Secondly, We shall now, under our next head, endeavour to give some account of those fallacious grounds, upon which the sinner is apt to take up such a confidence, as to believe that he shall be able to carry off his sin clear, without either discovery or retribution. And, no doubt, weak and shallow enough we shall find them all; and such as could never persuade any man to sin, did not his own love to sin persuade him much more forcibly than all such considerations; some of which are these that follow. As,

1. First, men consider the success which they have actually had in the commission of many sins; and this proves an encouraging argument to them to commit the same for the future; as naturally suggesting this to their thoughts, that what they have done so often, without either discovery or punishment, may be so done by them again. For nothing does so much confirm a man in the continuance of any practice, as frequent experience of success in what he does; the proper genuine result of this being confidence.

Some men indeed stumble in their very first entrance upon a sinful course; and this their disappointment frequently proves their cure, by making them to retreat and draw off timely, as being disheartened with so unfortunate a beginning. And it is, no doubt, the singular mercy and indulgence of God to such, thus to cross and turn them out of the paths of destruction; which had they found smooth, safe, and pleasurable, the corruption of their hearts would have infallibly engaged them in them to their lives end. That traveller, surely, has but little cause to complain, who by breaking a leg or an arm at his first setting out upon an unfortunate journey, prevents the losing of his head at his journey’s end; it being but a very uncomfortable way of travelling, to finish one’s journey and one’s life together. Great reason, therefore, have they to own themselves particularly favoured by Providence, who have been stopped and withstood by it, in the very first attempts of any sin, and thereby snatched, as it were a brand, out of the fire, or, which is yet better, have been kept from ever falling into it: their being scorched has prevented their being burnt; while the fright, caused by the danger they so narrowly escaped, has been always fresh upon their memories; and such as come to be thus happily frighted into their wits, are not so easily fooled out of them again. In short, all frustration in the first essays of a vicious course, is a balk to the confidence of the bold undertaker. And therefore, on the contrary, when God is pleased to leave a man under the full sway and power of any vice, he does not concern his providence to lay any block or impediment in such an one’s way, but suffers him to go on and succeed in his villainy, to effect all his projects, and compass the full satisfaction of his lewd desires. And this flushes him up, and makes him hard and insensible; and that makes him venturous and daring; and so locks him fast in the embraces of his sin, while he has not the least surmise of the sadness of the issue, and that the present sweets of sin will and must be bitterness in the end; but, like a sot in a tavern, first drinks himself drunk, and then forgets that there is a reckoning to be paid.

Such an one the Devil accounts he has fast enough; and for that cause, none shall so studiously endeavour to promote a man’s quiet and success in sin, as he, who at present tempts him to it, and will hereafter torment him for it. For the Devil desires not that the sinner should feel any trouble for sin, till he comes to feel it for good and all in that place which is designed only for payment, and not amendment; and where all that he can do or suffer to eternal ages can contribute nothing to his release. And therefore, that the sinner may sleep on soundly in his sin, the Devil will be sure to make his bed soft enough. It is said of the Spaniard, that there are two things much accounted of, and desired by many in the world, which yet he heartily wishes his enemy; one is, that if he be a gamester, he may win; the other, that if he be a courter of women, he may obtain his desires; for that he knows well enough, that either of these courses will, in all likelihood, prove his undoing at long run. In like manner, when the Devil has the management of a sinner, he will spread his wing over him so, that he shall never be alarmed with dangers, disgraces, and other calamitous effects of sin, (if the officious tempter can ward them off,) but shall pursue his vice with ease, safety, and reputation.

And while the sinner can do so, such is the proneness of man by nature to deceive himself in a thing which he passionately desires, that having thus acquitted himself to himself, he takes it for granted, that God will acquit him too; and like our late sanctified, and since justified rebels, concludes, that God and he, forsooth, are still of a mind: in Eccles. viii. 11. Because, says the Wise Man, sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil. Here he gives us an account of the secret reasoning of most sinners hearts; namely, that because God does not confound them in the very act of sin, by some immediate judgment, therefore they resolve upon a more audacious progress in it; and so sing Agag’s requiem to themselves, that surely the bitterness of death is past: but much surer will such find it, that no man’s being past fear makes him past feeling too; nor that the distance of an evil abates the certainty of it. And yet, the great knower of hearts ascribes men’s resolution to sin to such reasonings as these, (as sottish and ab surd as they are;) so that in Psalm 1. having reckoned up several flagitious practices, he adds, in ver. 21. These things hast thou done, and I kept silence, and thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself. God’s silence, it seems, passes with such for his consent, and his not attacking the guilty wretch by a present execution, makes him conclude, that Heaven has passed an act of oblivion upon all his rogueries, so that henceforth he shall live and die a prosperous, indemnified villain, and his sin never find him out. In which case, certainly, for a sinner thus to presume to absolve himself from his own sins, is itself a greater sin than any of those which he can pretend to absolve himself from. But,

2. A second ground upon which men are apt to persuade themselves, that they shall escape the stroke of divine justice for their sins, is their observation of the great and flourishing condition of some of the topping sinners of the world. They have seen perjury and murder nestle themselves into a throne, live triumphant, and die peaceably; and this makes them question whether God will ever concern himself to revenge that hereafter which he seems so much to connive at and countenance here; especially, since men are so generally apt to judge of things and persons according to the present face and appearance of them; that they make the present the sole measure of the future, guide their hopes and their fears by what they actually see and feel; and in a word, make their outward senses the rule and ground of their inmost ratiocinations.

For could we hear the secret language of most men’s thoughts, we should hear them making such kind of answers and replies to the checks of conscience dissuading them from sin, and laying the danger of it before them, as these: Pray, what mischief befell such an oppressor, such a tyrant, or such a rebel? And who passed his life with more affluence and jollity, than such an epicure, such a money-monger, such a tally-broker, and cheater of the public? And have not some dexterous accomptants got estates, and made their fortunes, by a clever stroke or two of their pen? and by a skilful mistake, wrote themselves forty or fifty thousand pounds richer than they were before, in a trice? And did not that discreet Roman, Verres, lighting into a wealthy province, plunder and carry off from thence enough to serve himself, his friends, and his judges too? And why may not others, whose parts lie the same way, follow such lucky examples? and the thriving hypocrites of the present age find as fair quarter from God and man, as any of the former? With such considerations as these, (if they may be called so,) men commonly arm themselves against all the threatenings of the divine judgments; and think that, in the strength of them, they can warrant the most resolute pursuit of their vices for safe and rational. They see not the smoke of the bottomless pit, and so dread not the fire.

Flourishing sinners are indeed plausible arguments to induce men to sin: but, thanks be to God, that for a sinner to spend and end his days flourishing, is a privilege allowed by him to very few; and those only such, as are likely to be much lower in the other world, than ever they were high in this. But,

3. As we have shewn how mightily men are heartened on to their sins by the successful examples of others, as bad as themselves, or perhaps worse; so the next ground, upon which such are wont to promise themselves security, both from the discovery and punishment of their sins, is the opinion which they have of their own singular art and cunning to conceal them from the knowledge, or, at least; of their power to rescue them from the jurisdiction of any earthly judge. The eye of man, they know, is but of a weak sight and a short reach; so that he neither sees in the dark, nor pierces into the cabinet-council and corner-practices of his neighbours; and therefore these sons of darkness, who love to work as well as walk in the dark, doubt not, but to contrive and cast the commission of their villainies under such sure coverts of secrecy, that they shall be able to laugh at all judges and witnesses, and defy the inspection of the most curious and exact inquirers. And this makes them proceed to sin with such bravadoes in their hearts as these: Who shall ever see, or hear, or know what I do? The sun itself, the eye of the world, shall never be conscious to my actions; even the light and the day shall be strangers to my retirements. So that, unless the stones I tread upon cry out against me, and the beam out of the wall accuse, and my own clothes arraign me, I fear no discovery. This is the language, these the inward boasts of secret, or rather self-be fooled sinners.

But now, what if such strange things as these should sometimes come to pass? And it should so fall out, (as it will appear by and by,) that even these dumb, inanimate things are sometimes unaccountably enabled to clamour and depose against the guilty wretch; so that, to the amazement of the world, he is drawn forth into public view, out of all his lurking holes and pavilions of darkness? Why then, upon such surprising accidents as these, some have yet a further asylum to fly to, and reckon that their power and interest shall protect them; and so secure the sinner, notwithstanding the discovery of the sin. And the truth is, if matters stand so with them, that the height of their condition equals the height of their crimes, what care such ungodly great ones, whether or no their sins are known, so long as their persons must not be touched? No, so far are such from excusing or covering their lawless practices, that they choose rather to own and wear them in the eye of the world, as badges of their power, and marks of such a greatness, as has set itself above the reach of either shame or fear: even treason itself dreads not a discovery, if the overgrown traitor be but mighty enough to bear it out; but it shall walk abroad openly, and look the world in the face undauntedly, with all the consciousness of a clamourous guilt, and yet with the confidence of innocence itself. For we must know, that it is not mere guilt, but guilt weak and disarmed, which exposes an offender to the merits of his offence; they are only the minorum gentium malefici, malefactors of a lower form, who break the law, and are hanged for it. Whereas, let a crime be never so foul and so notorious, yet if the wary criminal has so armed and encompassed himself with friends and money, as to stave off all approaches of justice, howsoever his sin may find him out, yet he persuades himself that his punishment cannot; and that is as much as he cares for. For a man’s debts will never fright him, if the officer dares not arrest him; and he will hardly fear breaking the law, who knows that he can trample upon it too. But,

4. The fourth and last ground (which I shall mention) of men’s promising themselves security from the punishment of their sins, is a strong presumption, that they shall be able to repent, and make their peace with God when they please; and this, they fully reckon, will keep them safe, and effectually shut the door against their utmost fears, as being a reach beyond them all. For let a man be never so deeply possessed with a belief of God’s sin-revenging justice, never so much persuaded, that all the wrath which the curse of the law can threaten or inflict, is most certainly entailed, not upon sin only in general, but also upon his own sin in particular; nay, let damnation be always present to his thoughts, and the fire of hell continually flaming in his apprehensions; yet all this shall not be able to take him off from his resolution to sin, and his confidence of escape, because he has an argument in reserve, which he thinks will answer all, to wit, an after-repentance. For if this shall interpose between the commission of sin and the punishment of it, he concludes, upon the stock of all God’s promises to the penitent, that he is past danger; and consequently has outwitted the law and the curse, and so stands rectus in curia, in spite of all the threatenings of death and damnation.

