Which, by the way, is the most pregnant demonstration in the world, of that self-condemning sentence, that is perpetually sounding in every great sinner’s breast; and of that inward, grating dislike of the very thing he practises, that he should abhor to see the same in any one, whose good he nearly tenders, and whose person he wishes well to. But if now, on the other side, we should chance to find a father corrupting his son, or a mother debauching her daughter, as (God knows such monsters have been seen within the four seas) we must not charge this barely upon an high predominance of vice in these persons, but much more upon a peculiar anomaly and baseness of nature: if the name of nature may be allowed to that which seems to be an utter cashiering of it; a deviation from, and a contradiction to, the common principles of humanity. For this is such a disposition, as strips the father of the man; as makes him sacrifice his children to Moloch; and as much outdo the cruelty of a cannibal or a Saturn, as it is more barbarous and unhuman to damn a child than to devour him. We sometimes read and hear of monstrous births, but we may often see a greater monstrosity in educations: thus when a father has begot a man, he trains him up into a beast, making even his own house a stews, a bordel, and a school of lewdness, to instill the rudiments of vice into the unwary, flexible years of his poor children, poisoning their tender minds with the irresistible, authentic venom of his base example; so that all the instruction they find within their father’s walls shall be only to be disciplined to an earlier practice of sin, to be catechized into all the mysteries of iniquity, and, at length, confirmed in a mature, grown up, incorrigible state of debauchery. And this some parents call a teaching their children to know the world, and to study men: thus leading them, as it were, by the hand, through all the forms and classes, all the varieties and modes of villainy, till at length they make them ten times more the children of the devil, than of themselves. Now, I say, if the unparalleled wickedness of the age should at any time cast us upon such blemishes of mankind as these, who, while they thus treat their children, should abuse and usurp the name of parents, by assuming it to themselves; let us not call them by the low, diminutive term or title of sinful, wicked, or ungodly men; but let us look upon them as so many prodigious exceptions from our common nature, as so many portentous animals, like the strange unnatural productions of Africa, and fit to be publicly shewn, were they not unfit to be seen: for certainly where a child finds his own parents his perverters, he cannot be so properly said to be born, as to be damned into the world; and better were it for him by far to have been unborn, and unbegot, than to come to ask blessing of those whose conversation breathes nothing but contagion and a curse. So impossible, and so much a paradox is it, for any parent to impart to his child his blessing and his vice too.

And thus I have despatched the first general thing proposed for the handling of the words, and shewn in five several particulars, what it is that brings a man to such a disposition of mind, as to take pleasure in other men’s sins. I proceed now to the

Second, which is, To shew the reasons why a man’s being disposed to do so, comes to be attended with such an extraordinary guilt. And the first shall be taken from this, that naturally there is no motive to induce or tempt a man to this way of sinning. And this is a most certain truth, that the lesser the temptation is, the greater is the sin. For in every sin, by how much the more free the will is in its choice, by so much is the act the more sinful. And where there is nothing to importune, urge, or provoke it to any act, there is so much an higher and perfecter degree of freedom about that act. For albeit the will is not capable of being compelled to any of its actings, yet it is capable of being made to act with more or less difficulty, according to the different impressions it receives from motives or objects. If the object be extremely pleasing, and apt to gratify it; there, though the will has still a power of refusing it, yet it is not without some difficulty: upon which account it is, that men are so strongly carried out to, and so hardly took off from, the practice of vice; namely, because the sensual pleasure arising from it is still importuning and drawing them to it.

But now, from whence springs this pleasure? Is it not from the gratification of some desire founded in nature? An irregular gratification it is indeed very often; yet still the foundation of it is, and must be, something natural: so that the sum of all is this, that the naturalness of a desire is the cause that the satisfaction of it is pleasure, and pleasure importunes the will; and that which importunes the will, puts a difficulty in the will’s refusing or forbearing it. Thus drunkenness is an irregular satisfaction of the appetite of thirst; uncleanness an unlawful gratification of the appetite of procreation; and covetousness a boundless, unreasonable pursuit of the principle of self-preservation. So that all these are founded in some natural desire, and are therefore pleasurable, and upon that account tempt, solicit, and entice the will. In a word, there is hardly any one vice or sin of direct and personal commission, but what is the irregularity and abuse of one of those two grand natural principles; namely, either that which in clines a man to preserve himself, or that which in clines him to please himself.

But now, what principle, faculty, or desire, by which nature projects either its own pleasure or preservation, is or can be gratified by another man’s personal pursuit of his own vice? It is evident, that all the pleasure that naturally can be received from a vicious action, can immediately and personally affect none but him who does it; for it is an application of the pleasing object only to his own sense; and no man feels by another man’s senses. And therefore the delight that a man takes from an other’s sin, can be nothing else but a fantastical, preternatural complacency arising from that which he has really no sense or feeling of. It is properly a love of vice, as such; a delighting in sin for its own sake; and is a direct imitation, or rather an exemplification of the malice of the devil; who delights in seeing those sins committed, which the very condition of his nature renders him uncapable of committing himself. For the devil can neither drink, nor whore, nor play the epicure, though he enjoys the pleasures of all these at a second hand, and by malicious approbation. If a man plays the thief, says Solomon, and steals to satisfy his hunger, Prov. vi. 30. though it cannot wholly excuse the fact, yet it sometimes extenuates the guilt. And we know there are some corrupt affections in the soul of man, that urge and push him on to their satisfaction, with such an impetuous fury, that when we see a man overborne and run down by them, considering the frailty of human nature, we cannot but pity the person, while we abhor the crime. It being like one ready to drink poison, rather than to die with thirst.

But when a man shall, with a sober, sedate, diabolical rancour, look upon and enjoy himself in the sight of his neighbour’s sin and shame, and secretly hug himself upon the ruins of his brother’s virtue, and the dishonours of his reason, can he plead the instigation of any appetite in nature inclining him to this; and that would otherwise render him uneasy to himself, should he not thus triumph in an other’s folly and confusion? No, certainly; this can not be so much as pretended. For he may as well carry his eyes in another man’s head, and run races with another man’s feet, as directly and naturally taste the pleasures that spring from the gratification of another man’s appetites.

Nor can that person, whosoever he is, who accounts it his recreation and diversion to see one man wallowing in his filthy revels, and another made in famous and noisome by his sensuality, be so impudent as to allege for a reason of his so doing, that either all the enormous draughts of the one, do or can leave the least relish upon the tip of his tongue; or that all the fornications and whoredoms of the other, do or can quench or cool the boilings of his own lust. No, this is impossible. And if so, what can we then assign for the cause of this monstrous disposition? Why, all that can be said in this case is, that nature proceeds by quite another method; having given men such and such appetites, and allotted to each of them their respective pleasures; the appetite and the pleasure still cohabiting in the same subject: but the devil and long custom of sinning have superinduced upon the soul new, unnatural, and absurd desires; desires that have no real object; desires that relish things not at all desirable; but, like the sickness and distemper of the soul, feeding only upon filth and corruption, fire and brimstone, and giving a man the devil’s nature and the devil’s delight; who has no other joy or happiness, but to dishonour his Maker, and to destroy his fellow-creature; to corrupt him here, and to torment him hereafter. In fine, there is as much difference between the pleasure a man takes in his own sins, and that which he takes in other men’s, as there is between the wickedness of a man, and the wickedness of a devil.

2. A second reason why a man’s taking pleasure in the sins of others comes to be attended with such an extraordinary guilt, is, from the boundless, unlimited nature of this way of sinning. For by this a man contracts a kind of an universal guilt, and, as it were, sins over the sins of all other men; so that while the act is theirs, the guilt of it is equally his. Consider any man as to his personal powers and opportunities of sinning, and comparatively they are not great; for at greatest they must still be limited by the measure of a man’s acting, and the term of his duration. And a man’s active powers are but weak, and his continuance in the world but short. So that nature is not sufficient to keep pace with his corruptions, by answering desire with proportion able practice.

For to instance in those two grand extravagances of lust and drunkenness: surely no man is of so general and diffusive a lust, as to prosecute his amours all the world over; and let it burn never so outrageously for the present, yet age will in time chill those heats; and the impure flame will either die of itself, or consume the body that harbours it. And so for intemperance in drinking; no man can be so much a swine, as to be always pouring in, but in the compass of some years he will drown his health and his strength in his own belly; and after all his drunken trophies, at length drink down himself too; and that certainly will and must put an end to the debauch.

But now, for the way of sinning which we have been speaking of, it is neither confined by place, nor weakened by age; but the bed-rid, the gouty, and the lethargic, may, upon this account, equal the activity of the strongest and the most vegete sinner. Such an one may take his brother by the throat, and act the murderer, even while he can neither stir an hand nor a foot; and he may invade his neighbour’s bed, while weakness has tied him down to his own. He may sin over all the adulteries and debauches, all the frauds and oppressions of the whole neighbourhood, and, as I may so speak, he may break every command of God’s law by proxy, and it were well for him if he could be damned by proxy too. A man, by delight and fancy, may grasp in the sins of all countries and ages, and by an inward liking of them communicate in their guilt. He may take a range all the world over, and draw in all that wide circumference of sin and vice, and center it in his own breast. For whatsoever sin a man extremely loves, and would commit if he had opportunity, and, in the mean time, pleases himself with the speculation of the same, whether ever he commits it or no, it leaves a stain and a guilt upon his conscience; and, according to the spiritual and severe accounts of the law, is made, in a great respect, his own. So that by this means there is a kind of transmigration of sins, much like that which Pythagoras held of souls. Such an one to be sure it is, as makes a man not only (according to the apostle’s phrase) a partaker of other men’s sins, but also a deriver of the whole entire guilt of them to himself; and yet so as to leave the committer of them as full of guilt as he was before.

From whence we see the infinitely fruitful and productive power of this way of sinning; how it can increase and multiply beyond all bounds and measures of actual commission, and how vastly it swells the sinner’s account in an instant. So that a man shall, out of all the various, and even numberless kinds of villainy, acted by all the people and nations round about him, as it were, extract one mighty, comprehensive guilt, and adopt it to himself; and so become chargeable with, and accountable for, a world of sin without a figure.

3. The third and last reason that I shall assign, of the extraordinary guilt attending a man’s being disposed to take pleasure in other men’s sins, shall be taken from the soul’s preparation and passage to such a disposition. For that it presupposes and includes in it the guilt of many preceding sins. For, as it has been shown, a man must have passed many periods of sin, before he can arrive to it; and have served a long apprenticeship to the devil, before he can come to such a perfection and maturity in vice, as this imports. It is a collection of the guilt of a long and numerous train of villainies, the compendium and sum total of several particular impieties, all united and cast up into one. It is, as it were, the very quintessence and sublimation of vice, by which, as in the spirit of liquors, the malignity of many actions is contracted into a little compass, but with a greater advantage of strength and force, by such a contraction.

In a word, it is the wickedness of a whole life, discharging all its filth and foulness into this one quality, as into a great sink or common shore. So that nothing is or can be so properly and significantly called the very sinfulness of sin, as this. And therefore no wonder, if, containing so many years guilt in the bowels of it, it stands here stigmatized by the apostle, as a temper of mind, rendering men so detestably bad, that the great enemy of mankind, the devil himself, neither can nor desires to make them worse. I cannot, I need not say any more of it. It is indeed a condition, not to be thought of (by persons serious enough to think and consider) without the utmost horror. But such as truly fear God, shall both be kept from it, and from those sins that lead to it.

To which God, infinitely wise, holt/, and just, be rendered and ascribed, as is most due, all praise, might, majesty, and dominion, both now and for evermore. Amen.

It must be confessed indeed, that it hath been something lamed in this its freedom by original sin; of which defect the heathens themselves were not wholly ignorant, though they were of its cause. So that hereupon, the will is not able to carry a man out to a choice so perfectly, and in all respects good, but that still there is some adherent circumstance of imperfection, which, in strictness of morality, renders every action of it evil; according to that known and most true rule, Malum ex quolibet defectu.

Nevertheless, the will has still so much freedom left, as to enable it to choose any act in its kind good, whether it be an act of temperance, justice, or the like; as also to refuse any act in its kind evil, whether of intemperance, injustice, or the like; though yet it neither chooses one, nor refuses the other, with such a perfect concurrence of all due ingredients of action, but that still, in the sight of God, judging according to the rigid measures of the law, every such choice or refusal is indeed sinful and imperfect. This is most certain, whatsoever Pelagius and his brethren assert to the contrary.

But however, that measure of freedom which the will still retains, of being able to choose any act materially, and in its kind good, and to refuse the contrary, was enough to cut off all excuse from the heathen, who never duly improved the utmost of such a power, but gave themselves up to all the filthiness and licentiousness of life imaginable. In all which it is certain, that they acted willingly, and without compulsion; or rather indeed greedily, and without control.

The only persons amongst the heathens who sophisticated nature and philosophy in this particular, were the Stoicks; who affirmed a fatal, unchangeable concatenation of causes, reaching even to the elicit acts of man’s will. So that according to them there was no act of volition exerted by it, but, all circumstances considered, it was impossible for the will not to exert that volition. But these were but one sect of philosophers; that is, but an handful in comparison of the rest of the Gentiles: ridiculous enough, for what they held and taught, and consequently not to be laid in the balance with the united judgment of all other learned men in the world, unanimously exploding this opinion. Questionless therefore, a thing so deeply engraven upon the first and most inward notions of man’s mind, as a persuasion of the will’s freedom, would never permit the heathens (who are here charged by the apostle) to patronize and excuse their sins upon this score, that they committed them against their will, and that they had no power to do otherwise. In which, every hour’s experience, and reflection upon the method of their own actings, could not but give them the lie to their face.

The only remaining plea therefore, which these men can take sanctuary in, must be that of ignorance; since there could be no pretence for unwillingness. But the apostle divests them even of this also: for he says expressly, in verse 19, that what might be known of God, that famous and so much disputed of τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ, was manifested in them; and in verse 21, their unexcusableness is stated upon the supposition of this very thing, that they knew God, but, for all that, did not glorify him as God. This was the sum of their charge; and how it has been made good against them we have already shewn, in what we have spoken about their idolatry, very briefly, I confess, but enough to shew its absurdity, though not to account for its variety, when Vossius’s very abridgment of it makes a thick volume in folio.

The plea of ignorance therefore is also taken out of their hands; forasmuch as they knew that there was a God; and that this God made and governed the world; and upon that account was to be worshipped and addressed to; and that with such a worship as should be agreeable to his nature, both in respect of the piety and virtue of the worshipper, and also of the means of the worship itself. So that he was neither to be worshipped with impious and immoral practices, nor with corporeal resemblances, For how could an image help men in directing their thoughts to a Being which bore no similitude or cog nation to that image at all? And what resemblance could wood or stone bear to a spirit void of all sensible qualities and bodily dimensions? How could they put men in mind of infinite power, wisdom, and holiness, and such other attributes, of which they had not the least mark or character?

But now, if these things could not possibly resemble any perfection of the Deity, what use could they be of to men in their addresses to God? For can a man’s devotions be helped by that which brings an error upon his thoughts? And certain it is, that it is natural for a man, by directing his prayers to an image, to suppose the Being he prays to represented by that image. Which how injurious, how contumelious it must needs be to the glorious, incomprehensible nature of God, by begetting such false and low apprehensions of him in the minds of his creature, let common sense, not perverted by interest and design, be judge. From all which it follows, that the idolatrous heathens, and especially the most learned of them, not being able to charge their idolatry either upon ignorance or unwillingness, were wholly without excuse. So that it is to be feared, that Averroes had not the right way of blessing himself, when, in defiance of Christianity, he wished, Sit anima mea cum philosophis.

And now, after all, I cannot but take notice, that all that I have said of the heathen idolatry is so exactly applicable to the idolatry of another sort of men in the world, that one would think this first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans were not so much an address to the ancient Romans, as a description of the modern.

But to draw towards a close. The use and improvement of the foregoing discourse shall be briefly to inform us of these two things.

1st, The signally great and peculiar mercy of God to those to whom he has revealed the gospel, since there was nothing that could have obliged him to it upon the account of his justice: for if there had, the heathens, to whom he revealed it not, could not have been thus without excuse, but might very rationally have expostulated the case with their great Judge, and demurred to the equity of the sentence, had they been condemned by him. But it appears from hence, that what was sufficient to render men inexcusable, was not therefore sufficient to save them.

It is not said by the apostle, nor can it be proved by any one else, that God vouchsafed to the heathens the means of salvation, if so be the gospel be the only means of it. And yet I will not, I dare not affirm, that God will save none of those to whom the sound of the gospel never reached: though this is evident, that if he does save any of them, it must not be by that ordinary, stated, appointed method, which the scripture has revealed to us, and which they were wholly ignorant of. For grant that the heathens knew that there was a God, who both made and governed the world, and who, upon that account, was to be worshipped, and that with such a worship as should be suitable to such a Being; yet what principle of mere reason could assure them, that this God would be a rewarder of such as diligently sought and served him? For certain it is, that there is nothing in the nature of God to oblige him to reward any service of his creature; forasmuch as all that the creature can do is but duty; and even now, at this time, God has no other obligation upon him, but his own free promise to reward the piety and obedience of his servants; which promise reason of itself could never have found out, till God made it known by revelation. And moreover, what principle of reason could assure a man, that God would pardon sinners upon any terms whatsoever? Possibly it might know, that God could do so; but this was no sufficient ground for men to depend upon. And then, last of all, as for the way of his pardoning sinners, that he should do it upon a satisfaction paid to his justice by such a Saviour as should be both God and man; this was utterly impossible for all the reason of mankind to find out.

For that these things could be read in the book of nature, or the common works of God’s providence, or be learned by the sun and moon’s preaching the gospel, as some have fondly (not to say profanely) enough asserted, it is infinitely sottish to imagine, and can indeed he nothing else but the turning the grace of God into wanton and unreasonable propositions.

It is clear therefore, that the heathens had no knowledge of that way by which alone we expect salvation. So that all the hope which we can have for them is, that the gospel may not be the utmost limit of the divine mercy; but that the merits of Christ may overflow, and run over the pale of the church, so as to reach even many of those who lived and died invincibly ignorant of him.

But whether this shall be so, or no, God alone knows, who only is privy to the great counsels of his own will. It is a secret hid from us; and therefore, though we may hope compassionately, yet I am sure we can pronounce nothing certainly: it is enough for us, that God has asserted his justice, even in his dealing with those whom he treats not upon terms of evangelical mercy. So that such persons can neither excuse themselves, nor yet accuse him; who, in the severest sentence that he can pronounce upon the sinner, will (as the Psalmist tells us) be justified when he speaks, and clear when he is judged.

2dly, In the next place, we gather hence the unspeakably wretched and deplorable condition of obstinate sinners under the gospel. The sun of mercy has shined too long and too bright upon such, to leave them any shadow of excuse. For, let them argue over all the topics of divine goodness and human weakness, and whatsoever other pretences poor sinking sinners are apt to catch at, to support and save themselves by; yet how trifling must be their plea! how impertinent their defence!

Accordingly, in our application of any parable to the thing designed and set forth by it, we must not look for an absolute and exact correspondence of all the circumstantial or subservient passages of the metaphorical part of it, with just so many of the same, or the like passages in the thing intended by it; but it is sufficient, that there be a certain analogy, or agreement between them, as to the principal scope and design of both.

As for the design of this parable, it is, no doubt, to set forth the free offer of the gospel, with all its rich privileges, to the Jewish church and nation, in the first place; and upon their refusal of it, and God’s rejection of them for that refusal, to declare the calling of the gentiles in their room, by a free, unlimited tender of the gospel to all nations whatsoever; adding withal a very dreadful and severe sentence upon those, who, being so freely invited, and so generously admitted, to such high and undeserved privileges, should nevertheless abuse and despise them by an unworthy, wicked, and ungrateful deportment under them.

For men must not think that the gospel is all made up of privilege and promise, but that there is something of duty to be performed, as well as of privilege to be enjoyed. No welcome to a wedding supper without a wedding garment; and no coming by a wedding garment for nothing. In all the trans actions between God and the souls of men, some thing is expected on both sides; there being a fixed, indissoluble, and (in the language of the parable) a kind of marriage-tie between duty and privilege, which renders them inseparable.

Now, though I question not but that this parable of the wedding supper comprehends in it the whole complex of all the blessings and privileges exhibited by the gospel; yet, I conceive, that there is one principal privilege amongst all the rest, that it seems more peculiarly to aim at, or at least may more appositely and emphatically be applied to, than to any other whatsoever: and that is the blessed sacrament of the eucharist, by which all the benefits of the gospel are in an higher, fuller, and more divine manner conveyed to the faithful, than by any other duty or privilege belonging to our excellent religion. And for this, I shall offer these three following reasons.

1 . Because the foundation of all parables is, as we have shewn, some analogy or similitude between the tropical or allusive part of the parable, and the thing couched under it, and intended by it. But now, of all the benefits, privileges, or ordinances of the gospel, which of them is there that carries so natural a resemblance to a wedding supper as that, which every one of a very ordinary, discerning faculty may observe in the sacrament of the eucharist? For, surely, neither the preaching of the word, nor yet the sacrament of baptism, bears any such resemblance or affinity to it. But, on the other side, this sacrament of the eucharist so lively resembles, and so happily falls in with it, that it is indeed itself a supper, and is called a supper, and that by a genuine, proper, as well as a common and received appellation.

2t. This sacrament is not only with great propriety of speech called a supper; but moreover, as it is the grand and prime means of the nearest and most intimate union and conjunction of the soul with Christ, it may, with a peculiar significancy, be called also a wedding supper. And, as Christ frequently in scripture owns himself related to the church, as an husband to a spouse; so, if these nuptial endearments, by which Christ gives himself to the soul, and the soul mutually gives itself to Christ, pass between Christ and believers in any ordinance of the gospel, doubtless it is most eminently and effectually in this: which is another pregnant instance of the notable resemblance between this divine sacrament and the wedding supper in the parable; and consequently, a further argument of the elegant and expressive signification of one by the other.

3dly and lastly, The very manner of celebrating this sacrament, which is by the breaking of bread, was the way and manner of transacting marriages in some of the eastern countries. Thus Q. Curtius reports, that when Alexander the Great married the Persian Roxana, the ceremony they used was no other but this; panem gladio divisum uterque libabat; he divided a piece of bread with his sword, of which each of them took a part, and so thereby the nuptial rites were performed. Besides, that this ceremony of feasting belongs most properly both to marriage and to the eucharist, as both of them have the nature of a covenant. And all covenants were, in old times, solemnized and accompanied with festival eating and drinking; the persons newly confederate always thereupon feasting together in token of their full and perfect accord, both as to interest and affection.

And now these three considerations together, so exactly suiting the parable of the wedding supper to this spiritual, divine banquet of the gospel, if it does not primarily, and in its first design, intend it; yet, certainly it may with greater advantage of resemblance be applied to it, than to any other duty or privilege belonging to Christianity.

Upon the warrant of which so very particular and extraordinary a cognation between them, I shall, at present, treat of the words wholly with reference to this sacred and divine solemnity, observing and gathering from them, as they lie in coherence with the foregoing and following parts of the parable, these two propositions.

1. That to a worthy participation of the holy mysteries and great privileges of the gospel, and particularly that of the Lord’s supper, there is indispensably required a suitable preparation.

2. That God is a strict observer of, and a severe animadverter upon, such as presume to partake of those mysteries, without such a preparation.

And first, for the first of these; viz. That to a worthy participation of the holy mysteries, &c. Now this proposition imports in it two things:

1. That to a right discharge of this duty, a preparation is necessary.

2. That every preparation is not sufficient. And first, for the

First of these: That a preparation is necessary. And this, I confess, is a subject which I am heartily sorry that any preacher should find it needful to speak so much as one word upon. For would any man in his wits venture to die without preparation? And if not, let me tell you, that nothing less than that which will fit a man for death, can fit him for the sacrament. The truth is, there is nothing great or considerable in the world, which ought to be done, or ventured upon, without preparation: but, above all, how dangerous, sottish, and irrational is it, to engage in any thing or action extempore, where the concern is eternity!

None but the careless and the confident (and few are confident, but what are first careless) would rush rudely into the presence of a great man: and shall we, in our applications to the great God, take that to be religion, which the common reason of mankind will not allow to be manners? The very rules of worldly civility might instruct men how to order their addresses to God. For who, that is to appear before his prince or patron, would not view and review himself over and over, with all imaginable care and solicitude, that there be nothing justly offensive in his habit, language, or behaviour? But especially, if he be vouchsafed the honour of his table, it would be infinitely more absurd and shameful to appear foul and sordid there; and in the dress of the kitchen, receive the entertainments of the parlour.

What previous cleansings and consecrations, and what peculiar vestments were the priests, under the law, enjoined to use, when they were to appear before God in the sanctuary! And all this upon no less a penalty than death. This and this they were to do, lest they died, lest God should strike them dead upon the spot; as we read in Levit. viii. 35. and in many other places in the books of Moses. And so exact were the Jews in their preparations for the solemn times of God’s worship, that every σάββατον had its προσάββατον or παρασκενὴ, that is, a part of the sixth day, from the hour of six in the evening, to fit them for the duties of the seventh day: nor was this all; but they had also a προπαρασκενὴ, beginning about three in the afternoon, to prepare them for that: and indeed, the whole day was,, in a manner, but preparative to the next; several works being disallowed and forborne amongst them on that day, which were not so upon any of the foregoing five: so careful, even to scrupulosity, were they to keep their sabbath with due reverence and devotion, that they must not only have a time to prepare them for that, but a further time also to prepare them for their very preparations.

Nay, and the heathens, (many of them at least,) when they were to sacrifice to their greatest and most revered deities, used, on the evening before, to have a certain preparative rite or ceremony, called by them coena pura; that is, a supper, consisting of some peculiar meats, in which they imagined a kind of holiness: and, by eating of which, they thought themselves sanctified, and fitted to officiate about the mysteries of the ensuing festival. And what were all their lustrations, but so many solemn purifyings, to render both themselves and their sacrifices acceptable to their gods?

So that we see here a concurrence both of the Jews and heathens in this practice, before Christianity ever appeared: which to me is a kind of demonstration, that the necessity of men’s preparing themselves for the sacred offices of religion was a lesson which the mere light and dictates of common reason, without the help of revelation, taught all the knowing and intelligent part of the world.

I will wash my hands in innocency, says David, and so will I compass thine altar, Psalm xxvi. 6. And as the apostle told the Hebrews, Heb. xiii. 10. We also, we Christians, have an altar as well as they; an altar as sacred, an altar to be approached with as much awe and reverence; and though there be no fire upon it, yet there is a dreadful one that follows it. A fire, that does not indeed consume the offering, but such an one as will be sure to seize and prey upon the unworthy offerer. I will be sanctified, says God, in them that come nigh me, Levit. x. 3. And God then accounts himself sanctified in such persons, when they sanctify themselves. Nadab and Abihu were a dreadful exposition of this text.

And for what concerns ourselves; he that shall throughly consider what the heart of man is, what sin and the world is, and what it is to approve one’s self to an all-searching eye, in so sublime a duty as the sacrament, must acknowledge that a man may as well go about it without a soul, as without preparation.

