Imperii the Cabals of his Dominion or Rule of the world but the presence of his infinite Justice and Jurisdiction over all things how much soever the administration of so great an Empire falls within it which doth certainly conspire herein as is hereafter to be shewn CHAP. III. An Endeavour to demonstrate by sound Reason That Judgments are from God THe great matter of debate we are first to take notice of in the account we have given of Judgments is That they are from the infinite Wisdom Counsel of God carrying a course of Justice in the world which is established by these following perswasions 1. By those reasons and assurances we have for the truth of the Scriptures all which must needs come home to the proof of what they do most industriously assert and teach and which they make so great a point of their Doctrine To every one that acknowledges them the Word of God it is out of all Controversie that all the evil that is in the City is to be ascribed to his directing and over-ruling hand who forms the light of prosperity and creates the darkness of adversity and that this he doth for the punishment of
Scriptures always discoursing Gods dealings with men at a higher rate of esteem then this and suing himself to all the moves against them that they may be orderly and just as if the Soul of man would reason and debate with him concerning his ways for so indeed we find there is a spirit in man that in those that are good humbly and reverently desires to plead with him as in Job and Jeremy and in evil men contends and calumniates him as unequal till he convinces them of all their hard speeches against him And the comparison can never be equal betwixt man and any of the creatures under him for they melt away from the least pressure into death and cease there but man dated for Eternity is therefore of a much higher consideration nor have the other those notions of right and wrong of rewards for doing well and punishments for ill doing that are implanted in mans Soul God therefore passes into all the cases of his rational Creatures and determines upon them so that he will not regret or offend those Principles which he himself hath put into them but in all his Judgments and tryals of them he comprehends their right in his own and so sentences them to misery as that it could not be otherwise consistently with that Justice and Righteousness he is to declare All which are not only argued here in the world in the darkness and low state of Souls and in this mixture of things wherein a man cannot truly know love or hatred by any thing that is before him but in the clearness and open air of Eternity when the spirits of men will be at their highest pitch and multitudes of them aculeated with the sting of an endless doom while other Creatures lye still in their dust and covered in their ashes These immortal Souls challenging out of rottenness their bodies rise up plead with the Almighty concerning themselves From whence we infer that God doth not willingly afflict the children of men so much as here seeing it is he that hath put into them and excites in them these powers of debate with himself and those reasons upon which they argue and he doth it that he may be justified when he speaketh and be clear when he judgeth and that it may be known that all he doth is as we have said upon accounts of Interest in his own glory of sincerest intention for the good of his Creation and of necessity for the righteous Government of the world Of which accounts we shall treat particularly having first laid down the fundamental reason of Judgments The primary reason of Judgments is to be found in close connexion with Justice and the nature of punishment For Judgments upon a close description are the executions of punishment according to rules of Justice The essence of this Justice is in the distribution of every ones right to them by an exact ballance of reward and punishment according to works for the establishment of righteousness and order in the world which are both the beauty and peace of it The supreme care of this is in the hand of Original Righteousness and increate Justice whose the world and all the Creatures are and which is ever awake upon this its Paramount Function The nature of punishment is found only in pain without which we can have no possible notion of it for it always imports to us something grievous And it stands upon this reason Fruition and pleasure are the last ends in which the desires of man rest as his happiness this is always his reach and contention through what ways soever he steers himself When he travels through the mediums of honour or profit or when he immediately grasps pleasure it self or whether these be truly or but apparently what he names them the satisfaction arising from them is equally the design in all This pleasure or satisfaction is the tast or reflection of man upon the conveniency of things to his Nature ministring delight through the mutual touch and embrace of them one with another being thereto fitted by the wisdom and goodness of the Author of Nature This conveniency of things is called Good the Fountain of it is God himself the First Good the streams of it are derived from him upon the several Creatures which flow one among another True pleasure God hath by great skill woven into Holiness and gracious Action these things being of themselves most accordant to mans Soul and further by an eternal and unchangeable constitution which is the foundation of all propriety set it as the reward of obedience to these Laws of Goodness so that to him who perfectly observes them the reward is reckoned of debt that the mind considering first this pleasure springing from goodness may be led to that as the root of it then understanding it as a reward apportioned to virtuous actions may be yet more fully invited thereunto The whole complex of Good is hereby assured both in the present accommodations of things to this life and state and in the sum of it eternal life For godliness hath the promises of this life and of that which is to come and they are rendred to them who by patient continuance in well-doing seek for honour glory and immortality the paths of which lead to that fulness of Joy in the presence of God and to those Rivers of pleasure at his right hand for evermore which are the most commensurate significations of Happiness On the other side that which stands opposite to pleasure as darkness to light or death to life is pain and it is the point from which the Fuga or aversation of the Soul hastens it with all vehemency This we style Evil for it is the disagreement of things to our Nature which awakening resentment causes greatest displeasure All this evil is by God seated in the heart of the evil of sin where its proper habitation is for every impure action being dissonant to the true make of mans Soul is as far from pleasure rightly so called as it is from goodness and it is moreover prepared for the avenge of disobedience as its due portion and reward From whence both the rise of unhappiness is known and the reason understood Death entred by sin and the wages of sin is death with all the preparations to it This evil of punishment is administred by the severe Touches of God himself as an adversary or the unfriendly pressures of the Creatures upon our Nature set on by his wrath either in the degrees now or that complement Scripture calls Hell where is wailing and gnashing of teeth in utter darkness or utter impossibility of enjoyment This constitution of things is the foundation of Religion the pleasurable both fruit and remuneration of obedience and the painful issue and recompence of transgression being adapted to the inclining of the mind on each side of it and the more necessary because through the wise disposition of things by God for the tryal of man virtue