And as he thus reckons that repentance will se cure him, so he doubts not but he can command that when he will; as, according to the doctrine of Pelagius, and his modern admired followers, he certainly may; repentance, in their divinity, being a work entirely in the power of the sinner’s will. So that now the sinner’s main business must be to time his repentance artificially, and to retreat opportunely, before the hand of vengeance be actually upon him: and if he can but prevent, and be too nimble for that; why then, he comes off clear and successful, with flying colours, having enjoyed the pleasures and advantages of his sin, without enduring any thing of the smart or sad consequences of the same.

But now, how wretched an inference this is, for any man to form to himself, and thereby to mock and defy Heaven! and yet how deep it lies in the hearts of most sinners, may easily be observed by men of sense; and will be sadly rued by such as are not so, when it is too late. For this is manifestly the great fort and castle, the citadel and strong tower, which the soul has built to itself, to repair to, whensoever it has a mind to sin both with delight and security too. And were it not for this, it would be impossible for any considering man to satisfy himself in his continuance in any known sin for one moment. For he could not, with any consistence with that mighty overruling principle of self-preservation, commit a sin, if he assuredly knew or believed that he should be damned for it; which yet, since the in finitely just and true God has most peremptorily decreed and threatened, unless repentance shall intervene, it is evident, that his whole refuge must He in the intervention of that; which also, he persuades himself, shall, in due time, step in between him and the fatal blow. And this very consideration utterly evacuates the terrifying force of the divine threatening; and by promising the sinner a fair issue of things, both here and hereafter, makes the poor self-deluding and deluded creature conclude, that his sin shall never find him out.

And thus having shewn some of those fallacious grounds, upon which men use to build their confidence of the concealment, or at least of the impunity of their sins, I proceed now to the

Third and last general head, at first proposed by us: which was, to shew the vanity of such a confidence, by declaring those several ways, by which, in the issue, it comes certainly to be defeated; and that both with reference to this world and the next.

And first for this world; there are various ways by which it comes to be disappointed here: as,

1. The very confidence itself of secrecy is a direct and natural cause of the sinner’s discovery. For confidence in such cases causes a frequent repetition of the same action; and if a man does a thing frequently, it is odds, but some time or other he is discovered: for by this he subjects himself to so many more accidents, every one of which may possibly betray him. He who has escaped in many battles, has yet been killed in the issue; and by playing too often at the mouth of death, has been snapped by it at last.

Add to this, that confidence makes a man venturous, and venturousness casts him into the high road of danger, and the very arms of destruction. For while a man ventures, he properly shuts the eyes of his reason. And he who shuts his own eyes, lies so much the more open to those of other men.

2. There is sometimes a strange, providential concurrence of unusual, unlikely accidents, for the discovery of great sins; a villainy committed perhaps but once in an age, comes sometimes to be found out also by such an accident, as scarce happens above once in an age. For there are some sins more immediately invading the great interests of society, government, and religion; which Providence sets itself in a more peculiar manner to detect and bring to light, in spite of all the coverings which art or power can cast over them: such as are murder, perjury, and sacrilege, (all of them accounted sins of the foulest guilt before forty-one, but marks of regeneration with many ever since:) and more particularly for murder; in what a strange, stupendous manner does Providence oftentimes trace it out, though concealed with all the closeness which guilt and skill, and the legerdemain of a well packed and paid jury can secure it by!

Such small, such contemptible, and almost unobservable hints have sometimes unravelled and thrown open the mysterious contexture of the deepest laid villainies, and delivered the murderer into the hands of justice, by means which seemed almost as much above nature, as the sin committed was against it.

And the like instances might be given in many other crying sins, which sometimes cry so long and so loud too, that they come at length to be seen as well as heard, and to alarm the earth as well as pierce heaven. Curse not the king, no not in thy heart, (says the Wise Man, in Eccles. x. 20,) for a bird in the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter: though some, I confess, are of opinion, that such as have no wings are much nimbler and quicker in carrying and telling these matters, than such as have. But to keep to these remarkable words now before us; if the bird upon the house-top (as the text seems to intimate) shall be able (in such a case as this) to tell what is done or whispered within the house; and these inhabitants of the air shall have keys to our chambers and our closets, nay, and to our very hearts too; how can there be such a thing in the world as secrecy? (as the truth is, setting aside all tropes and hyperboles, there is but very little:) and then, if such informers as these find out the treason, we may be sure, that the treason itself will not fail to find out the traitor.

For let a criminal seem never so safe in his own thoughts, and in the thoughts of all about him, yet still he must know, that the justice of God has him in chace, and will one day shew, that it never hunts surer, than when the politicians of the world think it upon a cold scent. For how many strange, intricate, and perplexed villainies have been ript up, and spread far and near, which the subtle actors of them, both before, and in, and after the commission, fully believed could not possibly be discovered? Whereas, on the contrary, it is most certain, that no man, though never so crafty and sagacious, can propose to himself such great unlikelihoods for the discovery of any action, but others, altogether as crafty, have actually failed, and miscarried under the very same, or greater.

And therefore the psalmist, most appositely to our present purpose, observes, Psalm xxxvi. 2, that the sinner flatters himself in his own eyes, till his iniquity be found out: that is the issue; and no wonder, if such a practice comes to such an end.

For whosoever flatters himself, cheats and be trays himself by false reasonings; and by not dealing clearly and impartially with himself, but grounding his presumption of secrecy upon arguments represented to him much firmer and stronger, than his own experience, severely judging, would allow them to be. For, if such an one finds an accident highly improbable, he will presently screw it up, from thence, to impossible, and then conclude, that in so vast a number of contingencies, one of a million shall never hit his case. And very probably it may not. But what if it should? why then, one such unlucky event will fully pay the reckoning for all former escapes; and one treason or felony discovered, will as certainly bring his neck to the block or the halter, as a thousand, were they all of them crowded together into one and the same indictment against him.

3. God sometimes makes one sin the means of discovering another: it often falling out with two vices, as with two thieves or rogues; of whom it is hard to say which is worse, and yet one of them may serve well enough to betray and find out the other. How many have by their drunkenness disclosed their thefts, their lusts, and murders, which might have been buried in perpetual silence, had not the sottish committers of them buried their reason in their cups? for the tongue is then got loose from its obedience to reason, and commanded at all adventures by the fumes of a distempered brain and a roving imagination; and so presently pours forth whatsoever they shall suggest to it, sometimes casting away life, fortune, reputation, and all in a breath.

And how does the confident sinner know, but the grace of God, which he has so often affronted and abused, may some time or other desert, and give him up to the sordid temptations of the jug and the bottle, which shall make the doors of his heart fly open, and cause his own tongue to give in evidence against him, for all the villainies which had lain so long heaped up and concealed in his guilty breast? For let no man think that he has the secrets of his own mind in his own power, while he has not himself so; as it is most certain that he has not who is actually under a debauch: for this confounds, and turns all the faculties of the soul topsy-turvy; like a storm tossing and troubling the sea, till it makes all the foul, black stuff, which lay at the bottom, to swim, and roll upon the top.

In like manner, the drunken man’s heart floats upon his lips, and his inmost thoughts proclaim and write themselves upon his forehead; and therefore, as it is an usual, and indeed a very rational saying, that a liar ought to have a good memory; so upon the like account, a person of great guilt ought to be also a person of great sobriety; lest otherwise his very soul should, some time or other, chance to be poured out with his liquor: for commonly the same hand which pierces the vessel, broaches the heart also, and it is no strange nor unusual passage from the tavern to the gaol.

4. God sometimes infatuates, and strikes the sinner with phrensy, and such a distraction, as causes him to reveal all his hidden baseness, and to blab out such truths, as will be sure to be revenged upon him who speaks them. In a word, God blasts and takes away his understanding, for having used it so much to the dishonour of him who gave it; and delivers him over to a sort of madness, too black and criminal to be allowed any refuge in bedlam. And for this, there have been several fearful instances of such wretched contemners of Heaven, as having, for many years, outfaced all the world, both about them and above them too, with a solemn look and a demure countenance, have yet, at length, had their loathsome inside turned outwards, and been made an abhorred spectacle to men and angels. For it is but just with God, when men have debauched their consciences, to bereave them of their senses also; and to disturb and disarm their reason, so as to disable it from standing upon its guard, even by that last and lowest sort of self-defence, the keeping of its own counsel; for no chains will hold a madman’s tongue, no fetters can restrain the ramble of his discourse, nor bind any one faculty of his soul or body to its good behaviour: but all that is within him is promiscuously thrown out; and his credit, with all that is dear to him, is at the mercy of this unruly member, as St. James calls it, which, in the present case, has no mercy upon him whom it belongs to; nor any thing to govern it, but a violent, frantic humour, wholly unable to govern itself.

5. God sometimes lets loose the sinner’s conscience upon him, filling it with such horror for sin, as renders it utterly unable to bear the burden it labours under, without publishing, or rather proclaiming it to the world.

For some sorts of sin there are, which will lie burning and boiling in the sinner’s breast, like a kind of Vesuvius, or fire pent up in the bowels of the earth; which yet must, and will, in spite of all obstacles, force its way out of it at length; and thus, in some cases of sin, the anguish of the mind grows so exceeding fierce and intolerable, that it finds no rest within itself, but is even ready to burst, till it is delivered of the swelling secret it labours with: such kind of guilt being to the conscience, like some offensive meats to the stomach, which no sooner takes them in, but it is in pain and travail, till it throws them out again.

Who knows the force, the power, and the remorseless rage of conscience, when God commissions it to call the sinner to an account? how strangely it will sift and winnow all his retirements? how terribly it will wring and torture him, till it has bolted out the hidden guilt which it was in search of? All which is so mighty an argument of the prerogative of God over men’s hearts, that no malefactor can be accounted free, though in his own keeping, nor any one concealed, though never so much out of sight; for still God has his sergeant or officer in the sinner’s breast; who will be sure to attack him, as soon as ever the great Judge shall but give the word: an officer so strictly true to his trust, that he is neither to be softened nor sweetened; neither to be begged nor bought off; nor consequently, in a word, fit to be of the jury, when a rich or potent malefactor comes to be tried, in hopes to be brought off.

And this also shews the great importance and wisdom of that advice of Pythagoras, namely, that every man, when he is about to do a wicked action, should, above all things in the world, stand in awe of himself, and dread the witness within him: who sits there as a spy over all his actions; and will be sure, one day or other, to accuse him to himself, and perhaps put him upon such a rack, as shall make him accuse himself to others too.

For this is no new thing, but an old experimented case; there having been several in the world, whose conscience has been so much too hard for them, that it has compelled them to disclose a villainous fact, even with the gibbet and the halter set before their eyes; and to confess their guilt, though they saw certain and immediate death the reward of that confession.

But most commonly has conscience this dismal effect upon great sinners, at their departure out of this world; at which time some feel themselves so horribly stung with the guilty sense of some frightful sin, that they cannot die with any tolerable peace till they have revealed it; finding it some small relief, it seems, and easement of their load, to leave the knowledge of their sin behind them, though they carry the guilt of it along with them.