For the holiest man living, by conversing with the world, insensibly draws something of soil and taint from it: the very air and mien, the way and business of the world, still, as it were, rubbing some thing upon the soul, which must be fetched off again, before it can be able heartily to converse with God. Many secret indispositions, coldnesses, and aversions to duty, will undiscernibly steal upon it; and it will require both time and close application of mind, to recover it to such a frame as shall dispose and fit it for the spiritualities of religion.

And such as have made trial, find it neither so easy nor so ready a passage from the noise, the din, and hurry of business, to the retirements of devotion, from the exchange to the closet, and from the freedoms of conversation, to the recollections and disciplines of the spirit.

Thirdly, If the moral goodness or evil of men’s actions were sufficiently derived from human laws or constitutions, then, upon supposal that a divine law should (as it often does) command what is prohibited by human laws, and prohibit what is commanded by them, it would follow, that either such commands and prohibitions of the divine law do not at all affect the actions of men in point of their morality, so as to render them either good or evil; or that the same action, at the same time, may, in respect of the divine law commanding it, be morally good; and, in respect of an human law forbidding it, be morally evil. Than which consequence, nothing can be more clear, nor withal more absurd.

And many more of the like nature I could easily draw forth, and lay before you. Every false principle or proposition being sure to be attended with a numerous train of absurdities.

But, as to the subject-matter now in hand; so far is the morality of human actions, as to the goodness or evil of them, from being founded in any human law, that in very many, and those the principal in stances of human action, it is not originally founded in, or derived from, so much as any positive divine law. There being a jus naturale certainly antecedent to all jus positivum, either human or divine; and that such as results from the very nature and being of things, as they stand in such a certain habitude or relation to one another: to which relation whatsoever is done agreeably is morally and essentially good; and whatsoever is done otherwise is, at the same rate, morally evil.

And this I shall exemplify in those two grand, comprehensive, moral duties, which man is for ever obliged to, his duty towards God, and his duty towards his neighbour.

And first, for his duty towards God; which is, to love and obey him with all his heart and all his soul. It is certain, that for a rational, intelligent creature to conform himself to the will of God in all things, carries in it a moral rectitude, or goodness; and to disobey or oppose his will in any thing, imports a moral obliquity, before God ever deals forth any particular law or command to such a creature; there being a general obligation upon man to obey all God’s laws, whensoever they shall be declared, before any particular instance of law comes actually to be declared. But now whence is this? Why, from that essential suitableness which obedience has to the relation which is between a rational creature and his Creator. Nothing in nature being more irrational and irregular, and consequently more immoral, than for an intelligent being to op pose or disobey that sovereign, supreme will, which gave him that being, and has withal the sole and absolute disposal of him in all his concerns. So that there needs no positive law or sanction of God to stamp an obliquity upon such a disobedience; since it cleaves to it essentially, and by way of natural result from it, upon the account of that utter unsuitableness which disobedience has to the relation which man naturally and necessarily stands in towards his Maker.

And then, in the next place, for his duty to his neighbour. The whole of which is comprised in that great rule, of doing as a man would be done by. We may truly affirm, that the morality of this rule does not originally derive itself from those words of our Saviour, Matt. vii. 12. Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them: no, nor yet from Moses or the prophets; but it is as old as Adam, and bears date with human nature itself; as springing from that primitive relation of equality, which all men, as fellow creatures, and fellow subjects to the same supreme Lord, bear to one another, in respect of that common right, which every man has equally to his life, and to the proper comforts of life; and consequently, to all things naturally necessary to the support of both.

Now, whatsoever one man has a right to keep or possess, no other man can have a right to take from him. So that no man has a right to expect that from or to do that to another, which that other has not an equal right to expect from and to do to him. Which parity of right, as to all things purely natural, being undoubtedly the result of nature itself, can any thing be inferred from thence more conformable to reason, and consequently of a greater moral rectitude, than that such an equality of right should also cause an equality of behaviour, between man and man, as to all those mutual offices and intercourses in which life and the happiness of life are concerned? Nothing certainly can shine out and shew itself by the mere light of reason, as an higher and more unquestionable piece of morality than this, nor as a more confessed deviation from morality than the contrary practice.

From all which discourse, I think we may with out presumption conclude, that the rationes boni et mali, the nature of good and evil, as to the principal instances of both, spring from that essential habitude, or relation, which the nature of one thing bears to another by virtue of that order which they stand placed in, here in the world, by the very law and condition of their creation; and for that reason do and must precede all positive laws, sanctions, or institutions whatsoever. Good and evil are in morality, as the east and west are in the frame of the world; founded in and divided by that fixed and unalterable situation, which they have respectively in the whole body of the universe: or, as the right hand is discriminated from the left, by a natural, necessary, and never to be confounded distinction.

And thus I have done with the first thing proposed, and given you such an account of the nature of good and evil, as the measure of the present exercise and occasion would allow. Pass we now to the

2nd. Which is to shew, That the way by which good and evil generally operate upon the mind of man, is by those words or names by which they are notified and conveyed to the mind. Words are the signs and symbols of things; and as in accompts, ciphers and figures pass for real sums; so in the course of human affairs, words and names pass for things themselves. For things, or objects, cannot enter into the mind, as they subsist in themselves, and by their own natural bulk pass into the apprehension; but they are taken in by their ideas, their notions or resemblances; which imprinting themselves after a spiritual immaterial manner in the imagination, and from thence, under a further refinement, passing into the intellect, are by that expressed by certain words or names, found out and invented by the mind, for the communication of its conceptions, or thoughts, to others. So that as conceptions are the images or resemblances of things to the mind within itself; in like manner are words, or names, the marks, tokens, or resemblances of those conceptions to the minds of them whom we converse with: τὰ ἐν τῇ φωνῇ τῶν ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ παθημάτων σύμβολα, being the known maxim laid down by the philosopher, as the first and most fundamental rule of all discourse.

This therefore is certain, that in human life, or conversation, words stand for things; the common business of the world not being capable of being managed otherwise. For by these, men come to know one another’s minds. By these they covenant and confederate. By these they buy and sell, they deal and traffick. In short, words are the great instruments both of practice and design; which, for the most part, move wholly in the strength of them. Forasmuch as it is the nature of man both to will and to do, according to the persuasion he has of the good and evil of those things that come before him; and to take up his persuasions according to the representations made to him of those qualities, by their respective names or appellations.

This is the true and natural account of this mat ter; and it is all that I shall remark upon this second head. I proceed now to the

3rd. Which is, to shew the mischief which directly, naturally, and unavoidably follows from the misapplication and confusion of those names. And in order to this, I shall premise these two considerations.

1. That the generality of mankind is wholly and absolutely governed by words or names; without, nay, for the most part, even against the knowledge men have of things. The multitude, or common rout, like a drove of sheep, or an herd of oxen, may be managed by any noise or cry, which their drivers shall accustom them to.

And he who will set up for a skilful manager of the rabble, so long as they have but ears to hear, needs never inquire whether they have any under standing whereby to judge; but with two or three popular empty words, such as popery and superstition, right of the subject, liberty of conscience, Lord Jesus Christ, well tuned and humoured, may whistle them backwards and forwards, upwards and down wards, till he is weary; and get up upon their backs when he is so.

As for the meaning of the word itself, that may shift for itself: and as for the sense and reason of it, that has little or nothing to do here; only let it sound full and round, and chime right to the humour, which is at present agog, (just as a big, long, rattling name is said to command even adoration from a Spaniard,) and no doubt, with this powerful sense less engine, the rabble-driver shall be able to carry all before him, or to draw all after him, as he pleases. For a plausible, insignificant word, in the mouth of an expert demagogue, is a dangerous and a dreadful weapon.

You know, when Caesar’s army mutinied, and grew troublesome, no argument from interest or reason could satisfy or appease them: but as soon as he gave them the appellation of Quirites, the tumult was immediately hushed; and all were quiet and content, and took that one word in good payment for all. Such is the trivial slightness and levity of most minds. And indeed, take any passion of the soul of man, while it is predominant and afloat, and, just in the critical height of it, nick it with some lucky or unlucky word, and you may as certainly overrule it to your own purpose, as a spark of fire, falling upon gunpowder, will infallibly blow it up.

The truth is, he who shall duly consider these matters, will find that there is a certain bewitchery, or fascination in words, which makes them operate with a force beyond what we can naturally give an account of. For would not a man think ill deeds and shrewd turns should reach further and strike deeper than ill words? And yet many instances might be given, in which men have much more easily pardoned ill things done, than ill things said against them: such a peculiar rancour and venom do they leave behind them in men’s minds, and so much more poisonously and incurably does the serpent bite with his tongue than with his teeth.

Nor are men prevailed upon at this odd unaccountable rate, by bare words, only through a defect of knowledge; but sometimes also do they suffer themselves to be carried away with these puffs of wind, even contrary to knowledge and experience itself. For otherwise, how could men be brought to surrender up their reason, their interest, and their credit to flattery? gross, fulsome, abusive flattery; indeed more abusive and reproachful, upon a true estimate of things and persons, than the rudest scoffs and the sharpest invectives. Yet so it is, that though men know themselves utterly void of those qualities and perfections, which the impudent sycophant, at the same time, both ascribes to them, and in his sleeve laughs at them for believing; nay, though they know that the flatterer himself knows the false hood of his own flatteries; yet they swallow the fallacious morsel, love the impostor, and with both arms hug the abuse; and that to such a degree, that no offices of friendship, no real services, shall be able to lie in the balance against those luscious falsehoods, which flattery shall feed the mind of a fool in power with: the sweetness of the one infinitely overcomes the substance of the other.

And therefore you shall seldom see, that such an one cares to have men of worth, honesty, and veracity about him; for such persons cannot fall down and worship stocks and stones, though they are placed never so high above them; but their yea is yea, and their nay, nay; and they cannot admire a fox for his sincerity, a wolf for his generosity, nor an ass for his wit and ingenuity; and therefore can never be acceptable to those whose whole credit, interest, and advantage lies in their not appearing to the world what they are really in themselves. None are or can be welcome to such, but those who speak paint and wash; for that is the thing they love; and no wonder, since it is the thing they need.

There is hardly any rank, order, or degree of men, but, more or less, have been captivated and enslaved by words. It is a weakness, or rather a fate, which attends both high and low; the statesman who holds the helm, as well as the peasant who holds the plough. So that, if ever you find an ignoramus in place and power, and can have so little conscience, and so much confidence, as to tell him to his face, that he has a wit and an understanding above all the world besides; and “that what his own reason can” not suggest to him, neither can the united reason “of all mankind put together

The words of a great self-opiniator, and a bitter reviler of the clergy.

But to give you yet a grosser instance of the force of words, and of the extreme vanity of man’s nature in being influenced by them, hardly shall you meet with any person, man or woman, so aged or ill-favoured, but, if you will venture to commend them for their comeliness, nay, and for their youth too, though “time out of mind” is wrote upon every line of their face; yet they shall take it very well at your hands, and begin to think with themselves, that certainly they have some perfections which the generality of the world are not so happy as to be aware of.

But now, are not these, think we, strange self-delusions, and yet attested by common experience almost every day? But whence, in the mean time, can all this proceed, but from that besotting intoxication which this verbal magic, as I may so call it, brings upon the mind of man? For can any thing in nature have a more certain, deep, and undeniable effect, than folly has upon man’s mind, and age upon his body? And yet we see, that in both these, words are able to persuade men out of what they find and feel, to reverse the very impressions of sense, and to amuse men with fancies and paradoxes, even in spite of nature and experience. But since it would be endless to pursue all the particulars in which this humour shews itself; whosoever would have one full, lively, and complete view of an empty, shallow, self-opinioned grandee, surrounded by his flatterers, (like a choice dish of meat by a company of fellows commending and devouring it at the same time,) let him cast his eye upon Ahab in the midst of his false prophets, 1 Kings xxii. where we have them all with one voice for giving him a cast of their court-prophecy, and sending him, in a compliment, to be knocked on the head at Ramoth Gilead. But, says Jehoshaphat, (who smelt the parasite through the prophet,) in the seventh verse, Is there not a prophet of the Lord besides, that we may inquire of him? Why, yes, says Ahab, there is yet one man by whom we may inquire of the Lord; but I hate him, for he doth not prophesy good concerning me, but evil. Ay! that was his crime; the poor man was so good a subject, and so bad a courtier, as to venture to serve and save his prince, whether he would or no; for, it seems, to give Ahab such warning as might infallibly have prevented his destruction, was esteemed by him evil; and to push him on headlong into it, because he was fond of it, was accounted good. These were his new measures of good and evil. And therefore those who knew how to make their court better, (as the word is,) tell him a bold lie in God’s name, and therewith send him packing to his certain doom; thus calling evil good at the cost of their prince’s crown and his life too. But what cared they? they knew that it would please, and that was enough for them; there being always a sort of men in the world, (whom others have an interest to serve by,) who had rather a great deal be pleased, than be safe. Strike them under the fifth rib, provided at the same time you kiss them too, as Joab served Abner, and you may both destroy and oblige them with the same blow.

Accordingly, in the thirtieth of Isaiah, we find some arrived to that pitch of sottishness, and so much in love with their own ruin, as to own plainly and roundly what they would be at; in the tenth verse, Prophesy not unto us, say they, right things, but prophesy to us smooth things. As if they had said, “Do but oil the razor for us, and let us alone “to cut our own throats.” Such an enchantment is there in words; and so fine a thing does it seem to some to be ruined plausibly, and to be ushered to their destruction with panegyric and acclamation: a shameful, though irrefragable argument, of the absurd empire and usurpation of words over things; and that the greatest affairs and most important interests of the world are carried on by things, not as they are, but as they are called.

And thus much for the first thing which I thought necessary to premise to the prosecution of our third particular.

2. The other thing to be premised is this; That as the generality of men are wholly governed by names and words; so there is nothing, in which they are so remarkably and powerfully governed by them, as in matters of good and evil, so far as these qualities relate to, and affect the actions of, men: a thing certainly of a most fatal and pernicious import. For though, in matters of mere speculation, it is not much the concern of society, whether or no men proceed wholly upon trust, and take the bare word of others for what they assent to; since it is not much material to the welfare either of government or of themselves, whether they opine right or wrong, and whether they be philosophers or no. But it is vastly the concern both of government and of themselves too, whether they be morally good or bad, honest or dishonest. And surely it is hardly possible for men to make it their business to be virtuous or honest, while vices are called and pointed out to them by the names of virtues; and they all the while suppose the nature of things to be truly and faith fully signified by their names, and thereupon believe as they hear, and practise as they believe. And that this is the course of much the greatest part of the world, thus to take up their persuasions concerning good and evil by an implicit faith, and a full acquiescence in the word of those who shall represent things to them under these characters, I shall prove by two reasons; and those such as, I fear, will not only be found reasons to evince that men actually do so, but also sad demonstrations to conclude that they are never like to do otherwise.

First, The first of which shall be taken from that similitude, neighbourhood, and affinity, which is between vice and virtue, good and evil, in several notable instances of each. For though the general natures and definitions of these qualities are sufficiently distant from one another, and so in no danger of a promiscuous confusion; yet when they come to subsist in particulars, and to be clothed and attended with several accidents and circumstances, the case is hereby much altered; for then the discernment is neither so easy, nor yet so certain. Thus it is not always so obvious to distinguish between an act of liberality and an act of prodigality; between an act of courage and an act of rashness; an act of pusillanimity, and an act of great modesty or humility: nay, and some have had the good luck to have their very dulness dignified with the name of gravity, and to be no small gainers by the mistake. And many more such actions of dubious quality might be instanced in, too numerous to be here recounted or insisted on. In all which, and the like, it requiring too great a sagacity for vulgar minds to draw the line nicely and exactly between vice and virtue, and to adjust the due limits of each; it is no wonder, if most men attempt not a laborious scrutiny into things themselves, but only take names and words as they first come, and so without any more ado rest in them; it being so much easier, in all disquisitions of truth, to suppose, than to prove; and to believe, than to distinguish.

Secondly, The other reason of the same shall be taken from the great and natural inability of most men to judge exactly of things; which makes it very difficult for them to discern the real good and evil of what comes before them; to consider and weigh circumstances, to scatter and look through the mists of error, and so separate appearances from realities. For the greater part of mankind is but slow and dull of apprehension; and therefore, in many cases, under a necessity of seeing with other men’s eyes, and judging with other men’s understandings. Nature having manifestly contrived things so, that the vulgar and the many are fit only to be led or driven, but by no means fit to guide or direct themselves.

To which their want of judging or discerning abilities, we may add also their want of leisure and opportunity to apply their minds to such a serious and attent consideration, as may let them into a full discovery of the true goodness and evil of things, which are qualities which seldom display themselves to the first view: for in most things good and evil lie shuffled and thrust up together in a confused heap; and it is study and intention of thought which must draw them forth, and range them under their distinct heads. But there can be no study without time; and the mind must abide and dwell upon things, or be always a stranger to the inside of them. Through desire, says Solomon, a man having separated himself, seeketh and intermeddleth with all wisdom, Prov. xviii. 1. There must be leisure and a retirement, solitude, and a sequestration of a man’s self from the noise and toil of the world: for truth scorns to be seen by eyes too much fixed upon inferior objects. It lies too deep to be fetched up with the plough, and too close to be beaten out with the hammer. It dwells not in shops or work houses; nor till the late age was it ever known, that any one served seven years to a smith or a tailor, that he might at the end thereof proceed master of any other arts, but such as those trades taught him; and much less that he should commence doctor or divine from the shopboard or the anvil; or from whistling to a team, come to preach to a congregation.

These were the peculiar, extraordinary privileges of the late blessed times of light and inspiration: otherwise nature will still hold on in its old course, never doing any thing which is considerable, with out the assistance of its two great helps, art and industry. But above all, the knowledge of what is good and what is evil, what ought and what ought not to be done, in the several offices and relations of life, is a thing too large to be compassed, and too hard to be mastered, without brains and study, parts and contemplation; which providence never thought fit to make much the greatest part of mankind possessors of. And consequently those who are not so, must, for the knowledge of most things, depend upon those who are, and receive their information concerning good and evil from such verbal or nominal representations of each, as shall be imparted to them by those, whose ability and integrity they have cause to rely upon, for a faithful account of these matters.

And thus from these two great considerations premised; 1st, That the generality of the world are wholly governed by words and names; and 2dly, That the chief instance in which they are so, is in such words and names as import the good or evil of things; (which both the difficulty of things themselves, and the very condition of human nature, constrains much the greatest part of mankind to take wholly upon trust;) I say, from these two considerations must needs be inferred, what a fatal, devilish, and destructive effect the misapplication and confusion of those great governing names of good and evil, must inevitably have upon the societies of men. The comprehensive mischief of which will appear from this, that it takes in both those ways, by which the greatest evils and calamities, which are incident to man, do directly break in upon him.

The first of which is by his being deceived, and the second by his being misrepresented. And first, for the first of these. I do not in the least doubt, but if a true and just computation could be made of all the miseries and misfortunes that befall men in this world, two thirds of them, at least, would be found resolvable into their being deceived by false appearances of good; first deluding their apprehensions, and then by natural consequence perverting their actions, from which are the great issues of life and death; since, according to the eternal sanction of God and nature, such as a man’s actions are for good or evil, such ought also his condition to be for happiness or misery.

Now all deception in the course of life is indeed nothing else but a lie reduced to practice, and false hood passing from words into things.

For is a man impoverished and undone by the purchase of an estate? Why, it is because he bought an imposture, paid down his money for a lie, and by the help of the best and ablest counsel, forsooth, that could be had, took a bad title for a good.

Is a man unfortunate in marriage? Still it is because he was deceived; and put his neck into the snare, before he put it into the yoke, and so took that for virtue and affection, which was nothing but vice in a disguise, and a devilish humour under a demure look.

3. Of the hazard a man runs, if the commission of sin be not prevented, whether ever it will come to be pardoned: and,

4thly and lastly, Of the advantages accruing to the soul from the prevention of sin, above what can be had from the bare pardon of it, in case it comes to be pardoned.

Of these in their order: and first, we are to take an estimate of the greatness of this mercy, from the condition it finds the sinner in, when God is pleased to vouchsafe it to him. It finds him in the direct way to death and destruction; and, which is worse, wholly unable to help himself. For he is actually under the power of a temptation, and the sway of an impetuous lust; both hurrying him on to satisfy the cravings of it by some wicked action. He is possessed and acted by a passion, which, for the present, absolutely overrules him; and so can no more recover himself, than a bowl rolling down a hill stop itself in the midst of its career. It is a maxim in the philosophy of some, that whatsoever is once in actual motion, will move for ever, if it be not hindered.

So a man, being under the drift of any passion, will still follow the impulse of it, till something interpose, and by a stronger impulse turn him another way: but in this case we can find no principle within him strong enough to counteract that principle, and to relieve him. For if it be any, it must be either, first, the judgment of his reason; or, secondly, the free choice of his will.

But from the first of these there can be no help for him in his present condition. For while a man is engaged in any sinful purpose, through the prevalence of any passion, during the continuance of that passion, he fully approves of whatsoever he is carried on to do in the strength of it; and judges it, under his present circumstances, the best and most rational course that he can take. Thus we see when Jonas was under the passion of anger, and God asked him, Whether he did well to be angry? He answered, I do well to be angry, even unto death, Jonas iv. 9. And when Saul was under his persecuting fit, what he did appeared to him good and necessary, Acts xxvi. 9. I verily thought with myself that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus. But to go no further than the text; do we not think, that while David’s heart was full of his revengeful design, it had blinded and perverted his reason so far, that it struck in wholly with his passion, and told him, that the bloody purpose he was going to execute, was just, magnanimous, and most becoming such a person, and so dealt with, as he was? This being so, how is it possible for a man under a passion to receive any succour from his judgment or reason, which is made a party in the whole action, and influenced to a present approbation of all the ill things which his passion can suggest? This is most certain; and every man may find it by experience, (if he will but impartially reflect upon the method of his own actings, and the motions of his own mind,) that while he is under any passion, he thinks and judges quite otherwise of the proper objects of that passion, from what he does when he is out of it. Take a man under the transports of a vehement rage or revenge, and he passes a very different judgment upon murder and bloodshed, from what he does when his revenge is over, and the flame of his fury spent. Take a man possessed with a strong and immoderate desire of any thing, and you shall find, that the worth and excellency of that thing appears much greater and more dazzling to the eye of his mind, than it does when that desire, either by satisfaction or otherwise, is quite extinguished. So that while passion is upon the wing, and the man fully engaged in the prosecution of some unlawful object, no remedy or control is to be expected from his reason, which is wholly gained over to judge in favour of it. The fumes of his passion do as really intoxicate and confound his judging and discerning faculty, as the fumes of drink discompose and stupify the brain of a man overcharged with it. When his drink indeed is over, he sees the folly and the absurdity, the madness and the vileness of those things, which before he acted with full complacency and approbation. Passion is the drunkenness of the mind; and therefore, in its present workings, not controllable by reason; forasmuch as the proper effect of it is, for the time, to supersede the workings of reason. This principle therefore being able to do nothing to the stopping of a man in the eager pursuit of his sin; there remains no other, that can be supposed able to do any thing upon the soul, but that second mentioned, to wit, the choice of his will. But this also is as much disabled from recovering a man fully intent upon the prosecution of any of his lusts, as the former. For all the time that a man is so, he absolutely wills, and is fully pleased with what he is designing or going about. And whatsoever perfectly pleases the will, overpowers it; for it fixes and determines the inclination of it to that one thing which is before it; and so fills up all its possibilities of indifference, that there is actually no room for choice. He who is under the power of melancholy, is pleased with his being so. He who is angry, delights in nothing so much as in the venting of his rage. And he who is lustful, places his greatest satisfaction in a slavish following of the dictates of his lust. And so long as the will and the affections are pleased, and exceedingly gratified in any course of acting, it is impossible for a man, so far as he is at his own disposal, not to continue in it; or, by any principle within him, to be diverted or took off from it.

From all which we see, that when a man has took up a full purpose of sinning, he is hurried on to it in the strength of all those principles which nature has given him to act by: for sin having depraved his judgment, and got possession of his will, there is no other principle left him naturally, by which he can make head against it. Nor is this all; but to these internal dispositions to sin, add the external opportunities and occasions concurring with them, and removing all lets and rubs out of the way, and, as it were, making the path of destruction plain before the sinner’s face; so that he may run his course freely, and without interruption. Nay, when opportunities shall He so fair, as not only to permit, but even to invite, and further a progress in sin; so that the sinner shall set forth, like a ship launched into the wide sea; not only well built and rigged, but also carried on with full wind and tide, to the port or place it is bound for: surely, in this case, nothing under heaven can be imagined able to stop or countermand a sinner, amidst all these circumstances promoting and pushing on his sinful design. For all that can give force and fury to motion, both from within and from without, jointly meet to bear him forward in his present attempt. He presses on like an horse rushing into the battle, and all that should withstand him giving way before him.

Now under this deplorable necessity of ruin and destruction does God’s preventing grace find every sinner, when it snatches him like a brand out of the fire, and steps in between the purpose and the commission of his sin. It finds him going on resolutely in the high and broad way to perdition; which yet his perverted reason tells him is right, and his will, pleasant. And therefore he has no power of himself to leave, or turn out of it; but he is ruined jocundly and pleasantly, and damned according to his heart’s desire. And can there be a more wretched and woful spectacle of misery, than a man in such a condition? a man pleasing and destroying himself together? a man, as it were, doing violence to damnation, and taking hell by force? So that when the preventing goodness of God reaches out its arm, and pulls him out of this fatal path, it does by main force even wrest him from himself, and save him, as it were, against his will.

But neither is this his total inability to recover or relieve himself the worst of his condition; but, which is yet much worse, it puts him into a state of actual hostility against, and defiance of, that al mighty God, from whom alone, in this helpless and forlorn condition, he is capable of receiving help. For surely, while a man is going on in a full purpose of sin, he is trampling upon all law, spitting in the face of Heaven, and provoking his Maker in the highest manner; so that none is or can be so much concerned as God himself, to destroy and cut off such an one, and to vindicate the honour of his great name, by striking him dead in his rebellion. And this brings us to the

Second thing proposed; which was to shew, What is the fountain or impulsive cause of this prevention of sin. It is perfectly free grace. A man at best, upon all principles of divinity and sound philosophy, is uncapable of meriting any thing from God. But surely, while he is under the dominion of sin, and engaged in full design and purpose to commit it, it is not imaginable what can be found in him to oblige the divine grace in his behalf. For he is in high and actual rebellion against the only giver of such grace. And therefore it must needs flow from a redundant, unaccountable fulness of compassion; shewing mercy, because it will shew mercy; from a compassion, which is and must be its own reason, and can have no argument for its exercise, but it self. No man in the strength of the first grace can merit the second, (as some fondly speak, for reason they do not,) unless a beggar, by receiving one alms, can be said to merit another. It is not from what a man is, or what he has done; from any virtue or excellency, any preceding worth or desert in him, that God is induced thus to interpose between him and ruin, and so stop him in his full career to damnation. No, says God, in Ezek. xvi. 6. When I passed by, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee, Live; yea, I said unto thee, when thou wast in thy blood, Live. The Spirit of God speaks this great truth to the hearts of men with emphasis and repetition, knowing what an aptness there is in them to oppose it. God sees a man wallowing in his native filth and impurity, delivered over as an absolute captive to sin, polluted with its guilt, and enslaved by its power; and in this most loathsome condition fixes upon him as an object of his distinguishing mercy. And to shew yet further, that the actings of this mercy in the work of prevention are entirely free,, do we not sometimes see, in persons of equal guilt and demerit, and of equal progress and advance in the ways of sin, some of them maturely diverted and took off, and others permitted to go on without check or control, till they finish a sinful course in final perdition? So true is it, that if things were cast upon this issue, that God should never prevent sin till something in man deserved it, the best of men would fall into sin, continue in sin, and sin on for ever.