They are all everlasting and bear up themselves consolidate by Eternity Man by his Soul is set in this heavenly world and can no more remove himself out of it then he can his body out of the material one let his mind be never so high in its own elevation it cannot keep the impressions of matter off from his earthy part much less can he by sensuality untye his relation to spirituality to which his Soul knits him so fast God having given a touch and feeling a sense and judgment though it be not improved Whatever a Soul doth or doth not that is wherein it refuses or through neglect minds not to act becomes most momentany for all partakes the spirituality of its nature and receives beauty or deformity purity or defilement from the powers of that Law within it A man cannot be a beast though he degenerate like one Sin then receiving force from the Soul that commits it mounts the spiritual Creation and rests it self in the world of Righteousness as a defilement in it adheres to it as death deformity sickness emptiness darkness do to the solid parts of the Creation and thereby challenge a place in this world which yet in themselves are nothing but the want of the due perfection of the subject to which they adjoyn Thus have we considered these two worlds as distinct yet is there in this world an Ordo ad Spiritualia through which it is inclasped under the Government of the higher having a capacity to be sublimated to ends above it self which is as a cement betwixt them both whence it comes to pass that sin descends upon the lower by neglect or inversion of the order wherein it stands the first of which is to depress the works of God below his intention and aim at his own Holiness in them and is to disanul it the latter is to debauch the Creatures of God to lust blotting out his superscription and setting that of sin in the room and both are to build up evil grounded in matter to the third Heaven Thus though meats cannot defile the man yet the man may defile himself by meats and defile the meats as on the other side meats commend him not to God yet he may by a holy use by the Word and prayer commend himself and sanctifie them he is able by his Soul to touch them into gold or to taint them with his own impurity And this very innate power though a man never considers it nor behaves himself worthily by his judgment and caution of it is yet the same as to the substance as if he had a Soul never so greatned and inlarged by improvement When there is a defilement among spiritual things every thing in the whole spiritual Nature keeps it extant and puts a seal upon it the certainty and unchangeableness of those holy Laws the all-seeing Eye of God an infinite mind and understanding an infinite purity an everlasting Justice and Judge the consent of the whole world of spirits with him the immortality of the Soul from which the defilement immediately rises and recoiling rests From whence it comes to pass that what men do with their Souls they never lose but live in the midst of all their actions whether good or evil For God keeping in force these Laws retains and binds the Soul sinning under the sense of what it hath done and sends down the charges of his wrath into the conscience and dispatches punishments as he pleases ever preserving inviolable records of every transgression laid up within his own Justice and registred in the guilty breast which sucks in the air it hath breathed out and if evil is setled into a defilement so great that nothing is pure to it Let us then compute things and when we find so many men in the world whose actions are going out by hundreds and thousands having no ballance of righteousness upon them nor sifted by any examination but rolling down that great precipice and declivity of humane Nature all corrupted not only with their own violence but by the force of that power of darkness that concurs with them what must the amount of the impurity then be That an Eternal Judgment countervails all this evil in number weight and measure shall be hereafter discoursed But how Judgments take off the foulness of sin at present is now to be considered which may better be conceived by applying their efficacies to every of the particulars of its defilement in these following observations 1. That prime and eternal Holiness which with its Glory governs the spiritual order and beauty of things in a conform Holiness Righteousness and Purity as their first constitution when offended by the sin of any of the proper subjects of it is secondarily repaired by punishment upon the sinner We may consider this as abstracted into its own most spiritual Nature or formed into Laws and either way punishment repairs it 1. If in its own spiritual Nature we look upon it there is a splendour in punitive Justice which is another mode of that Eternal Holiness shewing it self it is the zeal and earnest intention of it meeting with any thing aliene and receded from it The wrath of God is the flame or light-fire of his infinite purity in contest with iniquity which gives such a lustre that all the Earth is filled with this glory and is an accidental illumination of the superior state of things For which had there been no place undoubtedly all entrances of sin had been precluded The Apostle speaks of God that he willing to shew his wrath and make his power known endured with much long-suffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction Knowing how to give reparations to himself he permits to sin and sinners a scope in their own actions There is yet no communion betwixt light and darkness only another kind of efficacy of light For that which endures not the approach of the least evil but by its own vigour and perfection throws it off with abhorrence and disdain can never be defiled but hath occasion from evil to manifest its own intenseness and supremacy and preserve in another way the same lustre and greatness of the whole state under it 2. If we consider this Holiness as it is formed into Laws wherein the state of it is more plain the first honour of a Law is obedience if that be not paid the second is punishment which keeps up the Majesty and greatness of it and even establisheth its authority those Laws being only weakned and infringed by transgression which go unrevenged for then the power passes out of the Law and settles in the transgression which from thence assumes an authentickness and damnes the Law to an obsoletion But if the Law hath the offender in its hand to deal severely with and to condemn the power is apparently with it it can terrifie into its observation those whom it cannot allure by its direction equity and rewards which makes evil a feeble and weak