6. And lastly, God sometimes takes the work of vengeance upon himself, and immediately, with his own arm, repays the sinner by some notable judgment from heaven: sometimes, perhaps, he strikes him dead suddenly; and sometimes he smites him with some loathsome disease, (which will hardly be thought the gout, whatsoever it may be called,) and sometimes again he strangely blasts him in his name, family, or estate, so that all about him stand amazed at the blow; but God and the sinner himself know well enough the reason and the meaning of it too.

Justice, we know, uses to be pictured blind, and therefore it finds out the sinner, not with its eyes, but with its hands; not by seeing, but by striking: and it is the honour of the great attribute of God’s justice, which he thinks so much concerned, to give some pledge or specimen of itself upon bold sinners in this world; and so to assure them of a full payment hereafter, by paying them something in the way of earnest here.

And the truth is, many and marvellous have been the instances of God’s dealing in this manner, both with cities and whole nations. For when a guilt has spread itself so far as to become national, and grown to such a bulk as to be too big for all control of law, so that there seems to be a dispute whether God or sin governs the world; surely it is then high time for God to do his own work with his own hand, and to assert his prerogative against the impudent defiers of it, by something every whit as signal and national as the provocation given; whether it be by war, plague, or fire, (all which we have been visited with, though neither corrected nor changed by;) and to let the common nuisances of the age, the professed enemies of virtue and religion, and the very blots and scandal of human nature itself, know, that there still remains upon them a flaming guilt to account for, and a dreadful Judge to account to.

And thus I have gone over several of those ways by which a man’s sin overtakes and finds him out in this world. As, first, the very confidence itself of secrecy is a direct and natural cause of the sinner’s discovery. Secondly, there is sometimes a strange, providential concurrence of unusual, unlikely accidents, for the bringing to light great villainies. Thirdly, God sometimes makes one great sin a means to detect and lay open another. Fourthly, God sometimes infatuates and strikes the sinner with phrensy, and such a distraction, as makes him reveal all his hidden guilt. Fifthly, God sometimes lets loose the sinner’s conscience upon him, so that he can find no rest within himself, till he has confessed and declared his sin. Sixthly and lastly, God sometimes smites and confounds him by some notable, immediate judgment from heaven.

These, I say, are some of the chief ways by which God finds out the sinner in this life. But what now, if none of all these should reach his case, but that he carries his crimes all his life closely, and ends that quietly, and, perhaps, in the eye of the world, honourably too; and so has the good luck to have his shame cast into and covered under the same ground with his carcass? Why yet, for all this, the man has not escaped; but his guilt still haunts and follows him into the other world, where there can be no longer a concealment of it, but it must inevitably find him out: for, as it is in Daniel vii. 10, when the judgment shall be set, the looks shall be also opened; even those doomsday books, (as I may so call them,) wherein God has kept a complete register of all the villainies that were ever committed against him, which then shall be displayed, and read aloud in the audience of that great and terrible court. The consideration of which, surely, may well put those excellent words of the apostle, in Rom. vi. 21, with this little alteration of them, into our mouths. What fruit can we [now] have of those things, whereof we shall [then] be ashamed? So, what advantage of pleasure, profit, or honour, can the sinner promise to himself from any sin which may be laid in the balance against that infinite and incredible weight of reproach, with which it will certainly pay him home at that day?

For could he persuade the mountains to cover him, or could he hide himself in the bosom of the great deep, or could he wrap himself in the very darkness of hell; yet still his sin would fetch him out of all, and present him naked, open, and defenceless before that fiery tribunal, where he must receive the sentence of everlasting confusion, and where the Devil himself will be sure to do him justice, as never failing to be a most liberal rewarder of all his pimps and vassals, for the secret service done him in this world.

And now, what is the whole foregoing discourse, but a kind of panegyric (such a mean one as it is) upon that glorious thing innocence? I say innocence, which makes that man’s face shine in public, whose actions and behaviour it governs in private. For the innocent person lives not under the continual torment of doubts and fears, lest he should be discovered; for the light is his friend, and to be seen and looked upon is his advantage: the most retired parts of his life being like jewels, which, though indeed most commonly kept locked up in the cabinet, yet are then most admired and valued, when shewn and set forth by the brightness of the sun, as well as by their own.

How poor a thing secrecy is to corrupt a rational man’s behaviour, has been sufficiently declared already, by the survey which we have taken of those several ways whereby the most wise and just Governor of the world is pleased to defeat and befool the confidence of the subtilest and the slyest sinners. We have seen also what paper walls such persons are apt to inclose themselves with; and how slight, thin, and transparent all their finest contrivances of secrecy are; while, notwithstanding all the private recesses and dark closets, which they so much trust in, the windows of heaven are still open over their heads: and now, what should the consideration of all this do, but every minute of our lives remind us so to behave ourselves as under the eye of that God, who sees in secret, and will reward us openly?

To whom be rendered and ascribed, as is most due, all praise, might, majesty, and dominion, both now and for evermore. Amen.

Aristotle held an eternity of the world, viz. as to the heavens and the earth, the principal parts of it. But as to things mutable, he placed that eternity in the endless succession of individuals; which clearly shews, that he meant not, that those individuals should revive, and return to an endless duration. For since he asserted this succession only to immortalize the kind or species, the immortality of particulars would have rendered that succession wholly needless.

As for the Stoics and Epicureans, who, I am sure, were reputed the subtilest and most acute of all the sects of philosophers, we have them in Acts xvii. 32. scoffing at the very mention of rising from the dead. They thought it ridiculous for animated dust once dead to revive, or for man to be made or raised out of it, any more than once. For if that might be, they reckoned that men could not properly be said to die, but rather only to hold their breath for some time, than totally to lose it; and that death might be called a sleep without a metaphor, if we might so soon shake it off, and rise from it again. In short, if Zeno or Chrysippus were alive, they would explode, and if Epicurus himself should rise from the dead, he would scarce believe a resurrection.

But to pass from heathens to those who had their reason further improved by revelation, we have in the Jewish church a great, a learned, and considerable sect, called the Sadducees, wholly discarding this article from their creed; as St. Matthew tells us, in Matth. xxii. 23, and St. Luke, in Acts xxiii. 8, that the Sadducees say, there is no resurrection, &c. as, no doubt, it was their interest (as well as belief) that there should be none.

And lastly, even for some of those who professed Christianity itself, and that in the famous city of Corinth, where most of the gallantry, the wit, and learned arts of Greece flourished, we find some Christians themselves denying it, as appears from that elaborate confutation which St. Paul bestowed upon them in the 15th chapter of his first Epistle to the Corinthians.

Which instances, amongst several others assign able to the same purpose, may suffice to shew, how hardly this article finds credit with those who are led by principles of mere natural reason; and indeed so strange and incredible does it appear to such, (and some others also, though professing higher principles,) that the same power which God exerted in raising Christ from the dead, seems necessary to raise such sons of infidelity to a firm and thorough belief of it. And so I come to the

Second thing proposed, viz. to assign the causes, why natural reason thus starts from the belief of a resurrection: and these may be reckoned of two sorts.

1. Such as are taken from the manifold improbabilities, rendering the matter so exceeding unlikely to the judgment of human reason, that it cannot frame itself to a belief, that there is really any such thing. And,

. Such as are drawn from the downright impossibility charged upon it. Both which are to be considered. And

1st. Those many great improbabilities and unlikelihoods alleged against the resurrection of the same numerical body, are apt to give a mighty check to the mind of man in yielding its belief to it. For who would imagine, or could conceive, that when a body, by continual fraction and dissipation, is crumbled into millions of little atoms, some portions of it rarified into air, others sublimated into fire, and the rest changed into earth and water, the elements should after all this surrender back their spoils, and the several parts, after such a dispersion, should travel from all the four quarters of the world to meet together, and come to a mutual interview of one another, in one and the same individual body again? That God should summon a part out of this fish, that fowl, that beast, that tree, and remand it to its former place, to unite into a new combination for the rebuilding of a fallen edifice, and restoring an old, broken, demolished carcass to itself once more? So that, by such a continual circulation of life and death following upon one another, the grave should become, not so much a conclusion, as the interruption; not the period, but the parenthesis of our lives; a short interval between the present and the future, and only a passage to convey us from one life to another. These things, we must confess, are both difficult in the notion, and hard to our belief. For though, indeed, the word of truth has declared, that all flesh is grass, and man but as the flower of the field; yet the apprehensions of sense will hardly be brought to acknowledge, that he therefore grows upon his own grave, or springs afresh out of the ground. For can the jaws of death relent? or the grave, of all things, make restitution? Can filth and rottenness be the preparatives to glory? and dust and ashes the seedplots of immortality? Is the sepulchre a place to dress ourselves in for heaven, the attiring room for corruption to put on incorruption, and to fit us for the beatific vision? These are paradoxes which nature cannot well digest; mysteries which it cannot fathom; being all of them such, as the common, universal observation of the world is wholly a stranger to.

And thus much for the first cause, which generally keeps men from a belief of the resurrection; namely, the great improbabilities and unlikelihoods attending it; but this is not all; there being yet another and a greater argument alleged against it, and that is, in the

Second and next place, the downright impossibilities charged upon it. And this from the seemingly unanswerable contradictions and absurdities implied in it; and, as some think, unavoidably consequent upon it. Of which, the chief, and most hardly reconcileable to the discourses of human reason, is founded in and derivable from the continual transmutation of one thing into another. For how extravagant so ever the forementioned Pythagorean hypothesis, of the transmigration or metempsychosis of one soul into several bodies, may be justly accounted to be, yet the transmutation of one body into another ought not to be accounted so. For the parts of a body, we know, are in a continual flux, and the decays of nature are repaired by the daily substitution of new matter derived from our nutriment; and when, at length, this body comes to be dissolved by death, it soon after returns to earth; and that earth is animated into grass, and that grass turned into the substance of the beast which eats it, and that beast becomes food to man, and so, by a long percolation, is converted into his flesh and substance. So that such matter or substance, which was once an integral part of this man’s body, perhaps twenty years after his death, by this round or circle of perpetual transmutation, comes to be an integral part of another man’s. Now if there be a resurrection, and every man shall be restored with his own numerical body, perfect and complete, we may propose our doubt in those words of the Sadducees to our Saviour in Matth. xxii. 28, concerning the woman who had been married to several husbands successively: To which of them shall she belong at the last day? for all of them had her. So may it be said of such a portion of matter or substance, which, by continual change, has been an integral part of several bodies: To which of these bodies shall it be restored at the resurrection? For having successively belonged to each of them, either our bodies must not rise entire, or the same portion of substance and matter must be a part of several distinct bodies, and consequently be in several distinct places at the same time, which is manifestly impossible.