And thus much for the second thing proposed; which was to shew, What was the principle, or fountain, from whence this prevention of sin does proceed. Come we now to the

Third demonstration or proof of the greatness of this preventing mercy, taken from the hazard a man runs, if the commission of sin be not prevented, whether ever it will come to be pardoned.

In order to the clearing of which, I shall lay down these two considerations.

1. That if sin be not thus prevented, it will certainly be committed; and the reason is, because on the sinner’s part there will be always a strong inclination to sin. So that, if other things concur, and Providence cuts not off the opportunity, the act of sin must needs follow. For an active principle, seconded with the opportunities of action, will infallibly exert itself.

2dly, The other consideration is, That in every sin deliberately committed, there are (generally speaking) many more degrees of probability, that that sin will never come to be pardoned, than that it will.

And this shall be made appear upon these three following accounts.

1. Because every commission of sin introduces into the soul a certain degree of hardness, and an aptness to continue in that sin. It is a known maxim, that it is much more difficult to throw out, than not to let in. Every degree of entrance is a degree of possession. Sin taken into the soul is like a liquor poured into a vessel; so much of it as it fills, it also seasons. The touch and tincture go together. So that although the body of the liquor should be poured out again, yet still it leaves that tang behind it, which makes the vessel fitter for that, than for any other. In like manner, every act of sin strangely transforms and works over the soul to its own likeness. Sin in this being to the soul like fire to combustible matter; it assimilates, before it destroys it.

2dly, A second reason is, because every commission of sin imprints upon the soul a further disposition and proneness to sin. As the second, third, and fourth degrees of heat are more easily introduced, than the first. Every one is both a preparative and a step to the next. Drinking both quenches the present thirst, and provokes it for the future. When the soul is beaten from its first station, and the mounds and outworks of virtue are once broken down, it becomes quite another thing from what it was before. In one single eating of the forbidden fruit, when the act is over, yet the relish remains; and the remembrance of the first repast is an easy allurement to the second. One visit is enough to begin an acquaintance; and this point is gained by it, that when the visitant comes again, he is no more a stranger.

3dly, The third and grand reason is, because the only thing that can entitle the sinner to pardon, which is repentance, is not in the sinner’s power: and he who goes about the work will find it so. It is the gift of God: and though God has certainly promised forgiveness of sin to every one who repents, yet he has not promised to any one to give him grace to repent. This is the sinner’s hard lot, that the same thing which makes him need repentance, makes him also in danger of not obtaining it. For it provokes and offends that holy Spirit which alone can bestow this grace: as the same treason which puts a traitor in need of his prince’s mercy, is a great and a just provocation to his prince to deny it him.

Now, let these three things be put together: First, That every commission of sin, in some degree, hardens the soul in that sin. Secondly, That every commission of sin disposes the soul to proceed further in sin. And, thirdly, That to repent, and turn from sin, (without which all pardon is impossible,) is not in the sinner’s power; and then, I suppose, there can not but appear a greater likelihood, that a sin once committed will in the issue not be pardoned, than that it will. To all which, add the confirmation of general experience, and the real event of things, that where one man ever comes to repent, an hundred, I might say a thousand at least, end their days in final impenitence.

All which considered, surely there cannot need a more pregnant argument of the greatness of this preventing mercy, if it did no more for a man than this; that his grand, immortal concern, more valuable to him than ten thousand worlds, is not thrown upon a critical point; that he is not brought to his last stake; that he is rescued from the first descents into hell, and the high probabilities of damnation.

For whatsoever the issue proves, it is certainly a miserable thing to be forced to cast lots for one’s life; yet in every sin, a man does the same for eternity. And therefore let the boldest sinner take this one consideration along with him, when he is going to sin, that, whether the sin he is about to act ever comes to be pardoned or no, yet, as soon as it is acted, it quite turns the balance, puts his salvation upon the venture, leaves him but one cast for all; and, which is yet much more dreadful, makes it ten to one odds against him.

But let us now alter the state of the matter, so as to leave no doubt in the case: but suppose, that the sin, which, upon non-prevention, comes to be committed, comes also to be repented of, and consequently to be pardoned. Yet, in the

Fourth and last place, The greatness of this preventing mercy is eminently proved from those ad vantages accruing to the soul from the prevention of sin, above what can be had from the bare pardon of it: and that, in these two great respects.

1. Of the clearness of a man’s condition.

2. Of the satisfaction of his mind. And,

First, For the clearness of his condition. If innocence be preferable to repentance, and to be clean be more desirable than to be cleansed; then surely prevention of sin ought to have the precedence of its pardon. For so much of prevention, so much of innocence. There are indeed various degrees of it; and God, in his infinite wisdom, does not deal forth the same measure of his preventing grace to all. Some times he may suffer the soul but just to begin the sinful production, in reflecting upon a sin, suggested by the imagination, with some complacency and delight; which, in the apostle’s phrase, is to conceive sin; and then, in these early, imperfect beginnings, God perhaps may presently dash and extinguish it. Or possibly he may permit the sinful conception to receive life and form, by passing into a purpose of committing it; and then he may make it prove abortive, by stifling it before ever it comes to the birth. Or perhaps God may think fit to let it come even to the birth, by some strong endeavours to commit it, and yet then deny it strength to bring forth; so that it never comes into actual commission. Or, lastly, God may suffer it to be born, and see the world, by permitting the endeavour of sin to pass into the commission of it. And this is the last fatal step but one; which is, by frequent repetition of the sinful act, to continue and persist in it, till at length it settles into a fixed, confirmed habit of sin; which, being properly that which the apostle calls the finishing of sin, ends certainly in death; death, not only as to merit, but also as to actual infliction.

Now peradventure in this whole progress, preventing grace may sometimes come in to the poor sinner’s help, but at the last hour of the day; and having suffered him to run all the former risk and maze of sin, and to descend so many steps down wards to the black regions of death: as first, from the bare thought and imagination of sin, to look up on it with some beginnings of appetite and delight; from thence, to purpose and intend it; and from in tending, to endeavour it; and from endeavouring, actually to commit it; and, having committed it, perhaps for some time to continue in it: and then, I say, after all this, God may turn the fatal stream, and by a mighty grace interrupt its course, and keep it from passing into a settled habit, and so hinder the absolute completion of sin in final obduracy.

Certain it is, that wheresoever it pleases God to stop the sinner on this side hell, how far soever he has been advanced in his way towards it, it is a vast, ineffable mercy; a mercy as great as life from the dead, and salvation to a man tottering with horror upon the very edge and brink of destruction. But if, more than all this, God shall be pleased by an early grace to prevent sin so soon, as to keep the soul in the virginity of its first innocence, not tainted with the desires, and much less defloured with the formed purpose of any thing vile and sinful; what an infinite goodness is this! It is not a converting, but a crowning grace; such an one as irradiates, and puts a circle of glory about the head of him upon whom it descends; it is the Holy Ghost coming down upon him in the form of a dove, and setting him triumphant above the necessity of tears and sorrow, mourning and repentance, the sad after-games of a lost innocence. And this brings in the consideration of that other great advantage accruing to the soul from the prevention of sin, above what can be had from the bare pardon of it; namely,

But the truth is, the way by which these Romish casuists speak peace to the consciences of men, is either by teaching them that many actions are not sins, which yet really are so; or by suggesting some thing to them, which shall satisfy their minds, not withstanding a known, actual, avowed continuance in their sins: such as are their pardons and indulgences, and giving men a share in the saints merits, out of the common bank and treasury of the church, which the pope has the sole custody and disposal of, and is never kept shut to such as come with an open hand. So that according to these new evangelists, well may we pronounce, Blessed are the rich, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. But God deliver the world from such guides, or rather such hucksters of souls, the very shame of religion, and the shame less subverters of morality. And it is really matter both of wonder and indignation, that such impostors should at all concern themselves about rules or directions of conscience, who seem to have no consciences to apply them to.

3. The absolution pronounced by a priest, whether Papist or Protestant, is not a certain, infallible ground, to give the person so absolved confidence towards God; and the reason is, because, if absolution, as such, could of itself secure a man, as to the estate of his soul, then it would follow, that every person so absolved should, by virtue thereof, be ipso facto put into such a condition of safety, which is not imaginable.

For the absolution pronounced must be either conditional, as running upon the conditions of faith and repentance; and then, if those conditions are not found in the person so absolved, it is but a seal to a blank, and so a mere nullity to him. Or, the absolution must be pronounced in terms absolute and unconditional: and if so, then the said absolution becomes valid and effectual, either by virtue of the state of the person to whom it was pronounced, as being a true penitent, or by virtue of the opus operatum, or bare action itself of the priest absolving him. If it receives its validity from the former; then it is clear, that although it runs in forms absolute, yet it is indeed conditional, as depending upon the qualification of the person to whom it is pronounced; who therefore owes the remission of his sins, not properly to the priest’s absolution, but to his own repentance, which made that absolution effectual, and would undoubtedly have saved him, though the priest had never absolved him.

But if it be asserted, that the very action of the priest absolving him has of itself this virtue; then we must grant also, that it is in the priest’s power to save a man who never repented, nor did one good work in all his life; forasmuch as it is in his power to perform this action upon him in full form, and with full intention to absolve him. But the horrible absurdity, blasphemy, and impiety of this assertion, sufficiently proclaims its falsity without any further confutation.

In a word, if a man be a penitent, his repentance stamps his absolution effectual. If not, let the priest repeat the same absolution to him ten thousand times, yet for all his being absolved in this world, God will condemn him in the other. And consequently, he who places his salvation upon this ground, will find himself like an imprisoned and condemned malefactor, who in the night dreams that he is released, but in the morning finds himself led to the gallows.

4thly and lastly, No advantages from external church-membership, or profession of the true religion, can themselves give a man confidence towards God. And yet perhaps, there is hardly any one thing in the world, which men, in all ages, have generally more cheated themselves with. The Jews were an eminent instance of this: who, because they were the sons of Abraham, as it is readily acknowledged by our Saviour, John viii. 37. and because they were entrusted with the oracles of God, Rom. iii. 2. together with the covenants, and the promises, Rom. ix. 4. that is, in other words, because they were the true church, and professors of the true religion, (while all the world about them lay wallowing in ignorance, heathenism, and idolatry,) they concluded from hence, that God was so fond of them, that, notwithstanding all their villainies and immoralities, they were still the darlings of heaven, and the only heirs apparent of salvation. They thought, it seems, God and themselves linked together in so fast, but withal so strange a covenant, that, although they never performed their part of it, God was yet bound to make good every tittle of his.

And this made John the Baptist set himself with so much acrimony and indignation to baffle this senseless, arrogant conceit of theirs, which made them huff at the doctrine of repentance, as a thing below them, and not at all belonging to them, in Matt. iii. 9. Think not, says he, to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father. This, he knew, lay deep in their hearts, and was still in their mouths, and kept them insolent and impenitent under sins of the highest and most clamorous guilt; though our Saviour himself also, not long after this, assured them, that they were of a very different stock and parentage from that which they boasted of; and that whosoever was their father upon the natural account, the devil was certainly so upon a moral.

In like manner, how vainly do the Romanists pride and value themselves upon the name of Catholics, of the catholic religion, and of the catholic church! though a title no more applicable to the church of Rome, than a man’s finger, when it is swelled and putrefied, can be called his whole body: a church which allows salvation to none without it, nor awards damnation to almost any within it. And therefore, as the former empty plea served the sottish Jews; so, no wonder, if this equally serves these, to put them into a fool’s paradise, by feeding their hopes without changing their lives; and, as an excellent expedient, first to assure them of heaven, and then to bring them easily to it; and so, in a word, to save both their souls and their sins too.

And to shew how the same cheat runs through all professions, though not in the same dress; none are more powerfully and grossly under it than an other sort of men, who, on the contrary, place their whole acceptance with God, and indeed their whole religion, upon a mighty zeal, or rather outcry, against popery and superstition; verbally, indeed, uttered against the church of Rome, but really against the church of England. To which sort of persons I shall say no more but this, and that in the spirit of truth and meekness; namely, that zeal and noise against popery, and real services for it, are no such inconsistent things as some may imagine; indeed no more than invectives against Papists, and solemn addresses of thanks to them, for that very thing, by which they would have brought in popery upon us. And if those of the separation do not yet know so much, thanks to them for it, we of the church of England do; and so may they themselves too, in due time. I speak not this by way of sarcasm, to reproach them, (I leave that to their own consciences, which will do it more effectually,) but by way of charity, to warn them: for let them be assured, that this whole scene and practice of theirs is as really superstition, and as false a bottom to rest their souls upon, as either the Jews alleging Abraham for their father, while the devil claimed them for his children; or the Papists relying upon their indulgences, their saints merits and supererogations, and such other fopperies, as can never settle, nor indeed so much as reach, the conscience; and much less recommend it to that Judge, who is not to be flammed off with words, and phrases, and names, though taken out of the scripture itself.

Nay, and I shall proceed yet further. It is not a man’s being of the church of England itself, (though undoubtedly the purest and best reformed church in the world; indeed so well reformed, that it will be found a much easier work to alter than to better its constitution;) I say, it is not a man’s being even of this excellent church, which can of itself clear accounts between God and his conscience. Since bare communion with a good church can never alone make a good man: for if it could, I am sure we should have no bad ones in ours; and much less such as would betray it.

2dly, Those properties or qualities which peculiarly fit it for the discharge of this high office, in all things relating to the soul.

1. And first, for its office. It is no less than God’s vicegerent or deputy, doing all things by immediate commission from him. It commands and dictates every thing in God’s name, and stamps every word with an almighty authority. So that it is, as it were, a kind of copy or transcript of the divine sentence, and an interpreter of the sense of Heaven. And from hence it is, that sins against conscience (as all sins against light and conviction are, by way of eminence, so called) are of so peculiar and transcendent a guilt. For that every such sin is a daring and direct defiance of the divine authority, as it is signified and reported to a man by his conscience, and thereby ultimately terminates in God himself.

Nay, and this vicegerent of God has one prerogative above all God’s other earthly vicegerents; to wit, that it can never be deposed. Such a strange, sacred, and inviolable majesty has God imprinted upon this faculty; not indeed as upon an absolute, independent sovereign, but yet with so great a communication of something next to sovereignty, that while it keeps within its proper compass, it is controllable by no mortal power upon earth. For not the great est monarch in the world can countermand conscience so far, as to make it condemn where it would otherwise acquit, or acquit where it would otherwise condemn; no, neither sword nor sceptre can come at it; but it is above and beyond the reach of both.

And if it were not for this awful and majestic character which it bears, whence could it be, that the stoutest and bravest hearts droop and sneak when conscience frowns: and the most abject and afflicted wretch feels an unspeakable, and even triumphant joy, when the judge within absolves and applauds him. When a man has done any villainous act, though under countenance of the highest place and power, and under covert of the closest secrecy, his conscience, for all that, strikes him like a clap of thunder, and depresses him to a perpetual trepidation, horror, and poorness of spirit; so that, like Nero, though surrounded with his Roman legions and Pretorian bands, he yet sculks, and hides him self, and is ready to fly to every thing for refuge, though he sees nothing to fly from. And all this, because he has heard a condemning sentence from within, which the secret forebodings of his mind tell him will be ratified by a sad and certain execution from above: on the other side, what makes a man so cheerful, so bright and confident in his comforts, but because he finds himself acquitted by God’s high commissioner and deputy? Which is as much as a pardon under God’s own hand, under the broad seal of Heaven, (as I may so express it.) For a king never condemns any whom his judges have absolved, nor absolves whom his judges have condemned, whatsoever the people and republicans may.

Now from this principle, that the authority of conscience stands founded upon its vicegerency and deputation under God, several very important inferences may, or rather indeed unavoidably must, ensue. Two of which I shall single out and speak of; as,

First, We collect from hence the absurdity and impertinence; and,

Secondly, The impudence and impiety of most of those pretences of conscience, which have borne such a mighty sway all the world over, and in these poor nations especially.

1. And first, for the absurdity and impertinence of them. What a rattle and a noise has this word conscience made! How many battles has it fought! How many churches has it robbed, ruined, and reformed to ashes! How many laws has it trampled upon, dispensed with, and addressed against! And, in a word, how many governments has it over turned! Such is the mischievous force of a plausible word, applied to a detestable thing.

The allegation or plea of conscience ought never to be admitted barely for itself: for when a thing obliges only by a borrowed authority, it is ridiculous to allege it for its own. Take a lieutenant, a commissioner, or ambassador of any prince; and, so far as he represents his prince, all that he does or declares under that capacity has the same force and validity, as if actually done or declared by the prince himself in person. But then how far does this reach? Why, just so far as he keeps close to his instructions: but when he once balks them, though what he does may be indeed a public crime or a national mischief, yet it is but a private act; and the doer of it may chance to pay his head for the presumption. For still, as great as the authority of such kind of persons is, it is not founded upon their own will, nor upon their own judgment, but upon their commission.

In like manner, every dictate of this vicegerent of God, where it has a divine word or precept to back it, carries a divine authority with it. But if no such word can be produced, it may indeed be a strong opinion or persuasion, but it is not conscience: and no one thing in the world has done more mischief, and caused more delusions amongst men, than their not distinguishing between conscience, and mere opinion or persuasion.

Conscience is a Latin word, (though with an English termination,) and, according to the very notation of it, imports a double or joint knowledge; to wit, one of a divine law or rule, and the other of a man’s own action: and so is properly the application of a general law to a particular instance of practice. The law of God, for example, says, Thou shall not steal; and the mind of man tells him, that the taking of such or such a thing from a person lawfully possessed of it is stealing. Whereupon the conscience, joining the knowledge of both these together, pronounces in the name of God, that such a particular action ought not to be done. And this is the true procedure of conscience, always supposing a law from God, before it pretends to lay any obligation upon man: for still I aver, that conscience neither is nor ought to be its own rule.

I question not, I confess, but mere opinion or persuasion may be every whit as strong, and have as forcible an influence upon a man’s actions as conscience itself. But then, we know, strength or force is one thing, and authority quite another. As a rogue upon the highway may have as strong an arm, and take off a man’s head as cleverly as the executioner. But then there is a vast disparity in the two actions, when one of them is murder, and the other justice: nay, and our Saviour himself told his disciples, that men should both kill them, and think that in so doing they did God service. So that here, we see, was a full opinion and persuasion, and a very zealous one too, of the high meritoriousness of what they did; but still there was no law, no word or command of God to ground it upon, and consequently it was not conscience.

Now the notion of conscience thus stated, if firmly kept to, and thoroughly driven home, would effectually baffle and confound all those senseless, though clamorous pretences of the schismatical opposers of the constitutions of our church. In defence of which, I shall not speak so much as one syllable against the indulgence and toleration granted to these men. No, since they have it, let them, in God’s name, enjoy it, and the government make the best of it. But since I cannot find that the law which tolerates them in their way of worship (and it does no more) does at all forbid us to defend ours, it were earnestly to be wished, that all hearty lovers of the church of Eng land would assert its excellent constitution more vigorously now than ever: and especially in such congregations as this; in which there are so many young persons, upon the well or ill principling of whom, next under God, depends the happiness or misery of this church and state. For if such should be generally prevailed upon by hopes or fears, by base examples, by trimming and time-serving (which are but two words for the same thing) to abandon and betray the church of England, by nauseating her pious, prudent, and wholesome orders, (of which I have seen some scurvy instances,) we may rest assured, that this will certainly produce confusion, and that confusion will as certainly end in popery.

And therefore, since the Liturgy, rites, and ceremonies of our church have been, and still are so much cavilled and struck at, and all upon a plea of conscience, it will concern us, as becomes men of sense, seriously to examine the force of this plea, which our adversaries are still setting up against us as the grand pillar and buttress of the good old cause of nonconformity. For come to any dissenting brother, and ask him, Why cannot you communicate with the church of England? “Oh,” says he, “it is against my conscience; my conscience will not suffer me to pray by a set form, to kneel at the sacrament, to hear divine service read by one in a surplice, or to use the cross in baptism,” or the like.

Very well; and is this the case then, that it is all pure conscience that keeps you from complying with the rule and order of the church in these matters? If so, then produce me some word or law of God for bidding these things. For conscience never commands or forbids any thing authentically, but there is some law of God which commands or forbids it first. Conscience (as might be easily shewn) being no distinct power or faculty from the mind of man, but the mind of man itself applying the general rule of God’s law to particular cases and actions. This is truly and properly conscience. And therefore shew me such a law; and that, either as a necessary dictate of right reason, or a positive injunction in God’s revealed word: (for these two are all the ways by which God speaks to men nowadays:) I say, shew me something from hence, which countermands or condemns all or any of the forementioned ceremonies of our church, and then I will yield the cause. But if no such reason, no such scripture can be brought to appear in their behalf against us, but that with screwed face and doleful whine they only ply you with senseless harangues of conscience against carnal ordinances, the dead letter, and human inventions on the one hand, and loud outcries for a further reformation on the other; then rest you assured that they have a design upon your pocket, and that the word conscience is used only as an instrument to pick it; and more particularly as it calls it a further reformation, signifies no more, with reference to the church, than as if one man should come to another and say, “Sir, I have already taken away your cloak, and do fully intend, if I can, to take away your coat also.” This is the true meaning of this word further reformation; and so long as you understand it in this sense, you cannot be imposed upon by it.

Well, but if these mighty men at chapter and verse can produce you no scripture to overthrow our church ceremonies, I will undertake to produce scripture enough to warrant them; even all those places which absolutely enjoin obedience and submission to lawful governors in all not unlawful things: particularly that in 1 Pet. ii. 13. and that in Heb. xiii. 17. (of which two places more again presently,) together with the other in 1 Cor. xiv. last verse, enjoining order and decency in God’s worship, and in all things relating to it. And consequently, till these men can prove the forementioned things, ordered by our church, to be either intrinsically unlawful or undecent, I do here affirm by the authority of the foregoing scriptures, that the use of them, as they stand established amongst us, is necessary; and that all pretences or pleas of conscience to the contrary, are nothing but cant and cheat, flam and delusion. In a word, the ceremonies of the church of England are as necessary as the injunctions of an undoubtedly lawful authority, the practice of the primitive church, and the general rules of decency, determined to particulars of the greatest decency, can make them necessary. And I would not for all the world be arraigned at the last and great day for disturbing the church, and disobeying government, and have no better plea for so doing, than what those of the separation were ever yet able to defend themselves by.

But some will here say perhaps, If this be all that you require of us, we both can and do bring you scripture against your church ceremonies; even that which condemns all will worship, Col. ii. 23. and such other like places. To which I answer, first, that the will worship, forbidden in that scripture, is so termed, not from the circumstance, but from the object of religious worship; and we readily own, that it is by no means in the church’s power to appoint or choose, whom or what it will worship. But that does not infer, that it is not therefore in the church’s power to appoint how and in what manner it will worship the true object of religious worship; provided that in so doing it observes such rules of decency as are proper and conducing to that purpose. So that this scripture is wholly irrelative to the case before us; and as impertinently applied to it, as any poor text in the Revelation was ever applied to the grave and profound whimsies of some modern interpreters. But secondly, to this objection about will worship, I answer yet further; that the forementioned ceremonies of the church of England are no worship, nor part of God’s worship at all, nor were ever pretended so to be; and, if they are not so much as worship, I am sure they cannot be will worship. But we own them only for circumstances, modes, and solemn usages, by which God’s worship is orderly and decently performed: I say, we pretend them not to be parts of divine worship; but, for all that, to be such things as the divine worship, in some instance or other, cannot be without: for that which neither does nor can give vital heat, may yet be necessary to preserve it: and he who should strip himself of all that is no part of himself, would quickly find, or rather feel the inconvenience of such a practice; and have cause to wish for a body as void of sense as such an argument.

Now the consequence in both these cases is perfectly parallel: and if so, you may rest satisfied, that what is nonsense upon a principle of reason, will never be sense upon a principle of religion. But as touching the necessity of the aforesaid usages in the church of England, I shall lay down these four propositions.

1. That circumstantials in the worship of God (as well as in all other human actions) are so necessary to it, that it cannot possibly be performed with out them.

2. That decency in the circumstantials of God’s worship is absolutely necessary.

3. That the general rule and precept of decency is not capable of being reduced to practice, but as it is exemplified in, and determined to, particular instances. And,

4thly and lastly, That there is more of the general nature of decency in those particular usages and ceremonies which the church of England has pitched upon, than is or can be shewn in any other whatsoever.

These things I affirm; and when you have put them all together, let any one give me a solid and sufficient reason for the giving up those few ceremonies of our church, if he can. All the reason that I could ever yet hear alleged by the chief factors for a general intromission of all sorts, sects, and persuasions into our communion is, that those who separate from us are stiff and obstinate, and will not submit to the rules and orders of our church, and that therefore they ought to be taken away. Which is a goodly reason indeed, and every way worthy of the wisdom and integrity of those who allege it. And to shew that it is so, let it be but transferred from the ecclesiastical to the civil government, from church to state; and let all laws be abrogated, which any great or sturdy multitude of men have no mind to submit to. That is, in other words, let laws be made to obey, and not to be obeyed; and, upon these terms, I doubt not but you will find that kingdom (or rather that common wealth) finely governed in a short time.

And thus I have shewn the absurdity, folly, and impertinence of alleging the obligation of conscience, where there is no law or command of God mediate or immediate to found that obligation upon. And yet, as bad as this is, it were well if the bare absurdity of these pretences were the worst thing which we had to charge them with. But it is not so. For our second and next inference from the foregoing principle of the vicegerency of conscience under God, will shew us also the daring impudence and downright impiety of many of those fulsome pleas of conscience, which the world has been too often and too scandalously abused by. For a man to sin against his conscience, is doubtless a great wickedness. But to make God himself a party in the sin, is a much greater. For this is to plead God’s authority against God’s very law; which doubles the sin, and adds blasphemy to rebellion. And yet such things we have seen done amongst us. An horrid, unnatural, civil war raised and carried on; the purest and most primitively reformed church in the world laid in the dust; and one of the best and most innocent princes that ever sat upon a throne, by a barbarous unheard of violence, hurried to his grave in a bloody sheet, and not so much as suffered to rest there to this day; and all this by men acting under the most solemn pretences of conscience, that hypocrisy perhaps ever yet presumed to outface the world with.

And are not the principles of those wretches still owned, and their persons sainted by a race of men of the same stamp, risen up in their stead, the sworn mortal enemies of our church? And yet, for whose sake some projectors amongst us have been turning every stone to transform, mangle, and degrade its noble constitution to the homely, mechanic model of those republican, imperfect churches abroad; which, instead of being any rule or pattern to us, ought in all reason to receive one from us. Nay, and so short sighted are some in their politics, as not to discern all this while, that it is not the service but the revenue of our church which is struck at; and not any passages of our Liturgy, but the property of our lands which these reformers would have altered.