Now the foundation of this argument, taken from the vicissitude and mutual change of things into one another, is clear, from obvious and universally uncontested experience; and being so, the restitution of every soul to its own respective body, and to every integral part of it, is a thing to which all principles of natural reason seem a contradiction; and by consequence, if so, not within the power of omnipotence to effect. I say, it seems so; and I will not presume to say more.

The consideration of which drove the Socinians, those known enemies to natural as well as revealed religion, (whatsoever they pretend in contradiction to what they assert in behalf of both,) together with some others, peremptorily to deny that men shall be raised with the same numerical bodies which they had in this world, but with another, which, for its ethereal, refined substance, they say, is by St. Paul termed a spiritual body, 1 Cor. xv. 44. And being here pressed with the very literal signification of the word resurrection, which implies a repeated existence of the same thing, they will have it here used only by a kind of metaphor, viz. that because in death a man seems to the perception and view of sense utterly to perish and cease to be, therefore his restitution seems to be a sort of resurrection. And as for those Greek words ἀναστῆναι and ἐγείρειν, they endeavour to shew, by other like places of scripture, that they signify no more than the bare suscitation, raising, or giving being to a thing, without its having fallen or perished before. As for instance, in Matth. xxii. 24, ἀναστήσει σπέρμα τῷ ἀδελφῷ, he shall raise up seed to his brother. And in Rom. ix. 17, God says of Pharaoh, διὰ τοῦτο ἐξήγειρά σε· for this cause have I raised thee up. Whereas neither of these can be supposed to have perished before that raising. From whence, and some other such like places, they conclude, that these words, applied to the present case, import at most the bare restoration of the man; and that not necessarily by restoring his soul to its old body, but by joining it to a new; accounted indeed the same to all real intents and purposes of use, though not by formal identity; they still affirming, nevertheless, the man thus raised, and with his new body, to be the same person; forasmuch as, they say, it is the soul or spirit which makes the man, and is the proper principle which gives the individuation. This was their opinion.

And thus I have done with the first of the three propositions drawn from the words, viz. the exceeding great difficulty of men’s believing a resurrection. And that, both by proving that actually it is so, from the most authentic examples allegeable in the case, and by assigning withal the reasons and causes why it comes to be so: I proceed now to the second proposition, viz. To shew that, notwithstanding this difficulty, there is yet sufficient reason and solid ground for the belief of it.

And this I shall endeavour to do, both by answering the foregoing objections brought against the resurrection; and withal offering something by way of argument, for the positive proof of it.

Now for the first of these. I shew that the resurrection was argued against upon two distinct heads, viz. The improbabilities attending it, and the impossibilities charged upon it. And,

1. Briefly, as to the objection from the improbabilities said to attend it, and to keep men off from the belief of it; besides that the said objection runs in a very loose and popular, rather than in a close and argumentative way, and looks more like harangue than reasoning, (though yet the best that the thing will bear,) we are to observe yet further, that not every strange and unusual event ought always, and under all circumstances, to be accounted improbable. For where a sufficient cause of any thing or event may be assigned, though above and beyond the common course of natural causes, I cannot reckon that event or thing properly and strictly improbable. Forasmuch as it is no ways improbable, that the supreme agent and governor of all things should, for some great end or purpose, sometimes step out of the ordinary road of his providence, (as undoubtedly he often does,) and of which there are several instances upon record, both in sacred and profane story, relating what strange things have happened in the world, which could not rationally be ascribed to any other, but the supernatural workings of a divine power. Nevertheless, admitting, but not granting the fore-alleged improbabilities of a resurrection, yet this does not at all affect the point now in dispute before us, which turns not properly upon the probability, but the possibility of the thing here discoursed of. And where there is a possibility on the one side, answered by an omnipotence on the other, there can be no ground to question an effect commensurate to both. For a resurrection being allowed possible, though never so improbable, still it is in the number of those things which an infinite power can do; and upon this account we find, that there is a much higher pitch of infidelity, which stops not here, but goes so far on, as to deny the very possibility of it too: and this brings me to the examination of the

Second objection produced against this article of the resurrection, from the utter impossibility thereof, (as the objectors pretend) and that impossibility (as we have shewn) founded upon the continual transmutation of one body into another. This, I say, was the argument; and it seems to me to press the hardest upon the resurrection of the same numerical body, and to be the most difficult to be solved and answered of any other whatsoever. For as for those commonly drawn from the seeming impossibility of bringing together such an innumerable multitude of minute particles, as from a body once dissolved must needs be scattered all the world over into the several elements of fire, air, water, and earth, and reuniting them all together at the last day; I cannot, I say, find any thing in all this either hard or puzzling, and much less contrary to natural reason to believe, if we do but acknowledge an omniscience in the agent, who is to do this great thing, joined with an omni potence in the same. For, by the first of these two perfections, he cannot but know where all and every one of the said particles of the body are lodged and disposed of; and by the latter, he must be no less able to bring them from all parts and places of the universe, though never so vastly distant from one another, and join them again together in the restitution of the said body. Nothing being difficult, either for omniscience to know, or for omnipotence to do; but when the thing to be done is, in the nature of it, impossible; as the fore-alleged argument would infer the resurrection to be.

To which therefore I answer, that the proposition or assertion, upon which the said argument is grounded, is neither evident nor certain; and that we have no assurance, that the transmutation of an human body into other animated bodies, after its dissolution, is total, and extends to all the parts thereof; but that there may be a considerable portion of matter in every man’s body (for of such only we now dispute) which never passes by transmutation into any other animated body, but sinks into and rests in the common mass of matter, contained in the four elements, (according to the respective nature of each particular element wherein it is lodged,) and there continues unchanged by any new animation, till the last day. But what these particular parts are, which admit of no such further change, and what quantity of corporeal substance or matter they make or amount to, I suppose, is known only to God himself, the great disposer and governor, as well as maker and governor of the world.

And whereas it is said in the objection, that such a continual transmutation, as is here supposed, is evident from a general, constant, uncontestable experience; I deny, that the just measures, bounds, and compass of this transmutation can be exactly known by or evident to common experience; forasmuch as it falls not under the cognizance of the out ward senses; and yet it is only that, and the repeated observations made thereby, which experience is or can be founded upon. For who can assure himself, or any one else, upon his own personal sight, hearing, or the report of any other of his senses, that the whole matter of a dissolved body passes successively into other living bodies? (though a great portion of it may, and without question does;) and if, on the other side, he cannot, upon his own personal observation, give a full and exact account of this, can he pretend to tell how and where the providence of God has disposed of the remaining part of the said dissolved body, which has not under gone any such change? This, I say, is not to be known by us, either by any observation of sense, or discourse of reason founded thereupon, and I know of no revelation to adjust the matter. So that, although it should be supposed true, (which we do by no means grant to be so,) that in the dissolution of every human body the whole mass, and every part of the said body, underwent such an entire transmutation as we have been speaking of; yet, since this cannot certainly be known, it cannot come into argumentation, as a proof of that which it is alleged for; unless we would prove an ignotum per ceque ignotum; which being grossly illogical, and a mere petitio principii, can conclude nothing, nor at all affect the subject in dispute, one way or other: forasmuch as in every demonstration of the highest sort, the principles thereof ought to be evident, as well as certain.

The sum of all therefore is this; that every human body, upon its dissolution, sinks by degrees into the elementary mass of matter; whereof a great part passes by several animations into other bodies; and a great part likewise remains in the same elementary mass, without undergoing any further change. To which reserved portion, at the last day, the soul, as the prime, individuating principle, and the said reserved portion of matter, as an essential and radical part of the individuation, together with a sufficient supply of more matter (if requisite) from the general mass, shall, by the almighty power of God joining all those together, make up and restore the same individual person: and this cuts off all necessity of holding, that what was once an integral part of one body, should, at the same time, become an integral part of another, which, it is confessed, for the reason before given, would make the restitution of the same numerical portion of matter to both bodies utterly impossible.

But if it be here replied, that our assertion of a reserved portion of matter never passing into other animated bodies by any further transmutation, (albeit a considerable portion of the same dissolved body be allowed so to do) is a thing merely gratis dictum, and that we have not yet positively proved the same; my answer is, that in the present case, there is no necessity of proving that it is actually so; but it is sufficient to our purpose, that the contrary cannot be proved, and that nothing hinders but that it may be so; the thing being in itself possible: and if that be granted, then the argument, founded upon the supposed impossibility of it, comes to nothing. Forasmuch as being possible, it falls within the compass of God’s omnipotence, which is the great attribute to be employed in this case. And this effectually over throws the whole force of the objection.

But if it be further argued, that the great addition of matter to be made at the last day, out of the common mass, to those remainders of matter, which (having belonged to the same man’s body formerly) are then to be completed into a perfect body again, seems inconsistent with the numerical identity of the body which was before, and that which shall be after wards at the resurrection; I answer, that this is no more inconsistent with the numerical identity thereof, than the addition of so great a quantity of new matter, as comes to be made to a man’s body, by a continual augmentation of all the parts of it, from his birth to his full stature, makes his body numerically another at his grown age, from that which the same person had while he was yet an infant. In both which ages, nevertheless, the body is still reckoned but one and the same in number, though in disparity of bulk and substance, twenty to one greater in the latter than in the former. Accordingly, suppose we further, that only so much matter as has still continued in our bodies, from our coming into the world to our going out of it, shall be reunited to our soul at the resurrection, even that may and will be sufficient to constitute our glorified body in a real, numerical identity with that body which the soul was in before, so as upon all accounts to be still the same body, though in those so very different states and conditions.

And therefore, the opinion of the Socinians, viz. That the soul, at the resurrection, shall be clothed with another and quite different body, from what it had in this life, (whether of ether or some such like sublimated matter,) moved thereto by the forementioned objections, and the like, ought not to be admitted: it being contrary to reason and all sound philosophy, that the soul successively united to two entirely distinct bodies, should make but one and the same numerical person: since though the soul be indeed the prime and chief principle of the individuation of the person, yet it is not the sole and adequate principle thereof; but the soul, joined with the body, makes the adequate, individuating principle of the person. Nor will any true philosophy allow, that the body was ever intended for the mere garment of the soul, but for an essential, constituent part of the man, as really as the soul itself: and the difference of an essential half in any composition will be sure to make an essential difference in the whole compound. Nor is this Socinian assertion more contrary to the principles of philosophy, than to the express words of scripture; which are not more positive in affirming a resurrection, than in declaring a resurrection of the same numerical person. And whereas, they say, that they grant, that the same numerical person shall rise again, though not the same body, (the soul, as they contend, still individuating any body which it shall be clothed with,) we have already shewn, on the contrary, that the person cannot be numerically the same, when the body is not so too; since the soul is not the sole principle of personal individuation, though the chief; besides that it seems very odd, and no ways agreeable to the common sentiments of reason, to say, that any thing rises again, which had never perished nor fallen before, as it is certain that the body, which these men suppose shall be united to the soul at the last day, never did. But to elude the force of this argument, the Socinians pretend, that the words whereby we would infer a resurrection of the same body, to wit, ἀναστῆναι, ἐγείρειν, and ἐγείρεσθαι, &c. infer no such thing in the several texts from whence they are alleged; but only import a bare suscitation, or raising up of a thing, without any necessity of supposing it to have perished before, as being often applied to things entirely produced de novo. But the answer to this is not difficult, viz. that the point now before us is not wholly deter min able from the bare grammatical use of these words; (according to which we deny not, but that they sometimes import a mere suscitation or production of a thing, without supposing any precedent destruction of the same;) but the sense of these words must be sometimes also determined by the particular state and circumstance of the objects to which they are applied; as when they are applied to and used about things bereaved of their former existence, (as persons dead, and departed this life, manifestly are;) and in such a case, whensoever the words ἀναστῆναι, ἐγείρειν, and ἐγείρεσθαι come to be so applied, I affirm, that they can, with no tolerable accord to common sense and reason, be allowed to signify any thing else, but the repetition or restitution of lost existence, or, in other words, the resuscitation of that which had perished before.

And thus much in answer to the objection brought to prove the impossibility of a resurrection of the same numerical body founded upon the continual transmutation of one body into another. The sum of all amounting to this, viz. that if the transmutation of human bodies after death, into other animate bodies successively, be total, the objection, founded upon such a transmutation, is not easy to be avoided; and if, on the other side, it be not total, I cannot see how it proves, that the restitution of the same numerical body carries in it any contradiction, nor, consequently, any impossibility at all. For the point now before us depending chiefly upon the due stating of the object of an infinite power, if the thing in dispute be but possible, it is sufficient to overthrow any argument that would pretend to prove, that an omnipotence cannot effect it. Which consideration having been thus offered by us, for the clearing of the forecited objection, we shall now proceed in the

Second place, to produce something, as we promised, by way of positive proof for the evincing of a resurrection, notwithstanding all the difficulties and repugnancies which seem to attend it. And here, since this is a point of religion, knowable only by revelation, it cannot be positively proved, or made out to us any other way than by revelation, that is to say, by what God has declared in his written word concerning it: for natural reason and philosophy will afford us but little assistance in a case so extremely above both. Accordingly, since revelation is our only competent guide in this matter, the natural method, I conceive, for us to proceed by in our discourses thereupon, must be this, viz. that whereas the objection is, that the resurrection of the same numerical body implies in it a contradiction, and therefore cannot possibly be, even by the divine power itself; the proper answer to this ought to be by an inversion of the same terms after this manner, viz. that God has declared that he will, and therefore can raise the same numerical body at the last day. So that the sum of the whole matter turns upon this point; to wit, whether that which we judge to be or not to be a contradiction, ought to measure the extent of the divine power; or, on the other side, the divine power to determine what is or is not to be accounted by us a contradiction. And the difficulty on either side seems not inconsiderable. For if we take the first of these methods, this in convenience will attend it; that the measure we make use of is always short of the thing we apply it to; as a finite must needs be short of an infinite: and sometimes also false, and thereby not only short of it, but moreover disagreeable to it; it being very possible, (because indeed very frequent,) that the mind of man, even with its utmost sagacity, may be mistaken, and judge that to imply a contradiction which really does not so. But, on the other hand, if we make the divine power the measure, whereby we ought to judge what is or what is not a contradiction, we make that a measure which we do not throughly understand or comprehend; and that is contrary to the very nature and notion of a measure; forasmuch as that by which we would understand another thing, ought to be first understood itself. But how shall we be able to understand the extent of an infinite power, so as to know certainly how far it can go, and where it must stop, and can go no further? As if we should argue thus: This or that implies in it no contradiction, because God, by his divine power, can effect it; I think the inference very good: but for all that, it may be replied, How do you know what an infinite or divine power can or cannot do? Certain it is, that it cannot destroy itself, or put an end to its own being; and possibly there may be some other things, unknown to us, which are likewise under an incapacity of being done by it. And how then shall we govern our speculations in this arduous and perplexing point? For my own part, I should think it not only the safest, but in all respects the most rational way, in any doubtful case, where the power of almighty God is concerned, to ascribe as much to him as his divine nature and attributes suffer us to do: that is to say, that we rather prescribe to our reason from his power, than to his power from any rule or maxim taken up by our reason. And since there is a necessity of some rule or other to proceed by, in forming a judgment of God’s power, no less than of his other perfections; let God’s word or revelation, (in the name of all that pretends to be sensible or rational,) founded upon his infallible knowledge of whatsoever he says or reveals, (and confirmed by his essential veracity inseparably attending it,) be that great rule for us to judge by: for a better, I am sure, can never be assigned, nor a safer relied upon. And accordingly, when our Saviour was to answer the Sadducees, disputing upon this very subject, the resurrection, he argues not from any topic of common reason or natural philosophy, but wholly from the power of God, as declared by the word of God. Do ye not therefore err, says he, Mark xii. 24, because ye know not the scriptures, neither the power of God? or, in other words, the power of God, as declared in scripture. Our Saviour went no further with them, as knowing this to have been home to the point, and sufficient for their conviction. And upon the same account, those remarkable pas sages in the evangelists cannot but be of mighty weight in the present case: as that particularly in Matt. xix. 26, and in Mark x. 27. In both which it is plainly and positively affirmed, that with God all things are possible; and yet more particularly in Luke xviii. 27, where Christ, speaking of some things accounted with men impossible, tells us, that the things impossible with men were possible with God. The antithesis, we see here, is clear and full enough; and yet even with men nothing uses to be accounted impossible, but what is judged by them one way or other to imply in it a contradiction; and if so, it is evident, that the divine power may extend to some things, which, in the judgments of men, pass for contradictions; and consequently, that what, according to their judgments, implies in it a contradiction, cannot be always a just measure of what is impossible for God to do. Nevertheless, in order to the better understanding of this matter, I conceive it may not be amiss to distinguish here of two sorts of contradictions.

1. Such as appear immediately and self-evidently so, from the very terms of the proposition wherein they are expressed: the predicate implying in it a direct negation of the subject, and the subject mutually of the predicate; so that, upon the bare understanding of the signification of the terms or parts of the proposition, we cannot but apprehend and see the contradiction couched under them, and the utter inconsistency of the idea of one with the idea of the other: as if, for instance, we should say, that light is darkness, or that darkness is light; or that a piece of bread of about an inch in breadth, and of an inch in length, is a man’s body of about a yard and an half in length, and of a proportionable size in breadth; each of these propositions or assertions would import a direct and evident negation of the other, upon the very first sight or hearing, without any further examination of them at all. But then,

2. There is another sort of contradictions, which may not improperly be termed consequential. That is to say, such as shew themselves, not by the immediate self-evidence of the terms, but by consequences and deductions drawn from some known principle by human ratiocination or discourse, and the judgment which men use to pass upon things in the strength and light thereof. In all which, since men may be deceived, (nothing being more incident to common humanity than mistake,) such contradictions cannot be so far relied upon, as to be taken for a perfect and sure measure of what the divine power can or cannot do. As for instance, if we should say, “That for a body having been once destroyed, and transmuted into other human bodies, or some parts thereof successively, to be restored again, with all the parts of it complete, and numerically the same, is a contradiction;” it is certain, however, that the contradiction here charged does not manifestly appear such from any evidence of the terms, but is only gathered by such consequences and inferences, as men form to themselves in their discourses upon this subject; and therefore, though possibly a truth, yet can be no clear proof, that it is impossible for an infinite power to do that which is here supposed and said to be a contradiction. But, on the other side, touching the first sort of contradictions mentioned by us, and shewing themselves by the immediate self-evidence of the terms; these, no doubt, ought to be looked upon by us out of the sphere or compass of omnipotence itself to effect: or otherwise, that old and universally received rule, viz. that the divine power extends to the doing of every thing, not implying in it a contradiction, must be exploded, and laid aside by us, as utterly useless and fallacious.

But now, with reference to the foregoing distinction of prime and consequential contradictions, if it should be here asked, whether a contradiction of the latter sort be not as really and as much a contradiction as one of the former; I grant that it is, (there being no magis and minus in contradictions;) but nevertheless, not so manifestly nor so evidently such, nor consequently of so much force in argumentation, nor equally capable of having a conclusion or inference drawn from it, as the other is. For we are to observe, that, in the case now before us, a contradiction is not so much considered for what it is barely in itself, as for its being a medium to prove something else by it; and for that reason, we allow not the same conclusive force (though the same reality, could it be proved) to a consequential contradiction, which we allow to a prime and self-evident one, and such as shews itself to the very first view, in and by the bare terms of the proposition wherein it is contained.

Upon the whole matter therefore, if by true and sound reasoning I stand assured, that God has affirmed or declared a thing, all objections against the same, though never so strong, (even reason itself, upon the strictest principles of it, being judge,) must of necessity fall to the ground. Forasmuch as reason itself cannot but acknowledge, that men of the best wit, learning, and judgment, may sometimes take that for a contradiction, which really is not so; but still, on the other side, must own it utterly impossible for a being infinitely perfect, holy, and true, either to deceive or be deceived in any thing affirmed or attested by it. And moreover, to carry this point yet something further: if a proposition be once settled upon a solid bottom, and sufficiently proved, it will and must continue to be so, notwithstanding any after-arguments or objections brought against it, whether we can answer and clear off the said objections, or no; I say, it lessens not our obligation to believe such a proposition one jot. And if the whole body of Christians, throughout all places and ages, should with one voice declare, that they could not solve the foregoing objection urged against the resurrection, and taken from the continual transmutation of bodies into one another, or any other such like arguments, it would not abate one degree of duty lying upon them, to acknowledge and embrace the said article, as an indispensable part of their Christian faith; nor would they be at all the worse Christians, for not being able to give a philosophical account or solution thereof; so long as, with a non obstante to all such difficulties, they stedfastly adhered to and acquiesced in the article itself. For, so far as I can see, this whole controversy depends upon, and ought to be determined by the scriptures, as wholly turning upon these two points, viz. 1st, Whether a future general resurrection be affirmed and revealed in the scriptures, or no? And 2dly, Whether the said scriptures be the word of God? And if the matter stands thus, I am sure that none can justly pretend to the name of a Christian, who in the least doubts of the affirmative in either of these two points. And consequently, if this article stands thus proved, all arguments formed against it, upon the stock of reason or philosophy, come too late to shake it; for they find the thing already fixed and proved; and being so, it cannot, by after-allegations, be disproved. Since it being also a proposition wholly founded upon revelation, and the authority of the revelation upon the authority of the revealer, all arguments from any thing else are wholly foreign to the subject in dispute; and accordingly ought by no means to be admitted, either as necessary proofs of it, or so much as competent objections against it. For whatsoever is contrary to the word or affirmation of a being infinitely knowing and essentially infallible, let it carry with it never so much shew of truth; yet it certainly is and can be nothing else but fallacy and imposture. And upon this one ground I firmly do and ought to believe a general resurrection, though ten thousand arguments from the principles of natural philosophy could be opposed to it. But may it not then, you will say, upon the same terms, be here argued, that Jesus Christ (who is God blessed for ever) having expressly said of the bread in the holy sacrament, This is my body, we ought to believe the said piece of bread to be really and substantially his body, how much soever we may apprehend it to contradict the principles of sense, reason, and philosophy? To this I answer; That the words here alleged, as pronounced by our Saviour, are confessedly in the holy scripture. But that every thing affirmed by God in scripture, is there affirmed and intended by him, literally, properly, and not figuratively, this I utterly deny. And since it is agreed to by all, (and even by those whom in this matter we contend with,) that many expressions in scripture cannot be understood but by a figure; and since, moreover, I grant and assert, that every thing affirmed by God in holy scripture ought to be believed in that sense only in which it is so affirmed; I will venture to allow the persons, who are for the literal sense of those particular words against the figurative, till doomsday, to prove that the literal sense only ought to take place here, and the figurative to be exploded and set aside; and if they can but prove this, I shall not fail, as I said before, to believe and assent to the thing so proved, whatsoever that, which the world calls common reason and philosophy, shall or can suggest and offer to the contrary.