For I am sure no other alteration will satisfy dissenting consciences; no, nor this neither very long, without an utter abolition of all that looks like order or government in the church. And this we may be sure of, if we do but consider both the inveterate malice of the Romish party, which sets these silly, unthinking tools a-work, and withal that monstrous principle or maxim, which those who divide from us (at least most of them) roundly profess, avow, and govern their consciences by; namely, That in all matters that concern religion or the church, though a thing or action be never so indifferent or lawful in itself; yet if it be commanded or enjoined by the government, either civil or ecclesiastical, it becomes ipso facto, by being so commanded, utterly unlawful, and such as they can, by no means, with good conscience comply with.

Which one detestable tenet or proposition, carrying in it the very quintessence and vital spirit of all nonconformity, absolutely cashiers and cuts off all church government at one stroke; and is withal such an insolent, audacious defiance of Almighty God, under the mask of conscience, as perhaps none in former ages, who so much as wore the name of Christians, ever arrived to or made profession of.

For to resume the scriptures afore quoted by us; and particularly that in 1 Pet. ii. 13. Submit your selves to every ordinance of man, says the Spirit of God, speaking by that apostle. But say these men, If the ordinance of man enjoins you the practice of any thing with reference to religion or the church, though never so lawful in itself, you cannot with a good conscience submit to the ordinance of man in that case: that is, in other words, God says, they must submit; and they say, they must not.

Again, in the forementioned Heb. xiii. 17. The apostle bids them (and in them all Christians what soever) to obey those who have the rule over them; speaking there of church rulers; for he tells them, that they were such as watched for their souls. But, says the Separatist, If those who have the rule over you, should command you any thing about church affairs, you cannot, you ought not in conscience to obey them; forasmuch as, according to that grand principle of theirs, newly specified by us, every such command makes obedience to a thing otherwise lawful, to become unlawful; and consequently, upon the same principle, rulers must not, cannot be obeyed: unless we could imagine, that there may be such a thing as obedience on the one side, when there must be no such thing as a command on the other; which would make pleasant sense of it indeed, and fit for none but a dissenting reason, as well as conscience, to assert. For though these men have given the world too many terrible proofs of their own example, that there may be commands, and no obedience; yet, I believe, it will put their little logic hard to it, to prove, that there can be any obedience where there is no command. And therefore it unanswerably follows, that the abetters of the forementioned principles plead conscience in a direct and barefaced contradiction to God’s express command.

And now, I beseech you, consider with yourselves; (for it is no slight matter that I am treating of;) I say, consider what you ought to judge of those insolent, unaccountable boasts of conscience, which, like so many fireballs or mouth-granadoes, as I may so term them, are every day thrown at our church. The apostle bids us prove all things. And will you then take conscience at every turn, upon its own word? upon the forlorn credit of every bold imposter who pleads it? Will you sell your reason, your church, and your religion, and both of them the best in the world, for a name? and that a wrested, abused, misapplied name? Knaves, when they design some more than ordinary villainy, never fail to make use of this plea; and it is because they always find fools ready to believe it.

But you will say then, What course must be taken to fence against this imposture? Why truly, the best that I know of, I have told you before; namely, that whensoever you hear any of these sly, sanctified sycophants, with turned up eye and shrug of shoulder, pleading conscience for or against any thing or practice, you would forthwith ask them, what word of God they have to bottom that judgment of their conscience upon? Forasmuch as conscience, being God’s vicegerent, was never commissioned by him to govern us in its own name; but must still have some divine word or law to support and warrant it. And therefore call for such a word; and that, either from scripture or from manifest universal reason, and insist upon it, so as not to be put off without it. And if they can produce you no such thing from either of them, (as they never can,) then rest assured that they are errant cheats and hypocrites; and that, for all their big words, the conscience of such men is so far from being able to give them any true confidence towards God, that it cannot so much as give them confidence towards a wise and good man, no, nor yet towards themselves, who are far from being either.

And thus I have shewn you the first ground upon which the testimony of conscience (concerning a man’s spiritual estate) comes to be so authentic, and so much to be relied upon; to wit, the high office which it holds, as the vicegerent of God himself in the soul of man: together with the two grand inferences drawn from thence. The first of them shewing the absurdity, folly, and impertinence of pretending conscience against any thing, when there is no law of God mediate or immediate against it: and the other, setting forth the intolerable blasphemy and impiety of pretending conscience for any thing, which the known law of God is directly against, and stands in open defiance of.

Proceed we now to the second ground, from which conscience derives the credit of its testimony in judging of our spiritual estate; and that consists in those properties and qualities which so peculiarly fit it for the discharge of its forementioned office, in all things relating to the soul. And these are three.

First, The quickness of its sight.

Secondly, The tenderness of its sense; and,

Thirdly and lastly, Its rigorous and impartial way of giving sentence.

Of each of which in their order. And first for the extraordinary quickness and sagacity of its sight, in spying out every thing which can any way concern the estate of the soul. As the voice of it, I shew, was as loud as thunder; so the sight of it is as piercing and quick as lightning. It presently sees the guilt, and looks through all the flaws and blemishes of a sinful action; and on the other side, observes the candidness of a man’s very principles, the sincerity of his intentions, and the whole carriage of every circumstance in a virtuous performance. So strict and accurate is this spiritual inquisition.

Upon which account it is, that there is no such thing as perfect secrecy, to encourage a rational mind to the perpetration of any base action. For a man must first extinguish and put out the great light within him, his conscience, he must get away from himself, and shake off the thousand witnesses, which he always carries about him, before he can be alone. And where there is no solitude, I am sure there can be no secrecy.

It is confessed indeed, that a long and a bold course of sinning may (as we have shewn elsewhere) very much dim and darken the discerning faculty of conscience. For so the apostle assures us it did with those in Rom. i. 21. and the same, no doubt, it does every day; but still so, as to leave such persons, both then and now, many notable lucid intervals; sufficient to convince them of their deviations from reason and natural religion; and thereby to render them inexcusable; and so, in a word, to stop their mouths, though not save their souls. In short, their conscience was not stark dead, but under a kind of spiritual apoplexy or deliquium. The operation was hindered, but the faculty not destroyed. And now, if conscience be naturally thus apprehensive and sagacious; certainly this ought to be another great ground, over and above its bare authority, why we should trust and rely upon the reports of it. For knowledge is still the ground and reason of trust; and so much as any one has of discernment, so far he is secured from error and deception, and for that cause fit to be confided in. No witness so much to be credited as an eyewitness. And conscience is like the great eye of the world, the sun, always open, always making discoveries. Justly therefore may we by the light of it take a view of our condition.

The truth of which will appear from these two considerations.

First, That it is natural for them to place too high a value both upon themselves and their own performances. And that this is so, is evident from that universal experience, which proves it no less natural to them to bear a more than ordinary love to themselves; and all love, we know, is founded in, and results from, a proportionable esteem of the object loved: so that, look in what degree any man loves himself, in the same degree it will follow, that he must esteem himself too. Upon which account it is, that every man will be sure to set his own price upon what he is, and what he does, whether the world will come up to it or no; as it seldom does.

That speech of St. Peter to our Saviour is very remarkable, in Matt. xix. 27. Master, says he, we have forsook all, and followed thee; what shall we have therefore? In which words he seems to be upon equal terms with his Lord, and to expect no more of him, as he thought, but what he strictly had deserved from him; and all this from a conceit that he had done an act so exceedingly meritorious, that it must even nonplus his Master’s bounty to quit scores with him by a just requital. Nay, so far had the same proud ferment got into the minds of all the disciples, that neither could their own low condition, nor the constant sermons of that great example of self-denial and humility, whom they daily conversed with, nor, lastly, the correctives of a peculiar grace, totally clear and cure them of it. And therefore no wonder if a principle so deeply rooted in nature works with the whole power of nature; and, considering also the corruption of nature, as little wonder is it, if it runs out with an extravagance equal to its power, making the minds of men even drunk with a false intoxicating conceit of their own worth and abilities. From whence it is, that as man is, of all creatures in the world, both the most desirous and the most unable to advance himself; so, through pride and indigence, (qualities which usually concur in beggars,) none is so unwilling to own the benefactions he lives by, and has no claim to, as this weak and worthless self-admirer, who has nothing to be admired in him, but that he can, upon such terms, admire himself. For, Naked came I into the world, and naked shall I go out again, ought to be the motto of every man when born, the history of his life, and his epitaph when dead: his emptiness and self-consciousness together, cannot but make him feel in himself (which is the surest way of knowing) that he has indeed nothing, and yet he bears himself as if he could command all things; at the same time low in condition, and yet lofty in opinion; boasting and yet depending; nay, boasting against Him, whom he depends upon. Which certainly is the foulest solecism in behaviour, and two of the worst qualities that can be in conjunction. But,

Secondly, A second consideration, from whence we infer this proneness in men to think themselves able to merit of God, or to be profitable to him, is their natural aptness to form and measure their apprehensions of the supreme Lord of all things, by what they apprehend and observe of the princes and potentates of this world, with reference to such as are under their dominion. And this is certainly a very prevailing fallacy, and steals too easily upon men’s minds, as being founded in the unhappy predominance of sense over reason; which, in the present condition of man’s nature, does but too frequently and fatally take place. For men naturally have but faint notions of things spiritual, and such as incur not into their senses; but their eyes, their ears, and their hands are too often made by them the rule of their faith, but almost always the reason of their practice. And therefore no marvel, if they blunder in their notions about God; a being so vastly above the apprehensions of sense; while they conceive no otherwise of him at best, but as some great king or prince, ruling with a worldly majesty and grandeur over such puny mortals as themselves: whereupon, as they frame to themselves no other idea of him, but such as they borrow from the royal estate of an earthly sovereign, so they conceive also of their own relation to him, and dependance upon him, just as they do of that which passes between such a sovereign and his subjects; and consequently, since they find that there is no prince upon earth so absolute, but that he stands in as much need of his subjects for many things, as they do or can stand in need of him for his government and protection; (by reason whereof there must needs follow a reciprocal exchange of offices, and a mutual supply of wants between them, rendering both parties equally necessary to one another:) I say, from these misapplied premises, the low, gross, undistinguishing reason of the generality of mankind presently infers, that the creature also may, on some accounts, be as beneficial to his Creator, as such a subject is to his prince; and that there may be the like circulation of good turns between them; they being, as they think, within their compass, as really useful to God, as God for his part is beneficial to them; which is the true notion of merit, or of being profitable to God. A conceit that sticks so close to human nature, that neither philosophy nor religion can wholly remove it: and yet if we consider the limited right which the greatest prince upon earth has over his meanest slave, and that absolute, boundless, paramount right, which God has over the very same things and persons, which such princes avow a claim to, and by virtue of which transcendent right something is God’s which can never be theirs; and even what is theirs is still by a much higher title his: I say, if we consider this, the absurdity and inconsequence of all such discourses about the relation between God and man, as are taken from what we see and observe between man and man, as governing and governed, is hereby more than sufficiently proved; and yet as absurd, as fallacious, and inconsequent as this way of discoursing is, it is one of the chief foundations of the doctrine of merit, and consequently of the religion of too great a part of the world: a religion tending only to defraud men of their true Saviour, by persuading them that they may be their own. And thus much for the first particular, the thing supposed in the words, to wit, That men are naturally very prone to persuade themselves, that they are able to merit of God, or be profitable to him.

I proceed now to the

Second particular, in which we have something expressed, namely, That such a persuasion is utterly false and absurd, and that it is impossible for men to merit of God, or be profitable to him. And this I shall evince by shewing the several ingredients of merit, and the conditions necessary to render an action meritorious. Such as are these four that follow; as,

First, That an action be not due; that is to say, it must not be such as a man stands obliged to the doing of, but such as he is free either to do, or not to do, without being chargeable with the guilt of any sinful omission in case he does it not. It being no ill account given of merit by Spanhemius,

Dub. Evang. parte iii. pag. 782.

Besides, that in all the benefactions passing from Almighty God upon such as serve him the best they can, there could be no such thing as liberality; which can never take place but where something is given, which the receiver cannot challenge: nay, very hardly could there be any such thing as gift. For if there be first a claim, then, in strictness of speech, it is not so properly gift as payment. Yea, so vast would be the comprehension of justice, that it would scarce leave any object for favour. But God’s grace and bounty being so prevented by merit, would be spectators rather than actors in the whole work of man’s salvation. Nor would our obedience to God’s positive precepts only, but also to his negative, sometimes strike in for their share of merit and claim to a reward. And any one who could plead such a negative righteousness, might come and demand a recompence of God for not drinking or whoring, swearing or blaspheming; just as the Pharisee did, for not being as the very dregs of sinners; and so vouch himself meritorious, forsooth, for being a degree or two short of scandalous. Moreover, amongst men, it would pass for an obligation between neighbours, that one of them did not rob or murder the other; and a sufficient plea for preferment before kings and governors, not to have deserved the gibbet and the halter; which is a poor plea indeed, when to have deserved them proves oftentimes a better. In short, upon these terms, he, who is not the very worst of villains, must commence presently a person of a peculiar worth; and bare indemnity will be too low a privilege for the merit of not being a clamorous, overgrown malefactor.

But now, that all that any man alive is capable of doing, is but an indispensable homage to God, and not a free oblation; and that also such an homage, as makes his obligation to what he does much earlier than his doing of it, will appear both from the law of nature, and that of God’s positive command: of each of which a word or two, and

First, for the law of nature. There is nothing that nature proclaims with a louder and more intelligible voice, than that he who gives a being, and afterwards preserves and supports it, has an indefeasible claim to whatsoever the said being, so given and supported by him, either is, or has, or can possibly do. But this is a point which I must be more particular upon, and thereby lay a foundation for what I shall argue, a fortiori, concerning God him self, from what is to be observed amongst men. Now the right which one man has to the actions of another, is generally derived from one or both of these two great originals, production or possession. The first of which gives a parent right over the actions of his child; and the other gives a master a title to whatsoever can be done by his servant: which two are certainly the principal and most undoubted rights that take place in the world. And both of them are eminently and transcendently in God, as he stands related to men: and,

First, for production. By the purest and most en tire communication of being, God did not only produce, but create man. He gave him an existence out of nothing, and while he was yet but a mere idea or possibility in the mind of his eternal Maker. That one expression of the Psalmist, It is he who hath made us, and not we ourselves, being both a full account, and an irrefragable demonstration of his absolute sovereignty over our persons, and in contestable claim to all our services: nor is this the utmost measure of our obligation to him, but as he first drew us out of nothing and non-existence, so he ever since keeps us from relapsing into it; his power brought us forth, and his providence maintains us. And thus has this poor impotent creature been perpetually hanging upon the bounty of his great Creator, and by a daily preservation of his precarious being, stands obliged to him under the growing renewed title of a continual creation. But this is not all. There is yet,

Secondly, another title; whereby one person obtains a right to all that another can do; and that is possession. A title, every whit as transcendently in God as the former; as being founded in, and resulting from, his forementioned prerogative of a Creator. Nothing being more unquestionable, than that the earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; as the Psalmist declares, Psalm xxiv. 1. He is the sole proprietor and grand landlord of the universe. And moreover, as all things were made by him, so they were made for him also; He made all things for himself, says the wisest of men, Prov. xvi. 4. He is the original efficient by which, and the great and last end for which, they are; for by him they begun, and in him they terminate: after which two essential relations borne by God to man on the one side, and obliging man to God on the other, can there be any thing that is good, either in the being or actions of the latter, which can be called perfectly his own? any thing which is not entirely due to God, and that by a complication of the most binding and indispensable titles? And if so, how and where can there be any room for such a thing as merit?

The civil law tells us, that servants have not properly a jus, a right or title, to any thing, by virtue whereof they can implead or bring an action against their lord, upon any account whatsoever; every such servant, as the law here speaks of, being not only his master’s vassal, but also part of his possessions. And this right our Saviour himself owns, and sets forth to us by an elegant parable, couching under it as strong an argument, Luke xvii. 7, 8, 9. Which of you, saith he, having a servant plowing or feeding cattle, will say unto him by and by, when he is come from the field, Go and sit down to meat? And will not rather say unto him, Make ready wherewith I may sup, and gird thyself, and serve me, till I have eaten and drunken; and afterward thou shalt eat and drink? Doth he thank that servant because he did the things that were commanded him? I trow not. Where we see upon what terms of right even the most diligent and faithful servant stands with his master; who, after he had been toiling all day in his master’s business, dressing and manuring his grounds, and watering them with the drops of his brow, comes home at length hungry and tired, (where, if he could find no reward for his hard service, yet one would think, that he might at least expect a discharge from any further work, and receive the present refreshments of his natural food,) yet even then his master renews his employment, delays his repast, and commands him to serve and attend him at his table, and with weary limbs and an empty stomach to expect a dismission at his pleasure; and all this, without so much as any thanks for his pains. In which neither is the master unjust, nor the servant injured: for he did no more than what his condition obliged him to; he did but his duty; and duty certainly neither is nor can be meritorious. Thus, I say, stands the case amongst men according to the difference of their respective conditions in this world. And if so, must not the same obligation, as it passes between God and man, rise as much higher, as the condition of a creature founds an obligation incomparably greater than that of a bare servant possibly can? And therefore, since man stands bound to God under both these titles, to wit, of production and possession, how can there be a greater paradox, than for such a contemptible, forlorn piece of living dirt to claim any thing upon the stock of merit from him, who is both his master and his maker too? No, the very best of men, upon the very best of their services, have no other plea before God but prayer; they may indeed beg an alms, but must not think to stand upon their terms. But,

For the better explication of which, I must, according to a common but necessary distinction, (and elsewhere made use of by me,) observe, that this recta ratio may be taken in a double sense.

First, For those maxims or general truths, which, being collected by the observations of reason, and formed thereby into certain propositions, are the grounds and principles by which men govern both their discourse and practice, according to the nature of the objects that come before them: or,

Secondly, It may be taken for that faculty or power of the soul, by which it forms these maxims or propositions, and afterwards discourses upon them. And so no doubt it is to be taken here.

For propositions themselves, as to the truth of them, are neither capable of increase or decrease, improvement or diminution; but the powers and faculties of the soul are capable of both; that is, of becoming stronger or weaker, according as men shall use or abuse, cultivate or neglect them. Upon which account this recta ratio can be nothing else but that intellectual power or faculty of the soul which every one is naturally endowed with.

To which faculty, as there belong two grand and principal offices; to wit, one to inform or direct, and the other to command or oblige; so the said faculty sustains a different σχέσις or denomination, according to each of them. For as it serves to inform the soul, by discovering things to it, so it is called the light of nature; but as it obliges the soul to do this, or forbear that, (which it does, as it is actuated or in formed with those forementioned general truths or maxims,) so it is called the law of nature: which two offices, though belonging to one and the same faculty, are very different. For the former of them, to wit, its enlightening or informing quality, extends much further than its obliging virtue does; even to all things knowable in the mind of man; but the latter only to such things as are matter of practice, and so fall under a moral consideration. Besides, that this obliging quality must needs also presuppose the enlightening quality as essentially going before it. For as no law can bind till it be notified or promulged, so neither can this faculty of the soul oblige a man till it has first informed him. By which we see, that the light of nature, according to the essential order of things, precedes the law of nature, and consequently, in strictness of speech, ought to be distinguished from it, how much soever some have thought fit to confound them. And I doubt not but it is this which the text here principally intends by the light within us.

Nevertheless, since the word conscience takes in both, and signifies as well a light to inform, as it imports and carries with it also a law to oblige us, I shall indifferently express this light by the name of conscience (as a term equivalent to it) in all the following particulars; but still this shall be with respect to its informing, rather than to its obliging office. Forasmuch as it is the former of these only which is the proper effect of light, and not the latter. For though conscience be both a light and (as it commands under God) a law too; yet as it is a light, it is not formally a law. For if it were, then whatsoever it discovered to us, it would also oblige us to. But this is not so; since it both may and does discover to us the indifferent nature of many things and actions without obliging us either to the practice or forbearance of them; which one consideration alone is sufficient to set the difference between the enlightening and the obliging office of conscience clear beyond all objection.

And thus much I thought fit to premise concerning the nature of the light here spoken of by our Saviour, and intended for the subject of the present discourse. Which light, as it is certainly the great and sovereign gift of God to mankind, for the guidance and government of their actions, in all that concerns them with reference to this life or a bet ter; so it is also as certain, that it is capable of being turned into darkness, and thereby made wholly useless for so noble a purpose.

For so much the words of the text import; nor do they import only a bare possibility that it may be so, but also a very high probability that, without an extraordinary prevention, it will be so. Forasmuch as all warning, in the very reason of the thing, and according to the natural force of such expressions, implies in it these two things. First, some very considerable evil or mischief warned against; and secondly, an equal danger of falling into it: without which all warning would be not only superfluous, but ridiculous.

Now both these, in the present case, are very great; as will appear by a distinct consideration of each of them. And

First, For the evil which we are warned or cautioned against; to wit, the turning of this light within us into darkness. An evil so unconceivably great and comprehensive, that to give an account of the utmost extent of it, would pose our thoughts, as well as nonplus our expressions. But yet to help our apprehensions of it the best we can, let us but consider with ourselves those intolerable evils which bodily blindness, deafness, stupefaction, and an utter deprivation of all sense must unavoidably subject the outward man to. For what is one in such a condition able to do? And what is he not liable to suffer? And yet doing and suffering, upon the mat ter, comprehend all that concerns a man in this world. If such an one’s enemy seeks his life (as he may be sure that some or other will, and possibly such an one as he takes for his truest friend) in this forlorn case, he can neither see nor hear, nor perceive his approach, till he finds himself actually in his murdering hands. He can neither encounter nor escape him, neither in his own defence give nor ward off a blow: for whatsoever blinds a man, ipso facto disarms him; so that being thus bereft, both of his sight and of all his senses besides, what such an one can be fit for, unless it be to set up for prophecy, or believe transubstantiation, I cannot imagine.

These, I say, are some of those fatal mischiefs, which corporal blindness and insensibility expose the body to: and are not those of a spiritual blindness unexpressibly greater? For must not a man labouring under this be utterly at a loss, how to distinguish between the two grand governing concerns of life, good and evil? And may not the ignorance of these cost us as dear as the knowledge of them did our first parents? Life and death, vice and virtue, come alike to such an one; as all things are of the same colour to him who cannot see. His whole soul is nothing but night and confusion, darkness and indistinction. He can neither see the way to happiness; and how then should he choose it? nor yet to destruction, and how then should he avoid it? For where there is no sense of things, there can be no distinction; and where there is no distinction, there can be no choice.

A man destitute of this directing and distinguishing light within him, is and must be at the mercy of every thing in nature, that would impose or serve a turn upon him. So that whatsoever the devil will have him do, that he must do. Whithersoever any exorbitant desire or design hurries him, thither he must go. Whatsoever any base interest shall prescribe, that he must set his hand to, whether his heart goes along with it, or no. If he be a states man, he must be as willing to sell, as the enemy of his country can be to buy. If a churchman, he must be ready to surrender and give up the church, and make a sacrifice of the altar itself, though he lives by it; and, in a word, take that for a full discharge from all his subscriptions and obligations to it, to do as he is bid. Which being the case of such as steer by a false light, certainly no slave in the galleys is or can be in such a wretched condition of slavery, as a man thus abandoned by conscience, and bereft of all inward principles that should either guide or control him in the course of his conversation. So that we see here the transcendent greatness of the evil which we stand cautioned against. But then,

Secondly, If it were an evil that seldom happened, that very hardly and rarely befell a man, this might in a great measure supersede the strictness of the caution; but, on the contrary, we shall find, that as great as the evil is which we are to fence against, (and that is as great as the capacities of an immortal soul,) the greatness of the danger is still commensurate: for it is a case that usually happens; it is a mischief as frequent in the event, as it is or can be fatal in the effect. It is as in a common plague, in which the infection is as hard to be escaped, as the distemper to be cured: for that which brings this darkness upon the soul is sin. And as the state of nature now is, the soul is not so close united to the body, as sin is to the soul; indeed so close is the union between them, that one would even think the soul itself (as much a spirit as it is) were the matter, and sin the form, in our present constitution. In a word, there is a set combination of all without a man and all within him, of all above ground and all under it, (if hell be so,) first to put out his eyes, and then to draw or drive him headlong into perdition. From all which, I suppose, we must needs see reason more than sufficient for this admonition of our Saviour, Take heed that the light which is in thee be not darkness. An admonition founded upon no less a concern, than all that a man can save, and all that he can lose to eternity. And thus having shewn both the vastness of the evil itself, and the extreme danger we are in of it; since no man can be at all the wiser or the safer barely for knowing his danger, without a vigorous application to prevent it; and since the surest and most rational preventive of it is to know by what arts and methods our enemy will encounter us, and by which he is most likely to prevail over us, we will inquire into and consider those ways and means by which he commonly attempts, and too frequently effects this so dismal a change upon us, as to strip us even of the poor remains of our fallen nature, by turning the last surviving spark of it, this light within us, into darkness.

For this must be acknowledged, that no man living, in respect of conscience, is born blind, but makes himself so. None can strike out the eye of his conscience but himself: for nothing can put it out, but that which sins it out. And upon this account it must be confessed, that a man may love his sin so enormously much, as, by a very ill application of the apostle’s expression, even to pluck out his own eyes, and give them to it; as indeed every obstinate sinner in the world does.

Our present business therefore shall be (and that as a completion of what I discoursed formerly upon conscience in this place) to shew how and by what courses this divine light, this candle of the Lord, comes first to burn faint and dim, and so by a gradual decay fainter and fainter, till at length by a total extinction it quite sinks to nothing, and so dies away. And this I shall do, first, in general, and secondly, in particular.

And first in general, I shall lay down these two observations.

First, that whatsoever defiles the conscience, in the same degree also darkens it.

As to the philosophy of which, how and by what way this is done, it is hard to conceive, and much harder to explain. Our great unacquaintance with the nature of spiritual, immaterial beings leaving us wholly in the dark as to any explicit knowledge, cither how they work, or how they are worked upon. So that in discoursing of these things we are forced to take up with analogy and allusion, instead of evidence and demonstration. Nevertheless, the thing itself is certain, be the manner of effecting it never so unaccountable.

Yet thus much we find, that there is something in sin analogous to blackness, as innocence is frequently in scripture expressed and set forth to us by whiteness. All guilt blackens (or does something equivalent to the blackening of) the soul; as where pitch cleaves to any thing, it is sure to leave upon it both its foulness and its blackness together: and then we know, that blackness and darkness are inseparable.

Some of the ablest of the Peripatetic school (not without countenance from Aristotle himself, in the fifth chapter of his third book, περὶ ψυχῆς) hold, that besides the native, inherent light of the intellect, (which is essential to it, as it is a faculty made to apprehend, and take in its object after a spiritual way,) there is also another light, in the nature of a medium, beaming in upon it by a continual efflux and emanation from the great fountain of light, and irradiating this intellectual faculty, together with the species or representations of things imprinted thereupon. According to which doctrine it seems with great reason to follow, that whatsoever interposes between the mind and those irradiations from God, (as all sin more or less certainly does,) must needs hinder the entrance and admission of them into the mind; and then darkness must by necessary consequence ensue, as being nothing else but the absence or privation of light.