And this, I hope, may suffice to have been spoken upon the second proposition assigned for the prosecution of this subject, namely, That notwithstanding all the difficulties and objections alleged against the article of a general resurrection, there is yet sufficient reason and solid ground for the belief of it. From whence we should now proceed to treat of the third and last proposition; to wit, That a sufficiency of reason being thus given for the belief of the said article, all the difficulties, and seeming repugnancies to reason, which it is charged with, do exceedingly enhance the worth, value, and excellency of that belief.

But this, as I reckon, having been, in effect, done by us already; and the whole matter set in a full view, partly by clearing off the objections pretended to be brought against it, from natural reason, in the two foregoing propositions; and partly by establishing the proof thereof, upon the sure basis of those three great attributes of God, his omniscience, his omnipotence, and his essential veracity, all of them employed to warrant and engage our assent to it; we shall now at length come to consider the same more particularly in some of the consequences deducible from it. Such as are these two that follow. As,

1. We collect from hence the utter insufficiency of bare natural religion to answer the proper ends and purposes which God intended religion for. And,

2. We infer from hence also, the diabolical impiety of the Socinian opinions; and particularly of those relating to the resurrection. And here,

1. For the first of these, the insufficiency of natural religion to answer the proper ends which religion was designed for. This is most certain, that natural religion exceeds not the compass of natural reason; it neither looks higher nor reaches further, but both of them are commensurate to one another; and it is every whit as certain, that the soul of man, being the proper seat and subject of religion, must needs be allowed to be immortal; and being withal both endued with and acted by the affections of hope and fear, that it must be supplied with objects proper and adequate to both, which yet nothing under an eternal happiness with respect to the one, and an eternal misery with reference to the other, together with a general resurrection from the dead, to render men capable of either, can possibly be. So that it is manifest, from the very nature and essentials of religion, supposing it perfect, that the particulars now alleged by us necessarily do and must come up to the utmost of what they stand alleged for. But then, on the other hand, can mere natural reason of itself, by full evidence and strength of argument, convince us of any of the aforesaid particulars? As, for instance, can it demonstrate that the soul is immortal? Or can it certainly prove, that there is a future and eternal state of happiness or of misery in another life? And that, in order to it, there shall be a resurrection of their mortal bodies, after an utter dissolution of them into dust and ashes? No, there is nothing in bare reason that can so much as pretend to evince demonstratively any of these doctrines or assertions. And what then can natural religion do or say in the case? For where the former is at a stand, the latter can go no further; so that there is an absolute necessity, if we would have any more certain knowledge of these matters, to fetch it from revelation: forasmuch as the great apostle himself assures us, in 1 Cor. ii. 9, that eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man to conceive, what things God has prepared for those that love him; nor consequently, (by a parity of reason,) what miseries he has prepared for those that hate him. And if both of them are a perfect nonplus and baffle to all human understanding, is it possible for natural reason to comprehend what the heart of man cannot conceive? Nothing certainly can be a grosser contradiction, and that in the very terms of it, than such an assertion. But some perhaps may here say, that though natural reason, by its own strength and light, cannot give us a clear and particular account what these things are; yet it may, however, be able to discover to us, that really there are such things. But, in answer to this also, the same apostle tells us, in 2 Tim. i. 10, that it was our Saviour Christ who brought life and immortality to light through the gospel; that is to say, cleared off all doubts about the immortal state and being of the soul, the everlasting felicities of the righteous, and the never-dying worm and torments of the wicked in another world. Touching all which, I affirm, that nothing but divine revelation could give any solid satisfaction to the minds of men, either as to the quid sit or the quod sit of these things; that is to say, either by declaring the nature of them, what they are; or by proving the existence and being of them, that they are; besides, that the very expression of bringing a thing to light, must needs import its being hidden or undiscovered (at least to any considerable purpose) before. But some possibly may here further object, that the heathens could not but, long before the times of our Saviour, have had a competent knowledge of these matters. For did they not, by what they discoursed of the Elysian fields, intend thereby to express the future blessedness of pious and virtuous persons? And by what they taught of Styx, Acheron, and Cocytus, and the torments of Prometheus, Ixion, and other famous criminals, design likewise to set forth to us the future miseries of the wicked and flagitious? No doubt, they meant so: but still all this was built upon such weak and fabulous grounds, that the wiser sort of them did but despise and laugh at all these things. So that Juvenal, speaking of these matters, tells us in plain terms, vix pueri credunt, that children scarce believed them; though surely, if any thing could dispose the mind of men to an extravagant credulity, one would think that the age and state of childhood should. And then, as for the immortality of the soul, whatsoever Plato and other philosophers might argue in behalf thereof, yet I am abundantly satisfied, that neither Plato, nor all of them together, have been able to argue more close and home to this subject, than those wits, who have lived in the ages after them, have done. And yet, upon the result of all, I do not find, that any thing hitherto has been so clearly and irrefragably proved for the immortality of it, but that the most that can be done upon this argument is, that the soul cannot be proved by any principle of natural reason to be mortal. And that (though it does not prove so much as it should do) is yet, I think, no inconsiderable point or step gained: but, after all, admitting the proof hereof to be as full and convincing as we could wish, then what can natural reason say to a general resurrection from the dead, that main article which we are now insisting upon? Why, truly, nothing at all: and if this be the utmost which is to be had from natural reason upon this point, I am sure there is no more to be had from natural religion; which (to make the very best and most of it) is nothing but reason, not assisted by revelation. But,

2. The other thing, which we shall infer from the foregoing particulars, is, the horrible impiety of the Socinian opinions; and particularly of those relating to the resurrection, and the state of men’s souls after death. The Socinians, who have done their utmost to overthrow the credenda of Christianity, are not for stopping there, but for giving as great a blow to the agenda of it too, by subverting (if possible) those principles which are to support the practice of it. Amongst which I reckon one of the chief to be, the belief of those eternal torments awarded by God to persons dying in a state of sin and impenitence, one of the most powerful checks to sin, doubtless, of any that religion affords: forasmuch as where there is one withheld from sin by the hopes of those eternal joys promised in the scripture, I dare affirm, that there are an hundred at least, if not more, kept from it by the fears of eternal torments. And the reason of this is, because those things by which the joys of heaven are represented to us, do by no means make so quick and lively an impression upon men’s minds, as those by which the torments of hell, as they are described to us, are found to do. I am far, I confess, from affirming, that this ought to be so; but as the state of mankind now generally is, there are but too many and too manifest proofs, that actually it is so. And I do not in the least question, but that there are millions who would readily part with all their hopes of the future felicities which the scripture promises them, upon condition that they might be secured from the eternal torments which it threatens.

They deny the torments of hell, and give this reason for it. “Quod absurdum sit, Deum irasci in aeternum, et peccata creaturarum finita poenis infinitis mulctare, praesertim cum nulla hinc ipsius gloria illustretur.” Compendiolum Doctrinae Ecclesiarum in Polonia. Likewise Ernestus Sonnerus, a noted Socinian, has wrote a just treatise, with this title prefixed to it, Demonstratio Theologica et Philosophica, Quod aeterna impiorum supplicia non arguant Dei justitiam, sed injustitiam. And if they be unjust, we may be sure, (as Dr. Tillotson, in his sermon on Matthew xxv. 46, learnedly observes,) that there shall be no such thing. And to shew further how industrious these factors for the devil are to rid men’s minds of the grand restraint of sin, the belief of eternal torments, he sets down at the end of his Demonstration, (as he calls it,) several places of scripture, where the words eternal and for ever signify not an infinite or everlasting, but only a finite, though indefinite duration. Likewise Diodorus Camphuysen, one of the same tribe, with a frontless impudence, in a certain epistle of his, requires such as should read it, “negare et ridere damnatorum poenas, et cruciatus aeternos;” that is, not only to deny, but also to laugh at the eternal torments and punishments of the damned. And to make yet surer work, (if possible,) Socinus denies the soul even a capacity of being tormented after a man’s death. “Tantum id mihi videtur statui posse, post hanc vitam, animam, sive animum hominis non ita per se subsistere, ut praemia ulla poenasve sentiat, vel etiam ista sentiendi sit capax, quae mea firma opinio,” &c. Socinus in quinta Epistola ad Volkelium. And elsewhere; “Homo, sive anima humana nihil cum immortalitate habet commune.” In short, I am so far from accounting the authors or owners of such horrid assertions to be really Christians, that I account them really the worst of men, if profaneness, blasphemy, and the letting loose all sorts of wickedness upon the world, can make them so. For, according to these grand agents and apostles of Satan, wicked men, no less than the very brutes themselves, (whose spirits also they affirm to return to God, as well as those of the other,) being once dead, shall rise no more. And if they can but persuade men, that they shall die like beasts, there is no question to be made, but that most of them will be quickly brought to live like beasts too.

Reason indeed proves the revelation of it by God; but then, having done this, here it stops, and pretends not to understand and fathom the nature of the thing revealed.

If any one should plead a parity of the case, as to this article of the Trinity, and that about transubstantiation; and allege, that since we deny not a Trinity, though we understand it not, but account it a mystery, and so believe it; why may we not take transubstantiation also into the number of mysteries, and believe it, though it be intricate, and impossible to be understood?

To this I answer, 1st, in general, that no man discoursing or proceeding rationally upon this subject, refuses to believe transubstantiation merely upon this account, that it is impossible to be understood. 2dly, I affirm, that the case between transubstantiation and the Trinity is very different; the former being contradicted by the judgment of that faculty, of which it is properly the object; the latter being not at all contradicted, but only not comprehended by the faculty, to which the judgment and cognizance of it does belong. To make which clear, we must observe, that both the bread and the body of Christ, about which transubstantiation is said to be effected, being endued with quantity, colour, and the like, are the proper objects of sense, and so fall under the cognizance of the sight and touch; which senses being entire, and acting as naturally they ought, they both can and do certainly judge of their proper objects, and upon such judgment find it to be a contradiction for a small body retaining its own proper dimensions, at the same time to have the dimensions of a body forty times greater. For one body to be circumscribed, and so compassed in one place, and at the same time to fill a thousand more, I say it is a contradiction; for it makes the same thing in the very same respect to be circumscribed, and not to be circumscribed; circumscribed, because encompassed in such a place; and yet not circumscribed, because extending itself beyond that place to many others.

But now, on the other side, the divine nature and the Trinity are not the objects of sense, and consequently sense passes no judgment upon them. But they are the objects of (and so only triable by) the mind and the understanding; taking in these things from the reports not of sense, but revelation. Which supreme faculty being thus informed by revelation, tendering these reports to its apprehension, and withal finding that none of those rules or principles, by which it judges of the truth or falsity of what it apprehends, do at all contradict what revelation thus speaks and reports of the divine nature and the Trinity; it rationally judges, that they may and ought to be assented to.

For the stress of the point lies here, and let all the reason of mankind prove, if it can, that wheresoever the denomination of three is ascribed to any nature, it must of necessity multiply the nature itself, and not only its relations. Which being so, those that make the article of the Trinity parallel to that of transubstantiation, in point of its contrariety to reason, if they will speak and argue to the purpose, must undertake to prove, that for one infinite being or nature to be in any respect, or upon any account whatsoever, three, without a triplication of that nature, and so a loss of its unity, is as contrary and repugnant to some known principle of reason discoursing upon the reports of revelation; as for that thing, which all my senses tell me to be a little piece of bread, to be yet both for figure and dimension really a man’s body, is contradictory to all those principles, by which sense judges of those things that properly fall under the judgment of sense.

Let this, I say, be clearly and conclusively made out, and the business is done. But till then, they must give us leave to judge, that there is as much difference between the article of the Trinity as stated by us, and that of transubstantiation as stated by them, as there is between difficulty and contradiction.

And now, if there be any whose reason is so unruly and over-curious, as to be still inquisitive and unsatisfied, such must remember, that when we have made the utmost explications of this article, we pretend not thereby to have altered the nature of the subject we have been treating of; which, after all, is still a mystery; and they must know, moreover, that when the sacred mysteries of religion are discoursed of, the business of a Christian is sobriety and submission, and his duty to be satisfied, even though he were not convinced. The Trinity is a fundamental article of the Christian religion; and as he that denies it may lose his soul, so he that too much strives to understand it may lose his wits. Know ledge is nice, intricate, and tedious; but faith is easy; and what is more, it is safe. And why should I then unhinge my brains, ruin my mind, and pursue distraction in the disquisition of that which a little study would sufficiently convince me to be not intelligible? Or why should I by chewing a pill make it useless, which swallowed whole might be curing and restorative? A Christian, in these matters, has nothing to do but to believe; and since I can not scientifically comprehend this mystery, I shall worship it with the religion of submission and wonder, and casting down my reason before it, receive it with the devotions of silence, and the humble distances of adoration.

But here, having drawn the business so far, I can not but take notice of some of those blasphemous expressions which the Socinians use concerning the sacred mystery of the Trinity; their terms (as I have collected some out of many) are such as these: Deus tripersonatus. Idolum portentosum. Figmentum Satanae. Antichristi Cerberus. Triceps Geryon. Idolum trifrons. Monstrum triforme. Deus incognitus, adeoque procul rejiciendus, et Satanae conditori suo restituendus. Now, that the authors of these ugly appellations shew themselves not only bold and impious, but also (what by no means they would be thought) very unreasonable, will, I think, appear from these two considerations.

First, That the doctrine so broadly decried by them is at least very difficult, and hardly comprehensible; and therefore, though it could not be proved true, yet, upon the same score, it can as hardly be proved false. But now these expressions ought to proceed not only upon the supposition of its bare falsity, but also upon the evidence and undeniable clearness of its falsity; or they must needs be impudent and intolerable.

He that says, that it is clear that there can be no such thing as the quadrature of the circle, makes an impudent assertion; for, though possibly there can be really no such thing, yet since there have been such considerable reasons for it, as to engage the greatest wits in the search after it, no man can rationally say, that it is clear and manifest that there is no such thing. But besides, in this case they deal very irrationally in rejecting the doctrine of the Trinity, because it is not intelligible; when not only in divinity, but also in philosophy, (where yet, not faith, but strict ratiocination should take place,) they acknowledge many things which the best reason will scarce be able to frame an explicit notion and apprehension of. Such as are the composition and division of continued quantities, and the like; which these men, I believe, will not deny, though it would set them hard to give a clear account of them.

Secondly. The same charge of absurdity lies against these men upon this account, that they prefer their particular reason before the united reason of a much greater number than themselves; every one of which were of as great industry to search, and of as great abilities to understand the mysteries of divinity, as these men can be presumed to be.

Now, as this is much beside good manners, so indeed it is no less short of good reason; which will prove thus much at least; that when a few learned persons deny a proposition, and others forty times more numerous, and altogether as learned, do unanimously affirm it, it is very probable that the truth stands rather with the majority.

For if I should demand of these men, how they come to judge the doctrine of the Trinity to be false? they must tell me, that they have studied the point, considered the text, examined it by the principles of reason, and that by the use of these means they come at length to make this conclusion.

But to this I answer, that others who have studied the point as much, considered the text as exactly, and examined it by as strong principles of reason as their opposites could pretend to, and so standing upon equal ground with them in point of abilities, have much the advantage of them in point of number.

But you will say, Must I therefore conclude, that what is affirmed by such a majority of persons so qualified is certainly true? I answer, No; but this I assert; that it is great reason, though their assertion appear never so strange to me, that I should yet suspend my judgment, and not peremptorily conclude it false: since there is hardly any means nor way of ratiocination used by one to prove it a falsity, but by the very same way and means others persuade themselves, that they as strongly prove it to be a truth.

And thus I think, that these men’s exceptions against this great article are, to such as under stand reason, sufficiently proved irrational. But since these men reject the doctrine of the Trinity upon pretence both of its impiety and absurdity, it is but requisite, that they should acquit themselves in all their doctrine, from holding any thing either impious or absurd. But yet, that they cannot do so, these following positions maintained by them will, I believe, demonstrate:

1. To assert, as Volkelius, in his second book De Vera Religione, and the fourth chapter, not obscurely does, the matter of the universe to be a passive principle eternally coexisting with God, the active, is impious, and not consistent with God’s infinite power; for if matter has its being from itself, it will follow, that it can preserve itself in being against all opposition, and consequently, that God cannot destroy it, which makes him not omnipotent.

2. To allow God’s power to be infinite, and yet his substance to be finite, is monstrously absurd; but to assert, as Crellius, in his book De Attributis Dei, in the 27th chapter, does, that his substance is circumscribed within the compass of the highest heaven, is clearly to make it finite.

3. To allow all God’s prophecies and predictions recorded in scripture, of future contingent passages, depending upon the free choice of man’s will, to have been certain and infallible, and yet his prescience or foreknowledge of the same contingent things not to be certain, but only conjectural, as Socinus, in the 8th chapter of his Prelections, does affirm, is out of measure absurd and ridiculous.

4. To affirm Christ to be a mere creature, and no more, and yet to contend, that he is to be invoked and worshipped with divine worship, is exceedingly absurd, and contrary to all the discourses of right reason; and withal, as offensive and scandalous to Jews and Turks, and such like, as the bare affirmation of his divine nature can be pretended to be. But Socinus, though he denies this, yet is so earnest for the divine adoration and invocation of Christ, that he affirms, that of the two, it is better to be a Trinitarian, than not to ascribe this to him.

5. To assert, that the people of God, under the Jewish economy, lay under the obligation of no precept to pray to God, as Volkelius, in his 4th book De Vera Religione, and the 9th chapter, positively affirms, is an assertion highly impious, and to all pious minds abominable.

6. To assert, that it is lawful for a man to tell a He, to secure himself from some great danger or in convenience, as the same Volkelius, in the 4th book, and 19th chapter, does, is such a thing, as not only consists not with piety and sincerity, but tends to drive even common honesty and society out of the world.

7. To assert, that it is unlawful for Christians in any case to wage war, as Socinus himself does in his 2d epistle to Christophorus Morstinus, a Polonian commander, in which he allows him to bring his army into the field in terrorem hostium, provided that he neither strikes a stroke, nor draws blood, nor cuts off a limb: this, I say, is grossly ab surd and unnatural, and contrary to the eternal principle of self-preservation; as engaging men, even for conscience sake, to surrender their lives and fortunes to any thief or murderer, that shall think fit to require them. Neither can Socinus, in reason, so urge those words of our Saviour, (in Matt, v. 39,) of not resisting evil, in this case, if he will be but true to his own principle. For in his 3d book De Christo Servatore, and the 6th chapter, disputing against Christ’s satisfaction, he pleads, “that in regard it is,” as he says, “contrary to reason, though the scripture should never so often affirm it, yet it ought not to be admitted or assented to.” Now, if this be his rule, I demand of him, whether, for a man to preserve himself, and that even with the destruction of the life of the person assailing him, supposing that he cannot possibly do it otherwise, be not as undeniable a dictate or principle of natural reason, as any that he can pretend to be contradicted by Christ’s satisfaction. And therefore, if he can lay aside Christ’s satisfaction, though the scripture were never so express for it, in regard of the contrariety he pretends in it to reason; why may not we, upon the same grounds, assert the necessity of self-preservation in the instance of war, though the scripture expressly forbids it? Since for a man to relinquish his own defence, is indubitably contrary to the dictates of nature, and consequently of reason.

But we need not recur to this, for the warranting men under the gospel to defend their lives, though with the destruction of those that would take them away. Only this I allege as an argument ad hominem, which sufficiently shews how slight and desultorious this man is in his principles and way of arguing, while at one time he frames to himself a principle for his present turn, and at another makes assertions, and raises discourses, which that principle most directly overthrows. Now all the forementioned absurdities (with many more that might be reckoned) are the tenets of those who deny the article of the Trinity, because, forsooth, it is impious and absurd; that is, who strain at one gnat, having already swallowed so many vast camels. And yet these are the persons, who in all their writings have the face to own themselves to the world for those heroes, whom God, by his special providence, has raised up to explain Christian religion, and to reform the doctrine of the church. I suppose, just in the same sense, that the school of Calvin was to reform her discipline.