For the further illustration of which notion, we may observe, that the understanding, the mind, or conscience of man, (which we shall here take for the same thing,) seem to bear much the same respect to God, which glass or crystal does to the light or sun: which appears indeed to the eye a bright and a shining thing; nevertheless this shining is not so much from any essential light or brightness existing in the glass itself, (supposing that there be any such in it,) as it is from the porousness of its body, rendering it diaphanous, and thereby fit to receive and transmit those rays of light, which, falling upon it, and passing through it, represent it to common view as a luminous body. But now let any thing of dirt or foulness sully this glass, and so much of the shine or brightness of it is presently gone, because so much of the light is thereby hindered from entering into it, and making its way through it. But if, besides all this, you should also draw some black colour or deep die upon it, either by paint, or otherwise; why then no brightness could be seen in it at all, but the light being hereby utterly shut out, the glass or crystal would shine or glister no more than a piece of wood or a clod of earth.

In like manner every act of sin, every degree of guilt, does in its proportion cast a kind of soil or foulness upon the intellectual part of the soul, and thereby intercepts those blessed irradiations which the divine nature is continually darting in upon it. Nor is this all, but there are also some certain sorts and degrees of guilt, so very black and foul, that they fall like an huge thick blot upon this faculty; and so sinking into it, and settling within it, utterly exclude all those illuminations which would otherwise flow into it, and rest upon it from the great Father of lights; and this not from any failure or defect in the illumination itself, but from the indisposition of the object, which, being thus blackened, can neither let in nor transmit the beams that are cast upon it.

I will not affirm this to be a perfect exemplification of the case before us, but I am sure it is a lively illustration of it, and may be of no small use to such as shall throughly consider it. But however (as I shewed before) the thing itself is certain and unquestionable, guilt and darkness being always so united, that you shall never find darkness mentioned in scripture in a moral sense, but you shall also find it derived from sin, as its direct cause, and joined with it as its constant companion: for, by a mutual production, sin both causes darkness, and is caused by it. Let this therefore be our first general observation; That whatsoever pollutes or fouls the conscience, in the same degree also darkens it.

Secondly, Our other general observation shall be this; That whatsoever puts a bias upon the judging faculty of conscience, weakens, and, by consequence, darkens the light of it. A clear and a right judging conscience must be always impartial; and that it may be so, it must be perfectly indifferent: that is to say, it must be free and disencumbered from every thing which may in the least sway or incline it one way rather than another, beyond what the sole and mere evidence of things would naturally lead it to. In a word, it must judge all by evidence, and nothing by inclination.

And this our blessed Saviour, with admirable emphasis and significance of expression, calls the singleness of the eye, in the verse immediately before the text. If thine eye, says he, be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. That is, nothing extraneous must cleave to or join with the eye in the act of seeing, but it must be left solely and entirely to itself, and its bare object; as naked as truth, as pure, simple, and unmixed as sincerity. Otherwise the whole operation of it unavoidably passes into cheat, fallacy, and delusion. As, to make the case yet more particular, if you put a muffler before the eye, it cannot see; if any mote or dust falls into it, it can hardly see; and if there be any soreness or pain in it, it shuns the light, and will not see. And all this by a very easy, but yet certain and true analogy, is applicable to the eye of the soul, the conscience; and the instance is verifiable upon it, in every one of the alleged particulars.

In short, whatsoever bends or puts a bias upon the judging faculty of conscience, represents things to it by a false light; and whatsoever does so, causes in it a false and erroneous judgment of things. And all error or falsehood is, in the very nature of it, a real, intellectual darkness; and consequently must diffuse a darkness upon the mind, so far as it is affected and possessed with it. And thus much for our second general observation.

From whence we shall now pass to particulars. In the assigning and stating of which, as I shewed before, that sin in general was the general cause of this darkness, so the particular causes of it must be fetched from the particular kinds and degrees of sin.

Now sin may be considered three ways.

First, In the act.

Secondly, In the habit or custom.

Thirdly, In the affection, or productive principle of it.

Secondly, That expression, That it was said by those

Some render it [to those.]

Thirdly, That passage in the 43d verse of the same, Ye have heard that it hath been said, Ye shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy, is so far from being the words of the Mosaic law, that Moses commands the clean contrary to the latter clause, Exod. xxiii. 4, 5. If thou seest thine enemy’s ox going astray, thou shalt surely bring it back to him again; and if thou seest the ass of him who hateth thee lying under his burden, thou shalt surely help him. And if this was the voice of the law then, can we imagine that it would make it a man’s duty to relieve his enemy’s ox, or his ass, and at the same time allow him to hate or malign his person? This certainly is unaccountable and incredible.

Fourthly, If Christ opposed his precepts to those of the Mosaic law, then God speaking by Christ must contradict himself as speaking by Moses. For whatsoever Moses spoke, he spoke as the immediate dictates of God, from whom he received the law. But this is absurd, and by no means consistent with the divine holiness and veracity.

Fifthly and lastly, Christ in all this discourse never calls any one of the doctrines opposed by him the words of Moses, or of the law, but only the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, which shews that they, and they only, were the persons with whom he managed this whole contest.

Let this therefore rest with us as a firm conclusion; that Moses and Christ were at perfect agreement, whatever the controversy was between him and the Pharisees. And so from the scheme and context of the words, I pass to the duty enjoined in them, which is to love our enemies; the discussion of which I shall cast under these three general heads:

First, I shall shew negatively what is not that love, which we are here commanded to shew our enemies.

Secondly, I shall shew positively wherein it does consist.

Thirdly, I shall produce arguments to enforce it.

And first, for the first of these; what is not that love, which we must shew our enemies: this we shall find to exclude several things which would fain wear this name.

1. As, first, to treat an enemy with a fair deportment and amicable language, is not the love here enjoined by Christ. Love is a thing that scorns to dwell any where but in the heart. The tongue is a thing made for words; but what reality is there in a voice, what substance in a sound? and words are no more. The kindness of the heart never kills, but that of the tongue often does. And in an ill sense a soft answer may sometimes break the bones. He who speaks me well, proves himself a rhetorician or a courtier; but that is not to be a friend.

Was ever the hungry fed or the naked clothed with good looks or fair speeches? These are but thin garments to keep out the cold, and but a slender repast to conjure down the rage of a craving appetite. My enemy perhaps is ready to starve or perish through poverty, and I tell him I am heartily glad to see him, and should be very ready to serve him, but still my hand is close, and my purse shut; I neither bring him to my table, nor lodge him under my roof; he asks for bread, and I give him a compliment, a thing indeed not so hard as a stone, but altogether as dry. I treat him with art and outside: and lastly, at parting, with all the ceremonies of dearness, I shake him by the hand, but put nothing into it. In a word, I play with his distress, and dally with that which will not be dallied with, want and misery, and a clamorous necessity.

For will fair words and a courtly behaviour pay debts and discharge scores? If they could, there is a sort of men that would not be so much in debt as they are. Can a man look and speak himself out of his creditor’s hands? Surely then, if my words cannot do this for myself, neither can they do it for my enemy. And therefore this has nothing of the love spoken of in the text. It is but a scene, and a mere mockery, for the receiving that, cannot make my enemy at all the richer, the giving of which makes me not one penny the poorer. It is indeed the fashion of the world thus to amuse men with empty caresses, and to feast them with words and air, looks and legs; nay, and it has this peculiar privilege above all other fashions, that it never alters: but certainly no man ever yet quenched his thirst with looking upon a golden cup, nor made a meal with the outside of a lordly dish.

But we are not to rest here; fair speeches and looks are not only very insignificant as to the real effects of love, but are for the most part the instruments of hatred in the execution of the greatest mischiefs. Few men are to be ruined till they are made confident of the contrary: and this cannot be done by threats and roughness, and owning the mischief that a man designs; but the pitfall must be covered, to invite the man to venture over it; all things must be sweetened with professions of love, friendly looks, and embraces. For it is oil that whets the razor, and the smoothest edge is still the sharpest: they are the complacencies of an enemy that kill, the closest hugs that stifle, and love must be pretended before malice can be effectually practised. In a word, he must get into his heart with fair speeches and promises, before he can come at it with his dagger. For surely no man fishes with a bare hook, or thinks that the net itself can be any enticement to the bird.

But now, if these outward shews of fairness are short of the love which we owe to our enemies; what can we say of those who have not arrived so far as these, and yet pretend to be friends? Disdain and distance, sour looks and sharp words, are all the expressions of friendship that some natures can manifest. I confess, where real kindnesses are done, these circumstantial garnitures of love (as I may so call them) may be dispensed with; and it is better to have a rough friend than a fawning enemy: but those who neither do good turns nor give good looks, nor speak good words, have a love strangely subtile and metaphysical: for other poor mortals of an ordinary capacity are forced to be ignorant of that which they can neither see, hear, feel, nor understand. And thus much for the first negative. The love that we are to shew to enemies is not a fair external courtly deportment; it is not such a thing as may be learnt in a dancingschool, nor in those shops of fallacy and dissimulation, the courts and palaces of great men, where men’s thoughts and words stand at an infinite distance, and their tongues and minds hold no correspondence or intercourse with one another.

2. Fair promises are not the love that our Saviour here commands us to shew our enemies. And yet these are one step and advance above the former: for many fair speeches may be given, many courteous harangues uttered, and yet no promise made. And it is worth observing how some great ones often delude, and simple ones suffer themselves to be deluded, by general discourses and expressions of courtesy. As, “Take you no care, I will provide for you. I will never see you want. Leave your business in my hands, and I will manage it with as much or more concern than you could yourself. What need you insist so much upon this or that in particular? I design better things for you.” But all this while there is no particular determinate thing promised, so as to hold such an one by any real, solid engagement, (supposing that his promise were such,) but perhaps, when the next advantage comes in the way, the man is forgot and balked: yet still those general speeches hold as true as ever they did, and so will continue, notwithstanding all particular defeats; as indeed being never calculated for any thing else but to keep up the expectation of easy persons; to feed them for the present, and to fail them in the issue.

But now, as these empty glossing words are short of promises, so promises are equally short of performances. Concerning both which I shall say this, that there is no wise man, but had rather have had one promise than a thousand fair words, and one performance than ten thousand promises. For what trouble is it to promise, what charge is it to spend a little breath, for a man to give one his word, who never intends to give him any thing else? And yet, according to the measures of the world, this must sometimes pass for an high piece of love; and many poor unexperienced believing souls, who have more honesty than wit, think themselves wrapped up into the third heaven, and actually possessed of some no table preferment, when they can say, “I have such a great person’s promise for such or such a thing.” Have they so? Let them see if such a promise will pay rent, buy land, and maintain them like gentle men. It is at the best but a future contingent; for either the man may die, or his interest may fail, or his mind may change, or ten thousand accidents may intervene. Promises are a diet which none ever yet thrived by, and a man may feed upon them heartily, and never break his fast. In a word, I may say of human promises, what expositors say of divine prophecies, “that they are never understood till they come to be fulfilled.”

But how speaks the scripture of these matters? Why, in Rom. xii. 20. If thine enemy hunger , feed him; if he thirst, give him drink. It is not, Promise him meat and drink a week hence, that is perhaps two days after he is dead with thirst and hunger. He who lives only upon reversions, and maintains himself with hope, and has nothing to cover him but the clothes of dead men, and the promises of the living, will find just as much relief from them, as a man in the depth of winter feels the heat of the following summer.

But bare promises are so far from answering Christ’s precept of loving our enemies, that if they are not realized in deeds, they become a plague and a great calamity. For they raise an expectation, which, unsatisfied or defeated, is the greatest of torments; they betray a man to a fallacious dependance, which bereaves him of the succours of his other endeavours, and in the issue leaves him to inherit the shame and misery of a disappointment, and unable to say any thing else for himself, but that he was credulous, and the promiser false.

3. But thirdly and lastly, to advance a degree yet higher, to do one or two kind offices for an enemy, is not to fulfil the precept of loving him. He who clothes a naked man with a pair of gloves, and ad ministers to one perishing with thirst a drop or two of water, reaches not the measure of his necessity, but, instead of relieving, only upbraids his want, and passes a jest upon his condition. It is like pardoning a man the debt of a penny, and in the mean time suing him fiercely for a talent. Love is then only of reality and value when it deals forth benefits in a full proportion to one’s need; and when it shews itself both in universality and constancy. Otherwise it is only a trick to serve a turn and carry on a design.

There is hardly any necessity or convenience of mankind, but what is in a large measure served and provided for by this great blessing (as well as business) of the world, religion. And he who is a Christian, is not only a better man, but also a better neighbour, a better subject, and a truer friend, than he that is not so. For was ever any thing more for the good of mankind, than to forgive injuries, to love and caress our mortal adversaries, and, instead of our enemy, to hate only our revenge?

Of such a double yet benign aspect is Christianity both to God and man; like incense, while it ascends to heaven, it perfumes all about it; at the same time both instrumental to God’s worship, and the worshipper’s refreshment: as it holds up one hand in supplication, so it reaches forth the other in benefaction.

But now, if it be one great end of religion, thus to contribute to the support and benefit of society, surely it must needs consist in the active piety of our lives, not in empty thoughts and fruitless persuasions. For what can one man be the better for what another thinks or believes? When a poor man begs an alms of me, can I believe my bread into his mouth, or my money into his hand? Believing with out doing is a very cheap and easy, but withal a very worthless way of being religious.

And thus having given the reasons, why the active part of religion is the only sure bottom for us to build upon, I now proceed to the second thing proposed, namely, to shew those false and sandy foundations which many venture to build upon, and are accordingly deceived by; which though they are exceedingly various, and according to the multiplicity of men’s tempers, businesses, and occasions, almost infinite, and like the sand mentioned in my text, not only infirm, but numberless also, yet, according to the best of my poor judgment and observation, I shall reduce them to these three heads. The

First of which is a naked, unoperative faith. Ask but some upon what grounds they look to be saved, and they will answer, “Because they firmly believe that through the merits of Christ their sins are forgiven them.” But since it is hard for a man in his right wits to be confident of a thing which he does not at all know; such as are more cautious will tell you further, “That to desire to believe is to believe, and to desire to repent is to repent.” But as this is absurd and impossible, since no act can be its own object without being not itself; forasmuch as the act and the object are distinct things; and consequently a desire to believe can no more be belief, than a desire to be saved can be salvation; so it is further intolerable upon this account, that it quite dispirits religion, by placing it in languid, abortive velleities, and so cuts the nerves of all endeavour, by rating glory at a bare desire, and eternity at a wish.

But because the poison of this opinion does so easily enter, and so strangely intoxicate, I shall presume to give an antidote against it in this one observation, namely, that all along the scripture, where justification is ascribed to faith alone, there the word faith is still used by a metonymy of the antecedent for the consequent, and does not signify abstractedly a mere persuasion, but the obedience of an holy life performed in the strength and virtue of such a persuasion. Not that this justifies meritoriously by any inherent worth or value in itself, but instrumentally as a condition appointed by God, upon the performance of which, he freely imputes to us Christ’s righteousness, which is the sole, proper, and formal cause of our justification. So that that instrumentality, which some in the business of justification attribute to one single act of credence, is by this ascribed to the whole aggregate series of gospel obedience, as being that which gives us a title to a perfect righteousness without us, by which alone we stand justified before God. And this seems with full accord both to scripture and reason to state the business of justification by an equal poise both against the arrogant assertions of self-justiciaries on the one hand, and the wild opinions of the Antinomians on the other.

But whether the obedience of a pious life, performed out of a belief or persuasion of the truth of the gospel, ought to pass for that faith which justifies, or only for the effect or consequent of it, yet certainly it is such an effect as issues by a kind of connatural, constant efficiency and result from it. So that how much soever they are distinguishable by their respective actions from one another, they are absolutely inseparable by a mutual and a necessary connection: it belonging no less to the faith which justifies to be operative, than to justify: indeed, upon an essential account, more; forasmuch as it is operative by its nature, but justifies only by institution.

Secondly, The second false ground which some build upon, is a fond reliance upon the goodness of their heart, and the honesty of their intention. A profitable, and therefore a very prevailing fallacy; and such an one as the devil seldom uses, but with success; it being one of his old and long experimented fetches, by the pretences of a good heart, to supplant the necessity of a good life. But to allege the honesty of the mind against the charge of an evil course, is a protestation against the fact, which does not excuse, but enhance its guilt. As it would look like a very strange and odd commendation of a tree, to apologise for the sourness of its fruit, by pleading that all its goodness lay in the root.

But in the discourses of reason, such is the weakness and shortness of its reach, that it seldom suggests arguments a priori for any thing, but by a low and humble gradation creeps from the effects up to the cause, because these first strike and alarm the senses; and therefore St. James speaks as good philosophy as divinity, when he says, James ii. 18, Shew me thy faith by thy works. Every action being the most lively portraiture and impartial expression of its efficient principle, as the complexion is the best comment upon the constitution: for in natural productions there is no hypocrisy.

Only we must observe here, that good and evil actions bear a very different relation to their respective principles. As it is between truth and falsehood in argumentation, so it is between good and evil in matters of practice. For though from an artificial contrivance of false principles or premises may emerge a true conclusion, yet from true premises cannot ensue a false: so, though an evil heart may frame itself to the doing of an action in its kind or nature good, yet a renewed, sanctified principle cannot of itself design actions really vicious. The reason of which is, because the former in such a case acts upon a principle of dissimulation; and no man by dissembling affects to appear worse than he is, but better. But all this while, I speak not of a single action, but of a conversation or course of acting: for a pious man may do an evil action upon temptation or surprise, but not by the tenor of his standing principles and resolutions. But when a man’s sin is his business and the formed purpose of his life; and his piety shrinks only into meaning and intention; when he tells me his heart is right with God, while his hand is in my pocket, he upbraids my reason, and outfaces the common principles of natural discourse with an impudence equal to the absurdity.

This therefore I affirm, that he who places his Christianity only in his heart, and his religion in his meaning, has fairly secured himself against a disco very in case he should have none; but yet, for all that, shall at the last find his portion with those who indeed have none. And the truth is, those who are thus intentionally pious, do in a very ill and untoward sense verify that philosophical maxim, that what they so much pretend to be chief and first in their intention, is always last, if at all, in the execution.

Thirdly, The third and last false ground that I shall mention, upon which some men build to their confusion, is party and singularity. If an implicit faith be, as some say, the property of a Roman Catholic, then I am sure popery may be found where the name of papist is abhorred. For what account can some give of their religion, or of that assurance of their salvation, (which they so much boast of,) but that they have wholly resigned themselves up to the guidance and dictates of those who have the front and boldness to usurp the title of the godly. To be of such a party, of such a name, nay, of such a sneaking look, is to some the very spirit and characteristic mark of Christianity.

See what St. Paul himself built upon before his conversion to Christ, Acts xxvi. 5. I was, says he, after the strictest sect of our religion a Pharisee. So that it was the reputation of the sect upon which St. Paul then embarked his salvation. Now the nature of this fraternity or sect we may learn from the origination of their name Pharisee; it being derived from פָרַש parasch, separavit, discrevit, whence in Greek they were called ἀφωπισμένοι,

Φαρισαῖοι οἱ ἑρμηνευόμενοι ἀφωρισμένοι, παρὰ τὸ μερίζειν καὶ ἀφορίζειν ἑαυτοὺ τῶν ἄλλων ἁπάντων. Suidas. Again, Φαροσαῖος ἀφωρισμένος, μεμερισμένος, καθαρός. Hesych. So that the Pharisees properly were, and might be called the Jewish Cathari, or Puritans.

But singularity is not sincerity, though too often and mischievously mistaken for it; and as an house built upon the sand is likely to be ruined by storms, so an house built out of the road is exposed to the invasion of robbers, and wants both the convenience and assistance of society: Christ is not therefore called the corner stone in the spiritual building, as if he intended that his church should consist only of corners, or be driven into them. There is a by-path, as well as a broad-way, to destruction. And it both argues the nature, and portends the doom of chaff, upon agitation to separate and divide from the wheat. But to such as venture their eternal interest upon such a bottom, I shall only suggest these two words.

First, That admitting, but not granting, that the party which they adhere to may be truly pious, yet the piety of the party cannot sanctify its proselytes. A church may be properly called holy, when yet that holiness does not diffuse itself to each particular member: the reason of which is, because the whole may receive denomination from a quality inherent only in some of its parts. Company may occasion, but it cannot transfuse holiness.

No man’s righteousness but Christ’s alone can be imputed to another. To rate a man by the nature of his companions, is a rule frequent indeed, but not infallible. Judas was as much a wretch amongst the apostles, as amongst the priests: and therefore it is but a poor argument for a man to derive his saintship from the virtues of the society he belongs to, and to conclude himself no weed, only because he grows amongst the corn.

Secondly, Such an adhesion to a party carries in it a strong suspicion and tang of the rankest of all ill qualities, spiritual pride. There are two things natural almost to all men:

First, A desire of preeminence in any perfection, but especially religious. Secondly, A spirit of opposition or contradiction to such as are not of their own mind or way. Now both these are eminently gratified by a man’s listing himself of a party in religion. And I doubt not but some are more really proud of the affected sordidness of a pretended mortification, than others are of the greatest affluence and splendour of life: and that many who call the execution of law and justice persecution, do yet suffer it with an higher and more pleasing relish of pride than others can inflict it. For it is not true zeal rising from an hearty concernment for religion, but an ill, restless, cross humour, which is provoked with smart, and quickened with opposition. The godly party is little better than a contradiction in the adjunct; for he who is truly godly, is humble and peaceable, and will neither make nor be of a party, according to the common sense of that word. Let such pretenders therefore suspect the sandiness and hollowness of their foundation; and know, that such imitators of Corah, Dathan, and Abiram, build upon the same ground upon which they stood, and into which they sunk. And certainly that man’s condition is very unsafe, who accounts his sin his perfection, and so makes the object of his repentance the ground of his salvation.

And thus I have discovered some of those false and deceiving grounds upon which many bottom their eternal state, and by which they think themselves in the direct way to life and happiness, while, God knows, they are in the high and broad road to perdition.

Pass we now to the third thing proposed, which is, to shew whence it is that such ill-founded structures are upon trial sure to fall. For the demonstration of which we must observe, that to the violent dissolution of any thing two things concur: first, an assault or impression from without; secondly, an inherent weakness within. One is the active, the other the passive principle of every change. For so much as there is of weakness, there is of nonresistance, and so far as any thing yields or not resists, the contrary impression enters, and by degrees weakens, and at length destroys the subsistence of the thing opposed.

As for the first of these, the force and opposition from without: it comes from the ὁ ποωηρὸς the true common enemy, the implacable, insatiable devourer of souls, the devil; who will be sure to plant his engines of battery against every spiritual building which does but look towards heaven. The opposition he makes, our Saviour here emphatically describes by the winds blowing, the rain descending, and the floods coming, which is not an insignificant rhetorication of the same thing by several expressions, (like some pulpit bombast, made only to measure an hour glass,) but an exact description of those three methods by which this assault of the devil prevails and becomes victorious.

First, The first is, that it is sudden and unexpected. The devil usually comes upon the soul as he fell from heaven, like lightning. And he shews no small art and policy by his so doing: for quickness prevents preparation, and so enervates opposition. It is observed of Caesar, that he did plurima et maxima bella sola celeritate conficere: so that almost in all his expeditions he seldom came to any place, but his coming was before the report of it. And we shall find, that the Roman eagles owed most of their great conquests as much to their swiftness as to their force. And the same is here the devil’s method in his warfare against souls. Upon which account also the same character that Tully gave the forementioned Caesar in his Epistles to Atticus, may much more fitly agree to him, that he is monstrum horribile celeritatis et vigilantiae. He flies to his prey, he fetches his blow quick and sure; he can shoot a temptation in a glance, and convey the poison of his suggestions quicker than the agitation of thought, or the strictures of fancy. It is the sudden trip in wrest ling that fetches a man to the ground.

Thus St. Peter, that giant in faith, was shamefully foiled by a sudden though weak assault. While he sits in the high priest’s hall, warming himself and thinking nothing, one confounds him with this quick unexpected charge, Matth. xxvi. 69, Thou also wast with Jesus of Galilee. The surprise of the onset prevented his deliberating powers from rallying together those succours of habitual grace, which, being alarmed by a more gradual approach of the temptation, would have easily repulsed it. But the devil will never caution the soul into a posture of defence by presenting the temptation at a distance. He bites and shews his teeth at the same instant; and so prevents the foresight of the eye, by exceeding it in quickness.

Secondly, His assaults are furious and impetuous. Temptations come very often, as the devil himself is said to do, in a storm. And a gust of wind, as it rises on a sudden, so it rushes with vehemence. And if the similitude does not yet speak high enough; to the violence of a storm, the text adds the prevailing rage of a flood. And we know the tyranny of this element when it once embodies into a torrent, and runs with the united force of many waters; it scorns all confinement, and tears down the proudest opposition, as Virgil fully describes it:

With a parallel encounter does the devil draw upon the poor fortifications of outward civility, good desires, imperfect resolutions, and the like, which are no more able to abide the shock of such batteries, than a morning dew is able to bear the scorching fury of the sun; or than such little banks as children use to raise in sport, are able to stem or stand against the outrageous breaking in of the sea. Every temptation has this property of water, either to insinuate or to force its way.

Thirdly, The devil in his assaults is restless and importunate. The wind is here said not only to blow, but emphatically to beat upon the house. And as in a tempest the blasts are both sudden and violent in their onset, so they are frequent in their returns. Importunity is the only coaction that the will knows. Where the devil cannot persuade, he will, if he can, even weary into a consent. It is often charging that wins the field. The tempter, if he is repulsed in a battle, will lengthen his assault into a siege. For the mind may have often a sudden heat of valour to repel the one, and yet not constancy to endure the other. A rejected proposal shall be reinforced with continual fresh supplies of more urgent and repeated persuasions.

See him thrice renewing the combat with our Saviour; and indeed after he has had the impudence to begin a temptation, it is always his prudence to pursue it. Otherwise, opposition only attempted, serves not for conquest, but admonition. His assaults are here said to come like the rain, and the rain never falls in one single drop; and yet if it did, even a drop would hollow and dig its way by frequency and assiduity.

It is observed by the learned Verulam, what advantage bold and importunate men have over others, nay, even so as to prevail upon men of wisdom and resolution, because, as he excellently notes, “the wisest men have their weak times:” and then I infer, that he who is importunate at all times, must needs catch them at those.

So when the tempter continues his importunity and siege about a soul, he has all these advantages over it: as, to view its strong holds, and to spy where they are least fortified; to observe the intervals and cessations of duty; when devotion ebbs, and the spiritual guards draw off; when the affections revel, and slide into a posture of security; and then to renew and bring on the assault afresh, and so to force a victorious entrance for his temptations.

It is here, as with the Greeks before Troy; it was not their armies, nor their Achilles, but their ten years siege that got the conquest. What a violent flame cannot presently melt down, a constant, though a gentle heat will at length exhale. It is our known duty to fight and resist the devil; and we shall find that scarce any temptation ever encounters the soul without its second.

So then, you see here the first cause of this great overthrow, namely, the assault and impression made from without by the tempter; which in the next place is rendered effectual by the impotence and nonresistance of the soul that is so opposed; which peculiarly answers his threefold opposition with three contrary qualifications.

First, As first, that it is frequently unprepared. The soul, God knows, is but seldom upon the watch; its spiritual armour is seldom buckled on. The business, the cares, and the pleasures of the world, draw it off from its own defence: business employs, care distracts, and pleasure lulls it asleep. And is this a posture to receive an enemy in? an enemy cunning, watchful, and malicious? an enemy who never sleeps, nor loiters, nor overlooks an advantage?

Secondly, As it is unprepared, so it is also weak and feeble. The spirit, says our Saviour, is willing, but the flesh is weak. And such is the condition of man in this world, that much more of flesh than spirit goes to his constitution. Nay, is not grace itself described under the weakness of smoking flax, or a bruised reed? Of which how quickly is one extinguished, and how easily is the other broke!

Thirdly, As it is both unprepared and weak, so it is also inconstant. Peter will die for his Master at one time, and not many hours after deny and for swear him. Steadfastness is the result of strength, and how then can constancy dwell with weakness? The greatest strength of the mind is in its resolutions, and yet how often do they change! Even in the weightiest concerns men too frequently put them on and off with their clothes. They deceive when they are most trusted: suddenly starting and flying in pieces like a broken bow; and, like a bow again, even when strongest they can hardly be kept always bent. We see what fair and promising beginnings some made, Luke viii. 13. They heard the word, they received it with joy, but having not root, they believed only for a while, and so in time of temptation fell away.

Constancy is the crowning virtue. Matth. x. 22. He who endureth to the end shall be saved. But then constancy and perseverance are the gift of God, and above the production of mere nature; it being no small paradox to imagine, that where the stock itself is slight and infirm, any thing which grows out of it should be strong.

And thus having shewn the threefold impotence of the soul, answerable to the threefold opposition made against it by the devil, what can we conclude, but that where unpreparedness is encountered with unexpected force, weakness with violence, inconstancy with importunity, there destruction must needs be, not the effect of chance, but nature, and, by the closest connection of causes, unavoidable?

It now remains that in the last place we shew wherein the greatness of this fall consists. The house fell, and great was the fall thereof. In short, it may appear upon these two accounts.

First, That it is scandalous, and diffuses a contagion to others, and a blot upon religion. A falling house is a bad neighbour. It is the property of evil as well as of good to be communicative. We still suppose the building here mentioned in the text to have had all the advantages of visible representment, all the pomp and flourish of external ornament, a stately superstructure, and a beautiful appearance; and therefore such an one must needs perish as remarkably as it stood. That which is seen afar off while it stands, is heard of much further when it falls.

An eminent professor is the concern of a whole profession; as to nonplus an Aristotle would look, not only like a slur to a particular philosopher, but like a baffle to philosophy itself.

The devil will let a man build and practise high, that he may at length fetch him down with the greater shame, and so make even a Christian an argument against Christianity. The subduing of any soul is a conquest, but of such an one a triumph. A signal professor cannot perish without a train, and in his very destruction his example is authentic.

Secondly, The greatness of the fall here spoken of appears also in this, that such an one is hardly and very rarely recovered. He whose house falls, has not usually either riches or heart to build another. It is the business of a life once to build.

God indeed can cement the ruins, and heal the breaches of an apostate soul, but usually a ship wrecked faith and a defloured conscience admit of no repair. Like the present time, which when once gone never returns.

What may be within the compass of omnipotence, the secret of a decree, or the unlimited strains of extraordinary grace, is not here disputed: but, as it would be arrogance for us men to define the power of grace, so it is the height of spiritual prudence to observe its methods. And upon such observation we shall find, that the recovery of such apostates is not the custom, but the prerogative of mercy.

A man is ruined but once. A miscarriage in the new birth is dangerous; and very fatal it generally proves to pass the critical seasons of a defeated conversion.

And thus I have at length despatched what I at first proposed. Now the words themselves being, as I said before, Christ’s application of his own sermon, cannot be improved into a better, and consequently need not into another, except what their own natural consequence does suggest; and that is, what our Saviour himself intimates else where, namely, that he who is about to build, would first sit down and consider what it is like to cost him. For building is chargeable, especially if a man lays out his money like a fool. Would a man build for eternity, that is, in other words, would he be saved? let him consider with himself, what charges he is willing to be at, that he may be so. Nothing under an universal, sincere obedience to all the precepts of the gospel can entitle him to the benefits of it; and thus far and deep he must go, if he will lay his foundation true. It is an hard and a rocky work, I confess, but the difficulty of laying it will be abundantly recompensed by the firmness of it when it is laid.

But it is a sad and mortifying consideration to think upon what false and sinking grounds, or rather upon what whirlpools and quicksands, many venture to build. Some you shall have amusing their consciences with a set of fantastical new-coined phrases, such as laying hold on Christ, getting into Christ, and rolling themselves upon Christ, and the like; by which, if they mean any thing else but obeying the precepts of Christ, and a rational hope of salvation thereupon, (which it is certain that generally they do not mean,) it is all but a jargon of empty, sense less metaphors; and though many venture their souls upon them, despising good works and strict living, as mere morality, and perhaps as popery, yet being throughly looked into and examined, after all their noise, they are really nothing but words and wind.

Another flatters himself that he has lived in full assurance of his salvation for ten, or twenty, or perhaps thirty years; that is, in other words, the man has been ignorant and confident very long.

Aye, but says another, I am a great hearer and lover of sermons, (especially of lectures;) and it is this which is the very delight of my righteous soul, and the main business of my life; and though indeed, according to the good old puritan custom, I use to walk and talk out the prayers before the church door, or without the choir, yet I am sure to be always in at sermon. Nay, I have so entirely devoted my whole time to the hearing of sermons, that, I must confess, I have hardly any left to practise them. And will not all this set me right for heaven? Yes, no doubt, if a man were to be pulled up to heaven by the ears; or the gospel would but reverse its rule, and declare, that not the doers of the word, but the hearers only should be justified.

But then in comes a fourth, and tells us, that he is a saint of yet an higher class, as having got far above all their mean, beggarly, steeple-house dispensations, by an happy exchange of them for the purer and more refined ordinances of the conventicle; where he is sure to meet with powerful teaching indeed, and to hear will-worship and superstition run down, and the priests of Baal paid off, and the follies and fopperies of their great idol the Common Prayer laid open with a witness, (not without some edifying flings at the king and court too, some times,) by all which his faith is now grown so strong, that he can no more doubt of his going to heaven, than that there is such a place as heaven to go to.

So that if the conscience of such an one should at any time offer to grumble at him, he would presently stop its mouth with this, “that he is of such an one’s congregation;” and then, “conscience say thy worst:” or if the guilt of some old perjuries or extortions should begin to look stern upon him, why then all those old scores shall be cleared off with a comfortable persuasion, “that such as he cannot fall from grace,” though it is shrewdly to be feared, that his only way of proving this must be, “that there can be no losing or falling from that which a man never had.”

But ah! thou poor, blind, self-deluding, and deluded soul! are these the best evidences thou hast for heaven? these the grounds upon which thou hopest for salvation? Assure thyself that God will deal with thee upon very different terms.

For he absolutely enjoins thee to do whatsoever Christ has commanded; and to avoid whatsoever he has forbidden. And Christ has commanded thee to be poor in spirit, and pure in heart; to subdue thy unruly appetites, to curb thy lust, to restrain thy anger, and to suppress thy revenge. And if any thing proves an hinderance to thee in thy duty, though it be as dear to thee as thy right eye, to pluck it out; and as useful to thee as thy right hand, to cut it off and cast it from thee. He will have thee ready to endure persecutions, revilings, and all manner of slanders, not only patiently, but also cheerfully for the truth’s sake. He calls upon thee to love thine enemies, and to do good for evil: to bless those that curse thee, and to pray for those that despitefully use thee. He commands thee in all things, strictly to do as thou wouldest he done by; and not to cheat, lie, or overreach thy neighbour, and then call it, “a fetching over the wicked, the better to enable thee to relieve the godly.” He will not allow thee to resist evil, and much less to resist thy governor. He commands thee to be charitable without vain-glory, and devout without ostentation. In short, he requires thee to be meek and lowly, chaste and temperate, just and merciful; and, in a word, (so far as the poor measures of humanity will reach,) perfect as thy heavenly Father is perfect.

This is the sum of those divine sayings of our Saviour, which he himself refers to in my text, and which if a man hears and does, all the powers of hell shall never shake him. And nothing but a constant, impartial, universal practice of these will or can speak peace to thy conscience here, and stand between thee and the wrath of God hereafter. As for all other pretences, they are nothing but death and damnation dressed up in fair words and false shews; nothing but gins, and snares, and trapans for souls, contrived by the devil, and managed by such as the devil sets on work.

But I have done, and the result of all that I have said or can say, is, that every spiritual builder would be persuaded to translate his foundation from the sand to the rock: and not presume upon Christ as his Saviour, till by a full obedience to his laws he has owned him for his sovereign. And this is properly to believe in him: this is truly to build upon a rock; even that rock of ages, upon which every one that wears the name of Christ must by an in evitable dilemma either build or split.

Now to God, who is able to build us up in our most holy faith, to establish us here, and to save us hereafter, be rendered and ascribed, as is most due, all praise, might, majesty, and dominion, both now and for evermore. Amen.

Secondly, A suspicion ensuing thereupon of its unlawfulness.

Thirdly, A religious fear to use or practise it, grounded upon that ignorance or suspicion.

And first, for the first of these ingredients, ignorance; which is indeed the chief and principal of all the three, as being the original of the other two. Concerning this we must (as the groundwork of all) observe, that it ought by all means to be such an ignorance as may, in propriety of speech and sense, bear the denomination of weakness; which it is certain that every sort of ignorance neither does nor can. For since weakness is properly the privation or absence of power, that ignorance only can receive this name, which is not founded upon any vicious action or omission of the will. I say action or omission: for a man may either positively design and will the ignorance of a thing, by studiously avoiding all means to inform himself of it; much like the shutting of one’s eyes against the light, or refusing to come to church: or it may be founded upon some omission; as when the will, though it does not designedly avoid and put from it the means of knowledge, yet neglects to look after them. Now the ignorance which is occasioned either of these ways is willing, and consequently sinful: though usually, for distinction sake, the former is with more emphasis termed, not only willing, but wilful; as being the direct object of an act of volition, and upon that account stamped with an higher aggravation.

That ignorance therefore that renders and denominates the conscience weak, must be such an one as is not willing; which is evident upon a double account:

First, Because it must be such an one as renders it in some degree excusable; but, so far as any defect is resolved into the will, it is in that degree inexcusable.

Secondly, Because it must be such an ignorance as renders the person having it the object of pity and compassion. But no man pities another for any evil lying upon him which he would not help, but which he could not. One is his burden, the other his choice; virtually at least, since he might have chosen its prevention. So that it must be such an ignorance as is not (all circumstances considered) under the present power of a man’s will to remedy. And consequently it must be resolved into one of these two causes:

First, The natural weakness of the understanding faculty.

Secondly, The want of opportunities or means of knowledge.

Either of which makes ignorance necessary; as it is impossible for him to see who wants eyes, and equally impossible for him who wants light; the former being the organ, the other the means of seeing. But as touching the natural weakness or disability of the understanding faculty, we must observe, that this may be either total, as in case of idiotism, phrensy, or the like, which wholly deprives a man of the use of his reason: but persons in this condition fall not under the present consideration. Or secondly, this disability of the under standing may be only in part, and as to a certain degree of its exercise. From whence it is, that one man apprehends the same thing under the same ad vantages of proposal much more slowly and difficultly than another. Which defect being in no man’s power to prevent, but coming with him into the world, all that ignorance which is inevitably caused by it, neither can nor ever shall be charged upon the will. But then withal, as this defect does not wholly deprive a man of the power of knowing, but only of the readiness, easiness, and quickness of it; (upon which account knowledge becomes more difficult to him in the acquisition;) so this weakness, dulness, or slowness of a man’s intellectual powers, can never totally excuse him for being ignorant of what it was his duty to know; since it was in the power of his will by labour and industry to have supplied, and, as it were, to have pieced up these failures in his apprehension; and so at length to have acquired the knowledge of that by study and pains, which he could not by the slowness of his understanding take in at first.

But then this must be also confessed, that, by reason of this diversity in the quickness or slowness of men’s understandings, one man may be sooner in excusable for his ignorance of the same thing than another. For God will allow a man of slower parts to be ignorant of a thing longer than a person endued with more quick and pregnant sense. He expects from men only according to the proportions of his giving to them; still making an equality and commensuration between a man’s obligations and his powers. And thus much for the first and grand ingredient of weakness of conscience, which is ignorance.

Secondly, The second is a suspicion of the unlawfulness of any thing or action: and this is manifestly something more than a bare ignorance of its lawfulness. Though indeed such an ignorance is of itself enough to make the forbearance of any thing or action necessary: forasmuch as nothing ought to be done but in faith; that is, in a full persuasion of the lawfulness of what we do; which he can be no more said to do, who is ignorant of the lawfulness of what he goes about, than he who suspects it to be unlawful. Howbeit this suspicion adds to the guilt of the action, in case it be done during its continuance; because all suspicion is grounded upon some arguments, which leave not the opinion of the lawfulness or unlawfulness of a thing equal, as in case of mere ignorance, but rather incline us to a belief that it is unlawful. For it is one thing not to know whether a thing be lawful, another to doubt, and shrewdly to suspect that it is not so. Now this indeed is the usual concomitant of weakness of conscience, as being the natural product of ignorance, which seldom stops in itself: men in the dark being generally fearful, and apt to suspect the worst. But yet this suspicion is not essentially requisite to make a conscience weak; though where it is so, it makes that weakness greater, and more troublesome. For ignorance is properly that in which this weakness consists: ignorance makes the sore, suspicion in flames it.

Thirdly, The third and last thing that goes to the making up of this weakness of conscience, is a religious abstinence from the use of that thing, of the lawfulness whereof it is thus ignorant or suspicious. It brings a man to that condition in the 2d of Coloss. and the 21st verse, of touch not, taste not, handle not. It lays a tie and a restraint upon his practice, and enslaves him to the prejudice of a mistaking conscience, under no less a penalty than that of the divine wrath and eternal damnation; bonds not to be shook off, and fences not to be broke through, by any one who values the eternal welfare of his soul.

Now from these three things put together, I conceive we may collect this full description of a weak conscience; namely, that it is such an one as obliges a man to forbear any thing or action, from a suspicion that it is unlawful, or at least an ignorance that it is lawful; which suspicion or ignorance was not caused or occasioned by his own will, but either by the natural weakness of his understanding, or the want of such means of knowledge as were absolutely necessary to inform him.

This description ought well to be observed and remembered in the several parts of it; as being that which must give light into all the following particulars.

And thus much for the first thing proposed, which was, to shew what this weak conscience is. I proceed now to the

Second, which is, to shew what it is to wound or sin against it. It implies, I conceive, these two things:

First, To grieve, afflict, or discompose it; or, in a word, to rob it of its peace. For there is that concernment for God’s honour dwelling in every truly pious heart, which makes it troubled at the sight of any action by which it supposes God to be dishonoured. Rivers of tears, says David, run down my eyes, because men keep not thy statutes; and am I not grieved with those who rise up against thee? Every sin directly strikes at God, but collaterally the scandal of it reaches all about us. And as piety commands us not to offend God, so charity enjoins us not to grieve our neighbour.

Secondly, The other thing implied in the wounding of a weak conscience, is, to encourage or embolden it to act something against its present judgment or persuasion: which is, in other terms, to of fend, or cast a stumblingblock before it; that is, to do something which may administer to it an occasion of falling, or bringing itself under the guilt of sin. So that as the former was a breach upon the peace, this is properly a wound upon the purity of the conscience.

Now the conscience may be induced to act counter to its present persuasion two ways:

1st, By example. 2d, By command.

First. And first for example; which is the case here expressly mentioned, and principally intended. According to that of the apostle in the 10th verse of this 8th of 1 Cor. where he says, that the conscience of him who is weak is emboldened to eat things offered unto idols, by seeing him who has knowledge sit at meat in the idol’s temple: so that it is the seeing of another do so, which makes the weak person conclude that he may do so too. Now the reason of that persuasive force which is in example, is from a kind of implicit faith in the goodness and lawfulness of another’s actings, grounded upon a supposal of his piety and judgment, which, in the weak conscience of one who beholds him, naturally frames such a kind of ratiocination as this: “I, for my part, by the best of my understanding, can be no way satisfied of the lawfulness of my doing such an action; nevertheless, such an one, whom I esteem a person truly pious and more judicious than myself, makes no scruple of doing it at all, which surely he would, if it were indeed unlawful: and therefore, if it be lawful for him to do thus and thus, why may it not be so likewise for me, albeit my own reason, I confess, would persuade me otherwise?”

So that here is the force of example to persuade, and thereby, in this case, to wound; in that it induces a man to act by an implicit faith in the private judgment of another, against the express dictates and persuasions of his own; a thing directly against the law of God and nature, which has ap pointed every man’s reason or conscience to be the immediate guide or governor of his actions.

Secondly. The second way by which the conscience may be induced to act contrary to its present persuasion, is by command; as when a person in power enjoins the doing something, of the lawfulness of which a man is not persuaded: but concerning this, these two things are to be observed:

First, That it is not so clear that a mere command can wound the conscience this way; that is, by emboldening it to act against its present persuasion: for so to embolden it, is to make it willing to act in this manner; but a command as such, makes not a man willing to do the thing commanded, but lays only an obligation upon the action that is to be done. Nevertheless, since a command seldom comes proposed naked in itself, but with the conjunction of reward upon performance of the thing commanded, or of penalties upon the omission; one whereof works upon a man’s hopes, the other upon his fears; by both of which ways the will of man is apt to be prevailed upon; therefore in this sense a command enjoining a man to do something against his judgment, may be said to wound his conscience: not as a bare command, (for so it has nothing to allure or gain the will, and it is certain that it cannot force it,) but as a command attended with those things which are apt to entice and gain upon it. Add to this also, that a command coining from a person noted for his piety and knowledge has the force of an example; forasmuch as the reputation of the person derives the same credit upon his law.

Secondly, The other thing here to be observed is, that a command may be considered two ways:

First, As descending from one private person upon another, as from a father upon a son, from a master upon his servant, from a guardian upon his pupil, or the like. And I question not but the principal design of the apostle in this chapter extends not beyond private persons; but directly proposes rules only for the charitable and inoffensive deportment of one private person towards another. Nevertheless, since by manifest analogy of reason the case of magistrates or public persons may here come into consideration; therefore, in the

Second place, a command may be considered as descending from a magistrate or public person upon persons under his jurisdiction. And so I affirm that the supreme magistrate, in the making of laws, or giving out commands, stands not under any obligation from his office to frame those laws to the good or advantage of any particular persons, but only of the community or majority of the people, which are properly the trust committed to him. So that if his reason or conscience, upon the best information he can get, tells him that the making of such or such a law tends to the good of these, and that so apparently, that without it they would be unavoidably hurt in matters of the greatest moment; if this law now becomes an occasion of sin to some particular persons, its being so is wholly accidental and extrinsic to the design of the law, and consequently concerns not the civil magistrate, nor makes him charge able with those sins in the least: for surely where the public good of all or most of the people comes into competition with the private good of some particulars, so that both cannot possibly be served by the same means, there charity, as well as bare reason, will teach, that the private must stoop to the public, rather than the public be made a sacrifice to the private. In God’s government of the world, it is the public concern of mankind, that there should be summer and winter in their respective seasons, and yet there are millions of sick and weak persons to whose distempers the approach of either of those seasons will prove certainly mortal. Is it now, think we, rational, that God should suspend a summer or a winter only to comply with the distemper of those crazy, bodily-weak brethren, and thereby to incommode all the world besides?

The case is much alike here: however this indeed must be confessed, that if the magistrate or supreme power should make a law which he knew would be a direct occasion of sin to the generality or majority of his people, the making of such a law would be in him a sin, and a breach of his trust; but still I affirm, that his office obliges him only to provide for the good of the main body of his people; and if it so falls out, that particulars come to have an interest distinct from, or opposite to that, he is not, during such its opposition, at all bound to regard or provide for it, nor to answer for the inconveniences which may attend such persons, either in their civil or spiritual concerns.

And thus much concerning the second thing proposed, which was to shew what it is to wound or sin against a weak conscience; namely, that it is either to grieve it, or to embolden it to sin. And if it be now objected against this, that the text calls a sinning against a weak conscience, a sinning against Christ, to whom we can no ways properly be said to administer any occasion or inducement to sin; I answer, that this expression of [sinning against] being applied to Christ, imports only a grieving or disobeying him: though, as it is applied to the weak conscience, it signifies the other thing too; it being not unusual in scripture for the same word to be repeated in the very same sentence under a diverse signification. Having thus finished the two first things, I come now to the

Third and last, which is to set down those conclusions which, by way of consequence and deduction, naturally result from the foregoing particulars. Which conclusions are these:

1. That no man having been brought up, or for any length of time continued in the communion of a church teaching and professing the true religion, if he have but also the common use of his reason, can justly plead weakness of conscience in the sense in which it was here used by the apostle.

In sum, the articles of our faith are those depths in which the elephant may swim; and the rules of our practice those shallows in which the lamb may wade. But as both light and darkness make but one natural day; so here, both the clearness of the agenda, and the obscurity or mystery of the credenda of the gospel, constitute but one entire religion. And so much in answer to this objection; which being thus removed, I come now to shew, that the mysteriousness of those parts of the gospel called the credenda, or matters of our faith, is most subservient to the great, important ends of religion; and that upon these following accounts:

First, because religion, in the prime institution of it, was designed to make impressions of awe and reverential fear upon men’s minds. The mind of man is naturally licentious, and there is nothing which it is more averse from than duty; nothing which it more abhors than restraint. It would, if let alone, lash out, and wantonize in a boundless enjoyment and gratification of all its appetites and inclinations. And therefore God, who designed man to a supernatural end, thought fit also to en gage him to a way of living above the bare course of nature; and for that purpose to oblige him to a severe abridgment and control of his mere natural desires. And this can never be done, but by imprinting upon his judgment such apprehensions of dread and terror, as may stave off an eager and luxurious appetite from its desired satisfactions, which the infinite wisdom of God has thought fit in some measure to do, by nonplusing the world with certain new and unaccountable revelations of himself and the divine methods of a mysterious religion.

2.

Note that those four sons of David by Bathsheba, mentioned in 1 Chron. iii. 5. are not there set down according to the order of their birth. For Solomon, though last named, was certainly born first; and Nathan (as he is generally reckoned) immediately next.

Secondly, Christ’s entertainment, being come, in those other words, his own received him not.

In the former of which there being an account given us of one of the greatest and most stupendous actions that the world was ever yet witness of; there cannot, I suppose, be a truer measure taken of the nature of it, than by a distinct consideration of the several circumstances belonging to it, which are these.

First, The person who came.

Secondly, The condition from which he came.

Thirdly, The persons to whom he came. And,

Fourthly and lastly, The time of his coming.

Of all which in their order. And,

1. First for the person who came. It was the second Person in the glorious Trinity, the ever blessed and eternal Son of God, concerning whom it is a miracle, and a kind of paradox to our reason, (considering the condition of his person,) how he could be said to come at all: for since all coming is motion or progression from a place in which we were, to a place in which we were not before; and since infinity implies an actual comprehension of, and a presence to, all places, it is hard to conceive how he who was God could be said to come any whither, whose infinity had made all progression to, or acquisition of a new place impossible. But Christ, who delighted to mingle every mercy with miracle and wonder, took a finite nature into the society and union of his person; whereupon what was impossible to a divine nature was rendered very possible to a divine person; which could rightfully and properly entitle itself to all the respective actions and properties of either nature comprehended within its personality: so that being made man, he could do all things that man could do, except only sin. Every thing that was purely human, and had nothing of any sinful deficiency or turpitude cleaving to it, fell within the verge and compass of his actions. But now, was there ever any wonder comparable to this; to behold divinity thus clothed in flesh! the Creator of all things humbled, not only to the company, but also to the cognation of his creatures! It is as if we should imagine the whole world not only represented upon, but also contained in one of our little artificial globes; or the body of the sun enveloped in a cloud as big as a man’s hand; all which would be looked upon as astonishing impossibilities; and yet as short of the other, as the greatest finite is of an infinite, between which the disparity is immeasurable. For that God should thus in a manner trans form himself, and subdue and master all his glories to a possibility of human apprehension and converse, the best reason would have thought it such a thing as God could not do, had it not seen it actually done. It is, as it were, to cancel the essential distances of things, to remove the bounds of nature, to bring heaven and earth, and, what is more, both ends of the contradiction together.

And thereupon some, who think it an imputation upon their reason to believe any thing but what they can demonstrate, (which is no thanks to them at all,) have invented several strange hypotheses and salvos to clear up these things to their apprehensions: as, that the divine nature was never person ally united to the human, but only passed through it in a kind of imaginary, phantastic way; that is, to speak plainly, in some way or other, which neither scripture, sense, nor reason know any thing of. And others have by one bold stroke cut off all such relation of it to the divine nature, and in much another sense than that of the Psalmist, made Christ altogether such an one as themselves, that is, a mere man; ψιλὸς ἄνθρωπος: for Socinus would needs be as good a man as his Saviour.

But this opinion, whatsoever ground it may have got in this latter age of the church, yet no sooner was it vented and defended by Photinus, bishop of Sirmium, but it was immediately crushed, and universally rejected by the church: so that although several other heresies had their course, and were but at length extinguished, and not without some difficulty, yet this, like an indigested meteor, appeared and disappeared almost at the same time. However, Socinus beginning where Photinus had long before left off, licked up his deserted forlorn opinion, and lighting upon worse times, has found much better success.

But is it true that Christ came into the world? Then sure I am apt to think that this is a solid inference, that he had an existence and a being before he came hither; since every motion or passage from one place or condition to another, supposes the thing or person so moving to have actually existed under both terms; to wit, as well under that from which, as that to which he passes. But if Christ had nothing but an human nature, which never existed till it was in the world, how could that possibly be said to come into the world? The fruit that grows upon a tree, and so had the first moment of its existence there, cannot with any propriety or truth of speech be said to have come to that tree, since that must suppose it to have been somewhere else before. I am far from building so great and so concerning a truth merely upon the stress of this way of expression; yet till the reasoning grounded upon it be disproved, I suppose it is not therefore to be despised, though it may be seconded with much better.

But the men whom we contend with, seem hugely injurious to him, whom they call their Saviour, while they even crucify him in his divinity, which the Jews could never do; making his very kindness an argument against his prerogative. For his condescending to be a man makes them infer that he is no more; and faith must stop here, because sight can go no further. But if a prince shall deign to be familiar, and to converse with those upon whom he might trample, shall his condescension therefore unking him, and his familiarity rob him of his royalty? The case is the same with Christ. Men cannot persuade themselves that a Deity and infinity should lie within so narrow a compass as the contemptible dimensions of an human body: that omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence should be ever wrapt in swaddling clothes, and abased to the homely usages of a stable and a manger: that the glorious artificer of the whole universe, who spread out the heavens like a curtain, and laid the foundations of the earth, could ever turn carpenter, and exercise an inglorious trade in a little cell. They cannot imagine, that He who commands the cattle upon a thousand hills, and takes up the ocean in the hollow of his hand, could be subject to the meannesses of hunger and thirst, and be afflicted in all his appetites: that he who once created, and at present governs, and shall hereafter judge the world, should be abused in all his concerns and relations, be scourged, spit upon, mocked, and at last crucified. All which are passages which lie extremely cross to the notions and conceptions that reason has framed to itself of that high and impassible perfection that resides in the divine nature. For it is natural to men to be very hardly brought to judge things to be any more than what they appear; and it is also as natural to them to measure all appearances by sense, or at the furthest by reason; though neither of them is a competent judge of the things which we are here discoursing of.

2. The second thing to be considered is the state or condition from which Christ came; and that was from the bosom of his Father, from the incomprehensible, surpassing glories of the godhead, from an eternal enjoyment of an absolute, uninterrupted bliss and pleasure, in the mutual, ineffable intercourses between him and his Father. The heaven of heavens was his habitation, and legions of cherubims and seraphims his humble and constant attendants. Yet he was pleased to disrobe himself of all this magnificence, to lay aside his sceptres and his glories, and, in a word, to empty himself as far as the essential fulness of the Deity could be capable of such a dispensation.

And now, if by the poor measures and proportions of a man we may take an estimate of this great action, we shall quickly find how irksome it is to flesh and blood to have been happy, to descend some steps lower, to exchange the estate of a prince for that of a peasant, and to view our happiness only by the help of memory and long reflections. For how hard a task must obedience needs be to a spirit accustomed to rule and to dominion! How uneasy must the leather and the frieze sit upon the shoulder that used to shine with the purple and the ermine! All change must be grievous to an estate of absolute, entire, unmingled happiness; but then to change to the lowest pitch, and that at first, with out inuring the mind to the burden by gradual, intermediate lessenings and declensions, this is the sharpest and most afflicting calamity that human nature can be capable of. And yet what is all this to Christ’s humiliation? He who tumbles from a tower, surely has a greater blow than he who slides from a molehill. And we may as well compare the falling of a crumb from the table to the falling of a star from the firmament, as think the abasement of an Alexander from his imperial throne, and from the head of all the Persian and Macedonian greatness, to the condition of the meanest scullion that followed his camp, any ways comparable to the descension of him who was the brightness of his Father’s glory, and the express image of his person; to the condition of a man, much less of a servant and a crucified malefactor. For so was Christ treated: this was the strange leap that he made from the greatest height to the lowest bottom: concerning which it might be well pronounced the greatest wonder in the world, that he should be able so far to humble himself, were it not yet a greater that he could be willing. And thus much for the second circumstance.

3. The third is, the persons to whom he came, expressed by that endearing term his own; and this in a more peculiar, advanced sense of propriety. For all the nations of the world were his own by creation, and, what is consequent to it, by the right of possession and absolute dominion; but the Jews were his own by a fraternal right of consanguinity. He was pleased to derive his humanity from the same stock, to give them the honour of being able to call the God of heaven and the Saviour of the world their brother.

They were his own also by the right of churchship, as selected and enclosed by God from amidst all other nations, to be the seat of his worship, and the great conservatory of all the sacred oracles and means of salvation. The gentiles might be called God’s own, as a man calls his hall or his parlour his own, which yet others pass through and make use of; but the Jews were so, as a man accounts his closet or his cabinet his own; that is, by a peculiar, uncommunicable destination of it to his own use.

Those who have that hardy curiosity, as to examine the reason of God’s actions, (which men of reason should still suppose,) wonder that, since the design of Christ’s coming was universal, and extending to all mankind, he should address himself to so inconsiderable a spot of the world as that of Palestine, confining the scene of all his life and actions to such a small handful of men; whereas it would have seemed much more suitable to the purposes of his coming, to have made Rome, at that time the metropolis of the western world, and holding an intercourse with all nations, the place of his nativity and abode: as when a prince would promulge a law, because he cannot with any convenience do it in all places, therefore he does it in the most eminent and conspicuous. To which argument, frequently urged by the enemies of Christianity, he who would seek for a satisfactory answer from any thing but the absoluteness of God’s sovereignty, will find himself defeated in his attempt. It was the mere result of the divine good pleasure, that the fountain of life should derive a blessing to all nations, from so narrow and contemptible an head.

And here I cannot but think it observable, that all the passages of the whole work of man’s redemption carry in them the marks, not only of mercy, but of mercy acting by an unaccountable sovereignty: and that for this very reason, as may be supposed, to convince the world that it was purely mercy on God’s part, without any thing of merit on man’s, that did all. For when God reveals a Saviour to some few, but denies him to more; sends him to a people despised, but passes over nations victorious, honourable, and renowned; he thereby gives the world to know, that his own will is the reason of his proceedings. For it is worth remarking, that there is nothing that befalls men equally and alike, but they are prone to ascribe it either to nature or merit. But where the plea of the receivers is equal, and yet the dispensation of the benefits vastly unequal, there men are taught, that the thing received is grace; and that they have no claim to it, but the courtesy of the dispenser, and the largess of heaven; which cannot be questioned, because it waters my field, while it scorches and dries up my neighbour’s. If the sun is pleased to shine upon a turf, and to gild a dunghill, when perhaps he never looks into the bedchamber of a prince, we cannot yet accuse him for partiality: that short, but most significant saying in the evangelist, May I not do what I will with my own? Matt. xx. 15. being a full and solid answer to all such objections.

4. The fourth and last circumstance of Christ’s coming related to the time of it: he came to the Jews, when they were in their lowest and worst condition, and that in a double respect, national and ecclesiastical.

1. And first upon a civil or national account. It was not then with them as in those triumphant days of Solomon, when for plenty, riches, and grandeur, they had little cause either to make friends or to fear enemies, but shone as the envy and terror of all the surrounding neighbourhood. At the best now they were but a remnant, and a piece of an often scattered, conquered, and captivated nation: but two tribes of twelve, and those under the Roman yoke, tributary and oppressed, and void of any other privilege but only to obey, and to be fleeced quietly by whosoever was appointed their governor. This was their condition: and could there be any inducement, upon the common principles and methods of kindness, to visit them in that estate? which could be nothing else but only to share with them in servitude, and to bear a part in their oppression.

The measure of men’s kindness and visits be stowed upon one another, is usually the prosperity, the greatness, and the interest of the persons whom they visit; that is, because their favour is profitable, and their ill-will formidable; in a word, men visit others because they are kind to themselves. But who ever saw coaches and liveries thronging at the door of the orphan or the widow, (unless peradventure a rich one,) or before the house or prison of an afflicted, decayed friend? No, at such a time we account them not so much as our own; that unfriends and unbrothers, and dissolves all relations, and it is seldom the dialect of my good friend, any longer than it is my great friend.

But it was another sort of love that warmed the breast of our Saviour. He visits his kindred, nay, he makes them so in the lowest ebb of all their outward enjoyments, when to be a Jew was a name of disgrace, and to be circumcised a mark of infamy: so that they might very well be a peculiar people, not only because God separated them from all other nations, but because all other nations separated themselves from them.

Secondly. Consider them upon an ecclesiastical account, and so we shall find them as corrupted for a church, as they were despised for a nation. Even in the days of the prophet Isaiah, chap. i. 21, it was his complaint, that the faithful city was become an harlot; that is, notable for two things, as harlots usually are, paint and impurity. Which growing corruption, in all the intervening time, from thence to the coming of Christ, received a proportionable improvement: so that their teachers, and most seraphic adored doctors of the law, were still ranked with hypocrites. For the text of Moses was used only to authorize a false comment, and to warrant the impiety of a perverse interpretation. Still for all their villainies and hypocrisies they borrowed a veil from Moses; and his name was quoted and pretended as a glorious expedient to countenance and varnish over well contrived corruptions: nay, and they proceeded so high, that those who vouched the authority of Moses most, denied the being of immaterial substances, and the immortality of the soul, in which is wrapt up the very spirit and vital breath of all religions: and these men had formed themselves into a standing and considerable sect called the Sadducees; so considerable, that one of them once stepped into the high priesthood: so that whether you look upon the Sadducees or the Pharisees, they had brought the Jewish church to that pass, that they established iniquity by a law, or which is worse, turned the law itself into iniquity.

Now the state of things being thus amongst the Jews at the time of Christ’s coming, it eminently offers to us the consideration of these two things.

First, The invincible strength of Christ’s love, that it should come leaping over such mountains of opposition, that it should triumph over so much Jewish baseness and villainy, and be gracious even in spite of malice itself. It did not knock at, but even break open their doors. Blessing and happiness was in a manner thrust upon them. Heaven would have took them by force, as they should have took heaven: so that they were fain to take pains to rid themselves of their happiness, and it cost them labour and violence to become miserable.

Secondly, It declares to us the immovable veracity of God’s promise. For surely, if any thing could reverse a promise, and untie the bands of a decree, it would have been that uncontrolled impiety which then reigned in the Jewish church, and that to such a degree, that the temple itself was profaned into a den of thieves, a rendezvous of hagglers and drovers, and a place not for the sacrificing, but for the selling of sheep and oxen. So that God might well have forgot his promise to his people, when they had altered the very subject of the promise, and as much as in them lay had ceased to be his people.

We have here finished the first part of the text, and took an account of Christ’s coming to his own, and his coming through so many obstacles: may we not therefore now expect to see him find a magnificent reception, and a welcome as extraordinary as his kindness? For where should any one expect a welcome, if not coming to his own? And coming also not to charge, but to enrich them; not to share what they had, but to recover what they had lost; and, in a word, to change their temporals into eternals, and bring an overflowing performance and fruition to those who had lived hitherto only upon promise and expectation; but it fell out much otherwise, his own received him not.

Nor indeed if we look further into the world shall we find this usage so very strange or wonderful. For kindred is not friendship, but only an opportunity of nearer converse, which is the true cause of, and natural inducement to it. It is not to have the same blood in one’s veins, to have lain in the same womb, or to bend the knee to the same father, but to have the same inclinations, the same affections, and the same soul, that makes the friend. Otherwise Jacob may supplant Esau, and Esau hate and design the death of Jacob. And we constantly see the grand seignior’s coronation purple dipped in the blood of his murdered brethren, sacrificed to reason of state, or at least to his own unreasonable fears and suspicions: but friends strive not who shall kill, but who shall die first. If then the love of kindred is so small, surely the love of countrymen and neighbours can promise but little more. A prophet may, without the help of his prophetic spirit, foresee that he shall have but little honour in his own country. Men naturally malign the greatness or virtue of a fellow-citizen or a domestic; they think the nearness of it upbraids and obscures them: it is a trouble to have the sun still shining in their faces.

And therefore the Jews in this followed but the common practice of men, whose emulation usually preys upon the next superior in the same family, company, or profession. The bitterest and the loud est scolding is for the most part amongst those of the same street. In short, there is a kind of ill disposition in most men, much resembling that of dogs; they bark at what is high and remote from them, and bite what is next.

Now, in this second part of the text, in which is represented the entertainment which Christ found in the world, expressed to us by those words, his own received him not, we shall consider these three things.

1. The grounds upon which the Jews rejected Christ.

2. The unreasonableness of those grounds. And,

3. The great arguments that they had to the contrary.

As to the first of these. To reckon up all the pretences that the Jews allege for their not acknowledging of Christ, would be as endless as the tales and fooleries of their rabbles; a sort of men noted for nothing more than two very ill qualities, to wit, that they are still given to invent and write lies, and those such unlikely and incredible lies, that none can believe them but such as write them. But the exceptions which seem to carry most of reason and argument with them, are these two.

First, That Christ came not as a temporal prince.

Secondly, That they looked upon him as an underminer and a destroyer of the law of Moses.

1. As for the first. It was a persuasion which had sunk into their very veins and marrow; a persuasion which they built upon as the grand fundamental article of all their creed, that their Messiah should be a temporal prince, nor can any thing beat their posterity out of it to this day. They fancied nothing but triumphs and trophies, and all the nations of the earth licking the dust before them under the victorious conduct of their Messiah: they expected such an one as should disenslave them from the Roman yoke; make the senate stoop to their sanhedrim; and the capitol do homage to their temple. Nay, and we find the disciples themselves leavened with the same conceit: their minds still ran upon the grandeurs of an earthly sovereignty, upon sitting at Christ’s right and left hand in his kingdom, banqueting and making merry at his table, and who should have the greatest office and place under him. So carnal were the thoughts even of those who owned Christ for the Messiah; but how much more of the rest of the Jews, who contemned and hated him to the same degree! So that while they were feeding themselves with such fancies and expectations, how can we suppose that they would receive a person bearing himself for the Messiah, and yet in the poor habit and profession of a mean mechanic, as also preaching to them nothing but humility, self-denial, and a contempt of those glories and temporal felicities, the enjoyment of which they had made the very design of their religion? Surely the frustration of their hopes, and the huge contrariety of these things to their beloved preconceived notions, could not but enrage them to the greatest disdain and rejection of his person and doctrine imaginable.

And accordingly it did so: for they scorned, persecuted, and even spat upon him, long before his crucifixion; and no doubt, between rage and derision, a thousand flouts were thrown at him: as, What! shall we receive a threadbare Messiah, a fellow fitter to wield a saw or an hatchet, than a sceptre? For is not this the carpenter’s son? and have we not seen him in his shop and his cottage amongst his pitiful kindred? And can such an one be a fit person to step into the throne of David, to redeem Israel, and to cope with all the Roman power? No, it is absurd, unreasonable, and impossible: and to be in bondage to the Romans is nobler than to be freed by the hand of such a deliverer.

2. Their other grand exception against him was, that he set himself against the law of Moses, their reverence to which was so sacred, that they judged it the unchangeable rule of all human actions; and that their Messiah at his coming was to impose the observation of it upon all nations, and so to establish it for ever: nay, and they had an equal reverence for all the parts of it, as well the judicial and ceremonial as the moral; and (being naturally of a gross and a thick conception of things) perhaps a much greater. For still we shall find them more zealous in tything mint, and rue, and cummin , and washing pots and platters, (where chiefly their mind was,) than in the prime duties of mercy and justice. And as for their beloved sabbath, they placed the celebration of it more in doing nothing, than in doing good; and rather in sitting still, than in rescuing a life, or saving a soul: so that when Christ came to interpret and reduce the moral law to its inward vigour and spirituality, they, whose soul was of so gross a make that it was scarce a spirit, presently defied him as a Samaritan and an impostor, and would by no means hear of such strange impracticable notions. But when from refining and correcting their expositions and sense of the moral law, he proceeded also to foretell and declare the approaching destruction of their temple, and therewith a period to be put to all their rites and ceremonies, they grew impatient, and could hold no longer, but sought to kill him, and thereby thought that they did God good service, and Moses too. So wonderfully, it seems, were these men concerned for God’s honour, that they had no way to shew it, but by rejecting his Son out of deference to his servant.

We have seen here the two great exceptions which so blocked up the minds and hearts of the Jewish nation against Jesus Christ their true Messiah, that when he came to his own, his own rejected and threw him off. I come now in the next place,

2. To shew the weakness and unreasonableness of these exceptions. And,

First, For Christ’s being a temporal monarch, who should subdue and bring all nations under the Jewish sceptre. I answer, that it was so far from necessary, that it was absolutely impossible, that the Messiah should be such an one, and that upon the account of a double supposition, neither of which, I conceive, will be denied by the Jews themselves.

1. The first is the professed design of his coming, which was to be a blessing to all nations: for it is over and over declared in scripture, that in the seed of Abraham, that is, in the Messiah, all nations of the earth should be blessed. But now if they mean this of a temporal blessing, as I am sure they intend no other, then I demand how this can agree with his being such a prince, as, according to their description, must conquer all people, and enslave them to the Jews, as hewers of wood and drawers of water, as their vassals and tributaries, and, in a word, liable upon all occasions to be insulted over by the worst conditioned people in the world? A worthy blessing indeed, and such an one as, I believe, few nations would desire to be beholden to the seed of Abraham for. For there is no nation or people that can need the coming of a Messiah to bless them in this manner: since they may bless themselves so whensoever they please; if they will but send messengers to some of their neighbours, wiser and powerfuller than themselves, and declare their estates and country at their service, provided they will but come and make them slaves with out calling them so; by sending armies to take pos session of their forts and garrisons, to seize their lands, monies, and whatsoever else they have; and, in a word, to oppress, beggar, and squeeze them as dry as a pumice, and then trample upon them because they can get no more out of them: let any people, I say, as they shall like this, apply to some potent, overgrown prince, (whom the fools, his neighbours, shall have made so,) and I dare undertake, that upon a word speaking, they shall find him ready to be such a Messias to them at any time. And yet this was all that the gentile world could gain by those magnificent promises of the Messiah, (as universal a blessing as the prophets had foretold he should be,) if the Jews opinion concerning the nature of his kingdom over the rest of the world should take place. But since they judge such a kind of government so great a blessing to mankind, it is pity but they should have a large and lasting enjoyment of it themselves, and be made to feel what it is to be peeled and polled, fleeced and flayed, taxed and trod upon by the several governments they should happen to fall under; and so find the same usage from other princes which they had so liberally designed for them, under their supposed Messiah: as indeed through the just judgment of God they have in a great measure found ever since the crucifixion of Christ.

Second. The other supposition upon which I disprove the Messiah’s being such a temporal prince, is the unquestionable truth of all the prophecies recorded of him in scripture; many of which declare only his sufferings, his humility, his low despised estate; and so are utterly incompatible with such a princely condition. Those two, the first, Psalm xxii. the other in Isaiah liii. are sufficient proofs of this. It is not to be denied, indeed, that several have at tempted to make them have no respect at all to the Messiah; but still the truth has been superior to all such attempts. The Jewish rabbies for the most part understand them of the whole body of the people of Israel: and

See more of this in the following discourse on Isaiah liii. 8.

Well therefore, taking it for manifest, and that upon all the grounds of rational and unforced interpretation, that the person here spoken of was the Messias, and that this Messias could be no other than Jesus of Nazareth, the great mediator of the second covenant, very God, and very man, in whom every tittle of this prophecy is most exactly verified, and to whom it does most peculiarly and incommunicably agree; we shall proceed now to take an account of the several parts of the text, in which we have these three things considerable.

First, The suffering itself; he was stricken.

Secondly, The nature of the suffering, which was penal, and expiatory; he was stricken for transgression: and,

Thirdly, The ground and cause of this suffering, which was God’s propriety in, and relation to, the persons for whom Christ was stricken, implied in this word, my people: for the transgression of my people was he stricken.

Of each of which in their order: and,

First, For the suffering itself: he was stricken. The very word imports violence and invasion from without. It was not a suffering upon the stock of the mere internal weaknesses of nature, which carries the seeds and causes of its dissolution in its own bowels, and so by degrees withers and decays, and at length dies, like a lamp that for want of oil can burn no longer; but like a torch in its full flame beat and ruffled, and at length blown out by the breath of a north wind: so was Christ dealt with in the very prime and vigour of his years, being by main force torn and stricken out of the world. Blows did the work of time, and stripes and spears were in stead of age to put a period to his afflicted life. Now the greatness of this suffering will be made out to us upon these three accounts.

First, Upon the account of the latitude and extent of it.

Secondly, Of the intenseness and sharpness of it: and,

Thirdly, Of the person inflicting it.

First, As for the latitude or extent of it. The blow reached every part of his humanity, carrying the grief all over, till, by an universal diffusion of itself, it entered, according to the Psalmist’s expression, like water into his bowels, or like oil into his bones. It spread itself into every part of his body, as if it had been another soul. Nothing was free from suffering that could suffer. Suffering seemed to be his portion, his inheritance, nay, his very property. Even the religion that he came to propagate and establish was a suffering religion, and by the severest method of establishment, he gave the first and the greatest instance of it in himself. He who would recount every part of Christ that suffered, must read a lecture of anatomy. From the crown of the head to the sole of the foot, there was nothing but the traces of pain and suffering: they made long furrows upon his back, says the Psalmist; they did, as it were, tear and plough up his innocent body. In his person we might have seen grief in its height and supremacy; grief triumphant, crowned, and arrayed in purple; grief reigning, and doing the utmost that it was able. It is a subject too well known, and too frequently discoursed of, to make descriptions of the thorns, the spears, and the nails, that acted their several parts in this tragedy, and that so, that the very narrative of our Saviour’s passion cannot but beget another in every pious hearer of it. But when we have said the utmost of his bodily sufferings, we still know that nature has provided a support able to make and stand up against all these: for the strength and firmness of a resolved mind will bear a man above his infirmity, as the breath bears up the body from sinking: but when the supporter itself fails, when the primum vivens and the ultimum moriens has had a mortal blow, and the iron enters into the very soul, then baffled nature must surrender, and quit the combat, unless seconded and held up by something greater and mightier than itself. And this was our Saviour’s condition. There was a sword which reached his very spirit, and pierced his soul, till it bled through his body; for they were the struggles and agonies of the inward man, the labours and strivings of his restless thoughts, which cast his body into that prodigious sweat. For though it was the flesh that sweated, it was the spirit that took the pains. It was that which was then treading the winepress of God’s wrath alone, till it made him red in his apparel, and dyed all his garments with blood. What thought can reach, or tongue express, what our Saviour then felt within his own breast! The image of all the sins of the world, for which he was to suffer, then appeared clear and lively, and express to his mind. All the vile and horrid circumstances of them stood, as it were, particularly ranged before his eyes in all their dismal colours. He saw how much the honour of the great God was abused by them, and how many millions of poor souls they must inevitably have cast under the pressures of a wrath infinite and intolerable, should he not have turned the blow upon himself. The horror of which then filled and amazed his vast apprehensive soul, and those apprehensions could not but affect his tender heart, then brimful of the highest zeal for God’s glory, and the most relenting compassion for the souls of men, till it fermented and boiled over with transport and agony, and even forced its way through all his body in those strange ebullitions of blood, not to be paralleled by the sufferings of any person recorded in any history whatsoever. It was this which drew those doleful words from him, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, &c. Περίλυπός ἐστιν ἡ ψυχή μου. It was surrounded, and, as it were, besieged with an army of sorrows. And believe it, his soul was too big and of too strong a make to bend under an ordinary sorrow. It was not any of those little things which make us put the finger in the eye, as loss of estate, friends, preferment, interest, and the like, things too mean to raise a tumult in the breast of a resolved stoick, and much less in his, who both placed and preached happiness, not only in the want, but in the very defiance of them.

And now after this his agony in the garden, I need not much insist upon the wounds given his reputation by the sword of a blaspheming tongue, the sharpest of all others, and which, like a poisoned dagger, hurting both with edge and venom too, at the same time both makes a wound and prevents its cure. Even a guilty person feels the sting of a malicious report; and if so, much more must one who is innocent, and yet infinitely more must he, who was not only innocent, but innocence itself. Reputation is tender, and for it to be blown upon is to be tainted; like a glass, the clearer and finer it is, the more it suffers by the least breath. And therefore for him, who came to destroy the kingdom of Satan, to be traduced as a partner with, and an agent for Beelzebub; for him, whose greatest repasts were prayer and abstinence, and the most rigid severities upon himself, to be taxed as a wine-bibber, and a good fellow; for him, who came into the world both in life and death to bear witness to the truth, to suffer as an impostor and a deceiver; what could be more grievous and afflicting to a great innocence, joined with as great an apprehension!

However, his church gains this great advantage of comfort by it, that the worst of sufferings comes sanctified to our hands by the person of our grand example, who was reviled and slandered, and tossed upon the tongues of men before us. A greater martyrdom questionless than to be cast, as the primitive Christians were, to the mouths of lions, which are tender and merciful compared to the mouths of men; whether we look upon that bitter spirit which acted in those Jews, or in some Christians nowadays worse than Jews; men, who seem to have out done all before them in the arts of a more refined malice and improved calumny. Qualities lately sprung up out of the stock of a spreading atheism, and a domineering, reigning sensuality; sins now made national and authentic, and so much both judgment and mercy-proof, that it is well if we can be cured without being cut off. But to return to the business before us. We have now seen the first thing setting forth the greatness of this suffering; to wit, the latitude and extent of it; as that it seized both body and soul, and every part and faculty of both.

Secondly. The next thing declaring its greatness was the intenseness and sharpness of it. We have seen already how far it went; we are now to consider how deep. It fell not on him like a dew or mist, which only wets the surface of the ground, but like a pouring soaking rain, which descends into the very bowels of it. There was pain enough in every single part to have been spread in lesser proportions over the whole man. Christ suffered only the exquisiteness and heights of pain, without any of those mitigations which God is pleased to temper and al lay it with as it befalls other men; like a man who drinks only the spirits of a liquor separated and extracted from the dull, unactive body of the liquor itself. All the force and activity, the stings and fierceness of that troublesome thing were, as it were, drained and distilled, and abridged into that cup which Christ drank of. There was something sharper than vinegar, and bitterer than gall, which that draught was prepared and made up with. We cannot indeed say, that the sufferings of Christ were long in duration; for to be violent and lasting too is above the methods or measures of nature. But he who lived at that rate, that he might be said to live an age every hour, was able to suffer so too; and to comprise the greatest torments in the shortest space; which yet by their shortness lost nothing of their force and keenness; as a penknife is as sharp as a spear, though not so long. That which promotes and adds to the impressions of pain, is the delicate and exact crasis and constitution of the part or faculty aggrieved. And there is no doubt but the very fabric and complexion of our Saviour’s body was a masterpiece of nature, a thing absolutely and exactly framed, and of that fineness as to have the quickest and most sensible touches of every object; and withal to have these advanced by the communion of his admirably made body, with his high and vigorous intellectuals. All which made him drink in pain more deeply, feel every lash, every wound with so much a closer and a more affecting sense. For it is not to be doubted but a dull fellow can endure the paroxysms of a fever, or the torments of the gout or stone, much better than a man of a quick mind and an exalted fancy; because in one pain beats upon a rock or an anvil, in the other it prints itself upon wax. One is even born with a kind of lethargy and stupefaction into the world, armed with an iron body and a leaden soul against all the apprehensions of ordinary sorrow; so that there is need of some pain to awaken such an one, and to convince him that he is alive: but our Saviour, who had an understanding too quick to let any thing that was intelligible escape it, took in the dolorous afflicting object in its full dimensions. He saw the utmost evil of every one of those strokes, which the guilt of our sins inflicted on him; and what his eye saw, his heart proportion ably felt: for surely they must needs have been inconceivably afflicting, in the actual endurance, which were so dreadful in their very approach, that the horror of them put the man of God’s right hand, the man made strong for that very purpose, to start back, and decline the blow, could the avoidance of it have stood with the decrees of Heaven. Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: which yet was not the voice of cowardice, but of human nature; nature, which by its first and most essential principle would have saved itself, might it have consisted with the saving of the world.

Thirdly. The third thing setting forth the greatness of this suffering, is the cause and author of it, which was God himself. The measure of every passion is the operation of the agent. And then we know what omnipotence can do; omnipotence employed, or rather inflamed by justice, in whose quarrel it was then engaged. We must not measure the divine strokes by the proportion of those blows which are inflicted by the greatest and most exasperated mortal; the condition of whose nature sets bounds to his power, when it cannot to his rage: so that, in the utmost executions of it, he acts but like a wasp; very angrily indeed, but very weakly. Every blow inflicted by the fiercest tyrant can reach no further than the body; and the body is but the dwellingplace, not any part of the soul; and consequently can no more communicate its ruins to that, than a man can be said to be wounded in his person because a wall of his house was broken down. Upon which account there have been some, whose souls have been so fortified with philosophy and great principles, as to enable them to laugh in Phalaris’s bull, to sing upon the rack, and to despise the flames. For still, when God torments us by the instrumental mediation of the creature, his anger can fall upon us in no greater proportions than what can pass through the narrow capacities of a created being. For be the fountain never so full, yet if it communicates itself by a little pipe, the stream can be but small and inconsiderable, and equal to the measures of the conveyance. God can no more give his power than his glory to another; there is no mortal arm can draw his bow: God cannot thunder or lighten by proxy. He alone is the Father of spirits; and none can reach the conscience but he who made it: and therefore, being to discharge the utmost of his vindictive justice upon the sins of mankind, then charged upon our Saviour, he took the sword into his own hand, entered the lists, and dealt with him immediately by himself. And then we find the difference of our Saviour’s suffering by the difference of his behaviour. While he was buffeted, scourged, and nailed to the cross, we hear nothing from him; but, like a lamb before the shearers, he was dumb: not because he could not, but because he scorned to roar under the impressions of a finite anger. But when God reached forth his hand, and darted his immediate rebukes into his very soul and spirit, (as he did while he was hanging upon the cross,) then he cries out, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Silence upon such a loss would have been but stupidity, and patience an absurdity; for when God withdrew his presence from him, that darkness which then covered the face of the whole earth was but a faint emblem of that blacker cloud of despair which had overcast his soul. It is not possible for us to conceive the utmost weight of those heavy strokes inflicted by the Almighty himself upon our Saviour. All the representations and little draughts of them made by words and fancy, are vastly short of the keen impressions of sense. But yet that which gives us the nearest resemblance of them, surely, is the torment of a guilty mind under a state of desertion; when God shall turn the worm of conscience into a scorpion, and smite it with the secret invisible stings of his wrath, such as shall fester and rage inwardly, gnaw and rake the very entrails of the soul. The burden and anguish of this has been sometimes so insupportable, that some have professed themselves to envy the condition of Judas and the damned spirits, as thinking the endurance of those flames more tolerable than the expectation, and accordingly have done violence to their own lives, and so fled to hell as to a sanctuary, and chose damnation as a release. Far were such persons, God knows, from bettering their condition by completing that which they could not bear in the very beginnings and foretastes of it; yet, how ever, it demonstrates to us the unspeakable wretchedness of a guilty soul labouring under the hand of God. And by the way, let the boldest, the hardiest, and the securest sinner know, that God is able, with out ever touching him either in his estate, his health, his reputation, or any other outward enjoyment dear to him, but merely by letting a few drops of his wrath fall upon his guilty conscience, so to scald and gall him with the lively sense of sin, that he shall live a continual terror to himself, carry about him an hell in his own breast, which shall echo to him such peals of vengeance every hour, that all the wine and music, all the honours and greatness of the world shall not be able to minister the least ease to his heartsick and desponding soul. Now in these torments of a guilty conscience we have some little image of the pains then suffered by our Saviour, the greatness of both being founded upon the same reason, namely, that God is the sole and immediate inflicter of such strokes: and then surely the suffering must needs be grievous, when infinite justice passes sentence, and infinite power does execution.

And thus I have finished the first general thing proposed from the text, which was the suffering itself, expressed in these words, he was stricken, and that by considering the latitude, the intenseness, and also the cause of it: all of them so many arguments to demonstrate to us its unparalleled greatness.

2. The second general thing proposed was the nature and quality of this suffering; namely, that it was penal and expiatory; he was stricken for transgression. And to prove that it was penal, there needs no other argument to any clear, unbiassed understanding, than the natural, genuine, and unconstrained use of the word: for what other sense can there be of a man’s being stricken or suffering for sin, but his being punished for sin? And that I am sure is spoke so plain and loud by the universal voice of the whole book of God, that scripture must be crucified, as well as Christ, to give any other tolerable sense of it. But since heresy has made such bold invasions upon those sacred writings, we will consider both those senses which these words are asserted to be capable of.

1. First of all then, some assert, that to be stricken for transgression imports not here a punishment for sins past, but a prevention or taking away of sin for the future. So that Christ is said to be stricken, to suffer, and to die for sin, because by all this he confirmed to us an excellent and holy doctrine, the belief of which has in it a natural aptness to draw men off from their sins. In a word, because Christianity tends to make men holy, and cease from sin, and because Christ by his blood sealed the truth of Christianity, therefore is he said to die for sin; a strange and remote deduction, and such an one as the common rules and use of speaking would never have suggested. But then besides, because it is easy to come upon the authors of this perverse interpretation, by demanding of them, what fitness there could be in Christ’s death to confirm his doctrine? And what reason the world could have to believe Christianity true, because the author of it, a pious, innocent, excellent person, was basely and cruelly put to death? Therefore they further say, that this effect of its confirmation is really and indeed to be ascribed to his subsequent resurrection, though only his death be still mentioned; that being the most difficult and heroic passage of all, that he either did or suffered for our sakes, and consequently the greatest instance of his patience, and persuasion of the truth of that doctrine for which he suffered. But by their favour, if Christ is said no otherwise to die for sin, than because he delivered a doctrine, the design of which was to draw men off from sin, and which was confirmed to be true only by his resurrection; how comes it to pass that this effect is still joined with his death, but never with his resurrection? It being said over and over, that he died for sin, suffered and bled for sin, but never that he rose again for sin. It is indeed said once, that he rose again for our justification; but in the very foregoing words it is said, that he was delivered to death for our offences: which shews that those words, for our offences, and for our justification, have there a very different sense, and bear a different relation to the words with which they are joined, in that as well as in the other scriptures. But this whole invention is so forced and far-fetched, and so much out of the road of common reason, that it is impossible it should gain but by the strengths and prepossessions of prejudice; and where prejudice stands for judgment, for ought I see, it is as vain to urge arguments as to quote scriptures.

2. The other sense of these words, and which alone the catholic church receives for true, is, that Christ’s being stricken for sin, signifies his being punished for sin; the word for in this case denoting the antecedent meritorious cause of his suffering, and not the final, as the school of Socinus does assert; and consequently must directly relate to the removal of the guilt of sin, and not the power, as is also affirmed by the same persons. Now that Christ’s suffering and being stricken for transgression, imports that suffering to have been penal and expiatory, as it might with the highest evidence be demonstrated from several scriptures; so at this time I shall confine myself within the limits of the chapter from whence I took my text: and here I shall found the proof of it upon these two expressions.

First, That Christ is said to have borne our sins, in the 12th verse. Now, to bear sin is an Hebrew phrase for that which in Latin is luere peccatum, and in English to be punished for sin. And if to bear another man’s sin or iniquity by suffering, does not imply the undergoing of the punishment due to that man’s sin; we must invent a new way of expounding profane writers as well as sacred, and of interpreting the common speeches of men, as well as the word of God.

Secondly, Because the evangelist St. Luke follows the translation of the Septuagint, (who, little minding the Hebrew pointings, rendered the word חֶבְלֵי not by σχοιωία, cords or bands, but ὠδῖνας pains,) we are therefore not to balk so great an authority, but to see how the scheme of the text may be made clear and agreeable even to this exposition.

To this therefore I answer,

First, That the words contain in them an Hebraism, viz. the pains of death, for a painful death; as it is said, Matth. xxiv. 15. the abomination of desolation, for an abominable desolation; and so the resurrection loosed Christ from a painful death, not indeed painful in sensu composito, as if it were so at the time of his release from it, but in a divided sense, (as the logicians speak,) it loosed him from a continuance under that death; which, relating to the time of his suffering it, was so painful.

2. But secondly, I answer further, that though the pains of death ceased long before the resurrection, so that this could not in strictness of sense be said to remove them; yet, taking in a metonymy of the cause for the effect, the pains of death might be properly said to have been loosed in the resurrection, because that estate of death into which Christ was brought by those foregoing pains was then conquered and completely triumphed over. Captivity under death and the grave was the effect and consequent of those pains; and therefore the same deliverance which discharged Christ from the one, might not improperly be said to loose him from the other. And thus Christ was no sooner bound, but within a little time he was loosed again. He was not so much buried, as for a while deposited in the grave for a small inconsiderable space: so that even in this respect he may not inelegantly be said to have tasted of death; for a taste is transient, short, and quickly past. God rescued him from that estate, as a prey from the mighty, and a captive from the strong: and though he was in the very jaws of death, yet he was not devoured. Corruption, the common lot of mortality, seized not on him: worms and putrefaction durst not approach him: his body was sacred and inviolable; as sweet under ground as above it, and in death itself retaining one of the highest privileges of the living.

3. Come we now to the last and principal thing proposed; namely, the ground of Christ’s resurrection, which was its absolute necessity, expressed in these words, because it was not possible that he should be holden of it: and that according to the strictest and most received sense of the word possible. For it was not only par et aequum, that Christ should not always be detained under death, because of his innocence, (as Grotius precariously, and to serve an hypothesis, would have the word δυνατὸν here signify,) but it was absolutely necessary that he should not, and impossible that he should continue under the bands of death, from the peculiar condition of his person, as well as upon several other accounts. And accordingly this impossibility was founded upon these five things:

1. The union of Christ’s human nature to the divine.

2. God’s immutability.

3. His justice.

4. The necessity of Christ’s being believed in.

5. And lastly, the nature of his priesthood. First of all then, the hypostatical union of Christ’s human nature to his divine, rendered a perpetual duration under death absolutely impossible. For how could that which was united to the great source and principle of life be finally prevailed over by death, and pass into an estate of perpetual darkness and oblivion? Even while Christ’s body was divided from his soul, yet it ceased not to maintain an intimate, indissolvable relation to his divinity. It was assumed into the same person; for according to the Creed of Athanasius, as the soul and body make one man; so the divine nature and the human make one Christ. And if so, is it imaginable that the Son of God could have one of his natures rent wholly from his person? His divinity, as it were, buoyed up his sinking humanity, and preserved it from a total dissolution: for, as while the soul continues joined to the body, (still speaking in sensu composito,] death cannot pass upon it, forasmuch as that is the proper effect of their separation; so, while Christ’s manhood was retained in a personal conjunction with his godhead, the bands of death were but feeble and insignificant, like the withes and cords upon Sampson, while he was inspired with the mighty presence and assistance of God’s Spirit.

It was possible indeed that the divine nature might for a while suspend its supporting influence, and so deliver over the human nature to pain and death, but it was impossible for it to let go the relation it bore to it. A man may suffer his child to fall to the ground, and yet not wholly quit his hold of him, but still keep it in his power to recover and lift him up at his pleasure. Thus the divine nature of Christ did for a while hide itself from his humanity, but not desert it; put it into the chambers of death, but not lock the everlasting doors upon it. The sun may be clouded, and yet not eclipsed, and eclipsed, but not stopped in his course, and much less forced out of his orb. It is a mystery to be ad mired, that any thing belonging to the person of Christ should suffer; but it is a paradox to be exploded, that it should perish. For surely that nature which, diffusing itself throughout the universe, communicates an enlivening influence to every part of it, and quickens the least spire of grass according to the measure of its nature, and the proportion of its capacity, would not wholly leave a nature, assumed into its bosom, and, what is more, into the very unity of the divine person, breathless and in animate, and dismantled of its prime and noblest perfection. For life is so high a perfection of being, that in this respect the least fly or mite is a more noble being than a star. And God has expressly declared himself, not the God of the dead, but of the living: and this in respect of the very persons of men; but how much more with reference to what belongs to the person of his Son! For when natures come to unite so near, as mutually to interchange names and attributes, and to verify the appellation by which God is said to be man, and man to be God; surely man so privileged and advanced, can not for ever lie under death, without an insufferable invasion upon the entireness of that glorious person, whose perfection is as inviolable as it is incomprehensible.

2. The second ground of the impossibility of Christ’s continuance under death, was that great and glorious attribute of God, his immutability. Christ’s resurrection was founded upon the same bottom with the consolation and salvation of believers, expressed in that full declaration made by God of himself, Malachi iii. 6. I the Lord change not: therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed. Now the immutability of God, as it had an influence upon Christ’s resurrection, was twofold.

First, In respect of his decree or purpose.

Secondly, In respect of his word or promise.

And first for his decree. God had from all eternity designed this, and sealed it by an irreversible purpose. For can we imagine that Christ’s resurrection was not decreed as well as his death and sufferings? and these in the 23d verse of this chapter are expressly said to have been determined by God. It is a known rule in divinity, that what soever God does in time, that he purposed to do from eternity; for there can be no new purposes in God: since he who takes up a new purpose, does so because he sees some ground to induce him to such a purpose, which he did not see before; but this can have no place in an infinite knowledge, which by one comprehensive intuition sees all things as present, before ever they come to pass: so that there can be no new emergency that can alter the divine resolutions. And therefore it having been absolutely purposed to raise Christ from the dead, his resurrection was as fixed and necessary, as the purpose of God was irrevocable; a purpose which commenced from eternity, and was declared in the very beginnings of time; a purpose not to be changed nor so much as bent, and much less broke, by all the created powers in heaven and earth, and in hell besides. For though indeed death is a great conqueror, and his bands much too strong for nature and mortality; yet when overmatched by a decree, this conqueror, as old as he has grown in conquest, must surrender back his spoils, unbind his captives, and, in a word, even death itself must receive its doom. From all which it is manifest, that where there is a divine decree, there is always an omnipotence to second it; and consequently, that by the concurrence of both, no less a power was employed to raise Christ out of the grave, than that which first raised the world itself out of nothing.

2. Let us consider God’s immutability in respect of his word and promise; for these also were engaged in this affair. In what a clear prophecy was this foretold, and dictated by that Spirit, which could not lie. Psalm xvi. 10. Thou shalt not suffer thy Holy One to see corruption. And Christ also had frequently foretold the same of himself. Now when God says a thing, he gives his veracity in pawn to see it fully performed. Heaven and earth may pass away sooner than one iota of a divine promise fall to the ground. Few things are recorded of Christ, but the rear of the narrative is still brought up with this, that such a thing was done, that it might be fulfilled what was spoken by such or such a prophet; such a firm, unshaken, adamantine connection is there between a prophecy and its accomplishment. All things that are written in the prophets concerning me, says Christ, must come to pass. And surely then the most illustrious passage that concerned him could not remain under an uncertainty and contingency of event. So that, what is most emphatically said concerning the persevering obstinacy and infidelity of the Jews, John xii. 39, 40. that they could not believe, because that Esaias had said, that God blinded their eyes, and hardened their hearts, that they should not see with their eyes, nor understand with their hearts, and so be converted, and he should heal them: the same, I affirm, may, with as great an emphasis, and a much greater clearness to our reason, be affirmed of Christ, that therefore death could not hold him, because the kingly prophet had long before sung the triumphs of his glorious resurrection in the forementioned prediction. In a word, whatsoever God purposes or promises, passes from contingent and merely possible into certain and necessary: and whatsoever is necessary, the contrary of it is so far impossible.

But when I say that the divine decree or promise imprints a necessity upon things, it may, to prevent misapprehension, be needful to explain what kind of necessity this is, that so the liberty of second causes be not thereby wholly cashiered and taken away. For this therefore we are to observe, that the schools distinguish of a twofold necessity, physical and logical, or causal and consequential; which terms are commonly thus explained, viz. that physical or causal necessity is when a thing by an efficient productive influence certainly and naturally causes such an effect: and in this sense neither the divine decree nor promise makes things necessary; for neither the decree nor promise, by itself, produces or effects the thing decreed or promised; nor exerts any active influence upon second causes, so as to impel them to do any thing; but in point of action are wholly ineffective. Secondly, logical or consequential necessity is, when a thing does not efficiently cause an event, but yet by certain infallible consequence does infer it. Thus the foreknowledge of any event, if it be true and certain, does certainly and necessarily infer, that there must be such an event: forasmuch as the certainty of knowledge depends upon the certainty of the thing known. And in this sense it is, that God’s decree and promise give a necessary existence to the thing decreed or promised, that is to say, they infer it by a necessary infallible consequence: so that it was as impossible for Christ not to rise from the dead, as it was for God absolutely to decree and promise a thing, and yet for that thing not to come to pass.

The third reason of the impossibility of Christ’s detention under a state of death, was from the justice of God. God in the whole procedure of Christ’s sufferings must be considered as a judge exacting, and Christ as a person paying down a recompence or satisfaction for sin. For though Christ was as pure and undefiled with the least spot of sin as purity and innocence itself; yet he was pleased to make himself the greatest sinner in the world by imputation, and rendering himself a surety responsible for our debts. For, as it is said, 2 Cor. v. 21. he who knew no sin was made sin for us. When the justice of God was lifting up the sword of vengeance over our heads, Christ snatched us away from the blow, and substituted his own body in our room, to receive the whole stroke of that dreadful retribution inflicted by the hand of an angry Omnipotence.

But now, as God was pleased so to comport with his justice, as not to put up the injury done it by sin without an equivalent compensation; so this being once paid down, that proceeding was to cease. The punishment due to sin was death, which being paid by Christ, divine justice could not any longer detain him in his grave. For what had this been else, but to keep him in prison after the debt was paid? Satisfaction disarms justice, and payment cancels the bond. And that which Christ exhibited was full measure, pressed down and running over, even adequate to the nicest proportions, and the most exact demands of that severe and unrelenting attribute of God. So that his release proceeded not upon terms of courtesy, but of claim. The gates of death flew open before him out of duty; and even that justice which was infinite, was yet circumscribed within the inviolable limits of what was due. Otherwise guilt would even grow out of expiation, the reckoning be in flamed by being paid, and punishment itself not appease, but exasperate justice. Revenge indeed in the hands of a sinful mortal man is for the most part vast, unlimited, and unreasonable; but revenge in the hands of an infinite justice is not so infinite as to be also indefinite, but in all its actings proceeds by rule and determination, and cannot possibly surpass the bounds put to it by the merits of the cause and the measure of the offence. It is not the effect of mere choice and will, but springs out of the unalterable relation of equality between things and actions. In a word, the same justice of God which required him to deliver Christ to death, did afterwards as much engage him to deliver him from it.

4. The fourth ground of the impossibility of Christ’s perpetual continuance under death was the necessity of his being believed in as a Saviour, and the impossibility of his being so without rising from the dead. As Christ by his death paid down a satisfaction for sin, so it was necessary that it should be declared to the world by such arguments as might found a rational belief of it; so that men’s unbelief should be rendered inexcusable. But how could the world believe that he fully had satisfied for sin, so long as they saw death, the known wages of sin, maintain its full force and power over him, holding him, like an obnoxious person, in durance and captivity? When a man is once imprisoned for debt, none can conclude the debt either paid by him or forgiven to him, but by the release of his person. Who could believe Christ to have been a God and a Saviour while he was hanging upon the tree? A dying, crucified God, a Saviour of the world who could not save himself, would have been exploded by the universal consent of reason as an horrible paradox and absurdity. Had not the resurrection followed the crucifixion, that scoff of the Jews had stood as an unanswerable argument against him, Mark xv. 31. Himself he cannot save; and in the 32d verse, Let him come down from the cross, and we will believe in him. Otherwise, surely, that which was the lowest instance of human weakness and mortality could be no competent demonstration of a Deity. To save is the effect of power, and of such a power as prevails to a complete victory and a triumph. But it is expressly affirmed, 2 Cor. xiii. 4. that Christ was crucified through weakness. Death was too hard for his humanity, and bore away the spoils of it for a time. So that, while Christ was in the grave, men might as well have expected that a person hung in chains should come down and head an army, as imagine that a dead body, continuing such, should be able to triumph over sin and death, which so potently triumphs over the living. The discourse of the two disciples going to Emmaus, and expecting no such thing as a resurrection, was upon that supposition hugely rational and significant, Luke xxiv. 21. We trusted, said they, that this had been he who should have redeemed Israel: thereby clearly implying, that upon his death they had let that confidence fall to the ground together with him. For they could not imagine that a breathless carcass could chase away the Roman eagles, and so recover the kingdom and nation of the Jews from under their subjection; which was the redemption that even the disciples (till they were further enlightened) promised themselves from their Messiah. But the argument would equally, nay, more strongly hold against a spiritual redemption, supposing his continuance under a state of death, as being a thing in itself much more difficult. For how could such an one break the kingdom of darkness, and set his foot upon principalities and powers, and spiritual wickednesses in high places, who himself fell a sacrifice to the wickedness of mortal men, and remained a captive in the lower parts of the earth, reduced to a condition, not only below men’s envy, but below their very feet?

5. The fifth and last ground of the impossibility of Christ’s perpetual continuance under a state of death, was the nature of the priesthood which he had took upon him. The apostle, Heb. viii. 4, says, that if he were upon earth, he should not be a priest. Certainly then much less could he be so, should he continue under the earth. The two great works of his priesthood were, to offer sacrifice, and then to make intercession for sinners, correspondent to the two works of the Mosaical priesthood; in which the priest first slew the lamb, and then with the blood of it entered into the holy of holies, there to appear before God in the behalf of the people. Christ therefore, after that he had offered himself upon the cross, was to enter into heaven, and there, presenting himself to the Father, to make that sacrifice effectual to all the intents and purposes of it. Upon which account the apostle, to express his fitness for the priesthood infinitely beyond any of the sons of Aaron, states it upon this, Heb. vii. 25, that he lives for ever to make intercession for us, and upon that very score also is able to save to the uttermost. But surely the dead could not intercede for the living, nor w r as the grave a sanctum sanctorum. Had not Christ risen again, his blood indeed might have cried for vengeance upon his murderers, but not for mercy upon believers. In short, it had spoke no better things than the blood of Abel, which called for nothing but a fearful judgment upon the head of him who shed it. Christ’s death merited a redemption for the world, but Christ while dead could not shew forth the full effects of that redemption. He made the purchase at his death, but he could not take possession till he was returned to life. Ever since Christ ascended into heaven, he has been pursuing the great work begun by him upon the cross, and applying the virtue of his sacrifice to those for whom it was offered. It is affirmed by some, and that not without great probability of reason, that the souls of the saints who died before Christ’s resurrection did not actually enter into a state of complete glory, till Christ, the great captain of their salvation, upon his ascension first entered into it himself, and then made way for others. So that, according to that divine anthem of the church, after that he had overcome the sharpness of death, then at length, and not till then, he opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers. And thus I have given five several reasons, why it was not possible that a state of death should finally prevail over Christ, which was the thing to be proved. And I have nothing further to recommend to your consideration, but only two things, which the very nature of the subject seems of itself to imprint upon all pious minds.

1. The first is a dehortation from sin, and that indeed the strongest that can be. For can we imagine, that the second Person in the glorious Trinity would concern himself to take upon him our flesh, and to suffer, and die, and at length rise again, only to render us the more secure and confident in our sins? Would he neither see nor endure any corruption in his dead body, that we should harbour all the filth and corruption imaginable in our immortal souls? Did he conquer and triumph over death, that we should be the slaves and captives of that which is worse than death? Christ has declared that he will dwell in those whom he assumes into the society of his mystical body: but can we think, that he who passed from a clean new sepulchre into an heavenly mansion, will descend from thence to take up his habitation in the rotten sepulchre of an heart possessed and polluted with the love of that which he infinitely hates? It will little avail us, that Christ rose from a temporal death, unless we also rise from a spiritual. For those who do not imitate as well as believe Christ’s resurrection, must expect no benefit by it.

2. Christ’s resurrection is an high and sovereign consolation against death. Death, we know, is the grand enemy of mankind, the merciless tyrant over nature, and the king of terrors. But, blessed be God, Christ has given a mortal blow to his power, and broke his sceptre. And if we, by a thorough conquest of our sins, and rising from them, can be but able to say, O sin, where is thy power? we may very rationally and warrantably say thereupon, O death, where is thy sting? So that when we come to resign back these frail bodies, these vessels of mortality, to the dust, from whence they were taken, we may yet say of our souls as Christ did of the damsel whom he raised up, that she was not dead, but only slept; for, in like manner, we shall as certainly rise out of the grave, and triumph over the dishonours of its rottenness and putrefaction, as we rise in the morning out of our beds, with bodies refreshed, and advanced into higher and nobler perfections. For the head being once risen, we may be sure the members cannot stay long behind. And Christ is already risen and gone before, to prepare mansions for all those who belong to him under that high relation, that where he is, they (to their eternal comfort) may be also, rejoicing and singing praises and hallelujahs to him who sitteth upon the throne, and to the Lamb for ever and ever.

To whom be rendered and ascribed, as is most due, all praise, might, majesty, and dominion, to eternal ages. Amen.

Secondly, To shew how and by what means God does after such an extraordinary manner save and deliver princes.

Thirdly, To shew the reasons why he does so. And,

Fourthly and lastly, To draw something by way of inference and conclusion from the whole.

Of all which in their order: and,

First, for the first of these; which is to shew upon what account any act of God’s providence may be said to be peculiar and extraordinary. Providence in the government of the world acts for the most part by the mediation of second causes: which, though they proceed according to a principle of nature, and a settled course and tenor of acting, (supposing still the same circumstances,) yet Providence acting by them may, in several instances of it, be said to be extraordinary, upon a threefold account: as,

First, When a thing falls out besides the common and usual operation of its proper cause. As for in stance, it is usual and natural for a man meeting his enemy upon full advantage, to prosecute that advantage against him, and by no means to let him escape: yet sometimes it falls out quite otherwise. Esau had conceived a mortal grudge and enmity against his brother Jacob; yet as soon as he meets him, he falls upon him in a very different way from that of enemies, and embraces him. Ahab having upon conquest got Benhadad, his inveterate enemy, into his hands, not only spares his life, but treats him kindly, and lets him go. That a brother unprovoked should hate, and a stranger not obliged should love, is against the usual actings of the heart of man. Yet thus it was with Joseph, and no doubt with many others. In which, and the like cases, I conceive, things so falling out, may be said to come to pass by an extraordinary act of Providence; it being manifest, that the persons concerned in them do not act, as men of the same principles and interests under the same circumstances use to do. For interest, we say, will not lie, nor make a man false to himself, whatsoever it may make him to others.

Secondly. Providence may be said to act extraordinarily, when a thing falls out beside or contrary to the design of expert, politic, and shrewd persons, contriving or acting in it. As when a man by the utmost of his wit and skill projects the compassing of such or such a thing, fits means to his end, lays antecedents and consequents directly and appositely for the bringing about his purpose; but in the issue and result finds all broke a and baffled, and the event contrary to his intention; and the order of causes and counsels so studiously framed by him, to produce an effect opposite to, and destructive of, the design driven at by those means and arts. In this case also, I say, we may rationally acknowledge an extraordinary act of Providence: forasmuch as the man himself is made instrumental to the effecting of some thing perfectly against his own will and judgment, and that by those very ways and methods which in themselves were the most proper to prevent, and the most unlikely to bring to pass, such an event. The world all the while standing amazed at it, and the credit of the politician sinking: for that nothing seems to cast so just a reproach even upon reason itself, as for persons noted for it to act as notably against it.