VI. and lastly, I shall improve the point into some useful consequences and deductions from the whole.

Of each of which in their order. And,

I. For the first of them; to shew, how the mind of man can believe a lie. There is certainly so great a suitableness between truth and an human understanding, that the understanding of itself can no more believe a lie, than the taste rightly disposed can pronounce a bitter thing sweet. The formal cause of all assent is the appearance of truth; and if a lie is believed, it can be so no further, than as it carries in it the appearance of truth. But then, what and whence are these appearances? Appearance, no doubt, is a relative term, and must be between two; for one thing could not be said to appear, if there were not another for it to appear to. So that there must be both an object and a faculty, before there can be an appearance; and consequently, from one of these two must spring all falsehood at any time belonging to it. But the question is, from which of them? And in answer to it, it is certain, that the object itself cannot cause a false appearance of itself. For if so, when the mind has conceived a false apprehension of God, God, who is the object, would be the cause of that false apprehension. But it is certain, that objects operate not efficiently upon the faculties; for if they should, since the object is the same to all, viz. both those who entertain true, and those who entertain false apprehensions of it, it would be impossible for the same thing, so far as it is the same, to produce such contrary effects. It is the same body which appears to one of such a shape, and to another of a quite different. And therefore the difference must needs be on the beholder’s side, and rest in the faculty of perception, not in the thing perceived. This we may pronounce confidently and truly, that the object duly circumstantiated is never in fault, why it is not rightly apprehended. Objects are merely passive; and if they were not so, men would certainly be both learneder and better than they are; for neither can learning nor religion thrust itself into the heads or hearts of men, whether they will or no. Truth shews itself to be truth, and falsehood represents itself as falsehood, (and so far is a good representer,) whether men apprehend them so or no. For the object is not to be condemned for the failures of the faculty, any more than a man, who speaks audibly and intelligibly, is to be blamed for not being heard; no body being bound to find words and ears too.

Well then; since a lie cannot be believed, but under the appearance of truth, and since a lie cannot give itself any such appearance, it is evident, that if any man believes a lie, it is from something in himself that he does so. There are lies, errors, and heresies about the world, both plausible and infinite, but then they naturally appear what they are; and if truth be naked to the skin, error is and must be so to the bone; and the fairest falsehood can no more oblige assent, than the best dressed evil can oblige the choice.

And thus having given both falsehood, and the Devil, the father of it, their due, and cleared even the grossest He from being the cause that it is believed, and thereby left it wholly at the door of him who believes it; let us in the next place inquire, what may be the causes on the believer’s part, which make any object, and particularly a lie, appear otherwise to him than really it is, and upon that account gain his belief. Now these are two.

1. An undue distance between the faculty and its proper object.

2. An indisposition in the faculty itself. And,

1. For the first of these. As approximation is one necessary condition of perception; so, too much distance prevents and hinders it, by setting the object too far out of our reach: and if the apprehensive faculty offers at an object so placed, and falls short of the apprehension of it, the fault is not in the object, but in that. And here, by distance, I mean not only an interval in point of local position, which, if too great, certainly hinders all corporeal perception; but likewise a distance, or rather disparity, of natures; such as is between finite and infinite, material and spiritual beings, consisting in the great disproportion there is between one and the other. And from hence it is, that the mind of man is uncapable of apprehending any thing almost of God, or indeed of angels; the distance between their natures being so exceeding great. For though God, as the evangelist St. Luke tells us in Acts xvii. 27, be not far from every one of us; nay, as it is in the next verse, that he is so near, or rather intimate to us, that in him we live, and move., and have our being, so that it is as impossible for us to exclude him, as it is to comprehend him; yet still the vast difference of his nature from ours makes the distance between them so unspeakably great, that neither can our corporeal nor intellectual powers form any true idea of him. And from hence it is, that there is nothing about which the mind and apprehensive faculties of man have so frequently and foully blundered, as about the divine nature and persons, and (what is founded upon both) the divine worship. But,

2. The other cause, which makes any object, and particularly a lie, appear otherwise than really it is, is the indisposition of the intellectual faculty; which indisposition, in some degree or other, is sure to follow from sin, both original and actual. For so much as there is of deviation from the eternal rules of right reason or morality in the soul, so much there will of necessity be of darkness in it too; and so much of darkness as there is in it, so far must it be unavoidably subject to pass a false judgment upon most things that come before it. Otherwise there is nothing in reason, considered purely and simply as such, which is or can be unsuitable to religion, or indeed to the nature of any thing; but so much the contrary, that if we could imagine a man all reason, without any bias from his sensitive part, it were impossible but that, upon the first sufficient offer, he should, as we may so express it, with both arms embrace religion. But the case has been much altered since the fall of our first parents, and the fatal blow thereby given to all the powers of men’s mind; besides the further debilitation and distemper brought upon it by many actual and gross sins. So that now the understandings of men are become like some bodily eyes, disabled from an exact discernment of their proper object, both by a natural weakness and a supervening soreness too.

And thus I have accounted for the true cause which sometimes prostitutes the noble understanding of man to the lowest of dishonours, the belief of a lie; namely, either the remoteness of the faculty (whether in point of distance or difference) from its object, or some weakness or disorder in it; either of which will be sure to pervert its operation: and then a fault in the first apprehension of any thing will not fail to produce a false judgment, and that a false belief likewise about the same. And so I proceed to the

Second particular proposed, viz. to shew what it is to receive the love of the truth.

And this we shall find implies in it these two things.

1. An high esteem and valuation of the real worth and excellency of it; this is the first and leading act of the mind. Truth must be first enthroned in our judgment, before it can reign in our desires; and as it is the leading faculty, so it is the measure of the rest: for no man’s love of any thing can rise above his esteem of it, nor can his appetites exert themselves upon any object, not first vouched by his apprehensions. For which cause, the Holy Ghost in scripture, the better to advance religion in our thoughts, represents it by things of all others the most highly accounted of in the world, as crowns, thrones, kingdoms, hidden treasure, and the like; all which expressions, though far from being intended according to the strict and philosophical truth of things, but rather as allusions to them, yet still were founded in the universally acknowledged course of nature, which ever was and will be, for men to be first allured by the worth of things, before they can desire the property or possession of them; and to consider the value, before they design the purchase. But, be the matter as it may, our affections, to be sure, will bid nothing for any thing, till our judgment has set the price. Thus St. Paul evinces his love to Christ from his transcendent esteem of him; I account all things, says he, but dung and dross, that I may win Christ, Phil. iii. 8. And he who accounts a thing as dung will no doubt trample upon it as such. The rule of contrarieties will be found a clear illustration of the case. For hatred generally begins in contempt, or something very like it; and it is certain in matter of fact, as well as reason, that we leave off to love any thing or person, as soon as we begin to despise them. He who in scorn turns away his eye from looking upon an object, will hardly be brought to reach out his hand after it. Let a man therefore set his understanding faculty on work, and put it to examine and consider, to view and review the intrinsic value of religion, what it is and what it offers, before he proceeds to make it his portion so far, as to be ready to quit all the world for it, should they both come to rival his choice as competitors; let him, I say, by a strict and impartial inquiry, descend into himself, and see whether he can upon these terms (for lower and easier it knows none) judge it absolutely eligible; and if not, let him assure himself, that without a passport from the judgment, it will never gain a free and full admittance into the affections. For still it is through the eye that love enters into the heart: nay, so mighty an influence has the judging faculty in this case, that it is much disputed, whether the last dictate of the judgment about any object does not necessarily determine and draw after it the choice of the will; and perhaps there is scarce any point in moral philosophy of a nicer speculation and an harder decision: for as the affirmation of this, on the one side, seems to border upon stoicism, and to intrench upon the freedom of the will; which, after the supposal of all things requisite to its acting, ought nevertheless still to retain a power to exert or not exert an act of volition; so, on the other side, to affirm, that after the understanding has made the last proposal of the object to the will, the will may yet refuse it, and go contrary to it, seems to infer this great inconvenience, that the will, in order to its acting, needs not the preceding act or conduct of the intellect to make a sufficient proposal of the object to it, since after it is so proposed, it may not withstanding divert its actings quite another way; and then, if it can in this manner proceed without a guide, the will is not so blind a faculty as the schools make it. For he who goes one way, when his guide directs him another, manifestly shews that he both can and does go without him. But I shall dispute this point no further; it being, as I conceive, sufficient for our present purpose, that the act of the understanding proposing the object, must of necessity precede, whether the act or choice of the will follow it or no. Though for my own part I cannot see, that the holding the necessity of the will’s following the last dictate or proposal of the understanding, does at all prejudice its freedom, (which is rather opposed to coaction from without, than to a determination from within;) forasmuch as it was in the power of the will to have diverted the understanding from its application to any object, before it came to form its last judgment of it; and consequently, the whole proceeding of the understanding being under the free permission of the will, the act of the will closing with this last determination, was originally and virtually free, though formally and immediately, in this latter sense, necessary. As God necessarily does what he first absolutely decreed, and yet the whole act is free, since the decree itself was the free issue and result of his will. But I beg pardon, if I have dwelt too long upon this point. It was, because I thought it requisite to shew what is the part and office, and how great the force and power of the understanding, in recommending the truths of religion to the souls of men; that so they may not acquiesce in a slight, superficial judgment or apprehension of them; which, we may rest satisfied, will never have any considerable effect, or work any thorough change upon the heart; and if so, all will come to nothing; for the foundation is ill laid, and the superstructure cannot be firm. And upon this account, no doubt, it is, that the scripture ascribes so much to faith; indeed, in effect, the whole work of man’s salvation; and yet it is but an act of the understanding, and properly and strictly speaking can be no more: yet nevertheless, of such a mighty and controlling influence upon the will is it, that, if it be strong, vigorous, and of the right kind, it draws the whole soul after it, and works all those wonders which stand recorded of it in the 11th of the Hebrews, which from first to last is but a panegyric upon the invincible strength and heroic achievements of this grace. In a word, if a man, by faith, can bring his understanding to receive and entertain the divine truths of the gospel so as to look upon the promises of it as conveying the greatest good and happiness to man that a rational nature is capable of, and the threatenings of it as denouncing the bitterest and most insupportable evils that a created being can sink under, and both of them as things of certain and infallible event; this is for a man truly to value his religion, and to lay such a foundation of it in his judgment, as shall never disappoint or shame his practice. Accordingly, in the

Second place, the other thing implied in and intended by the receiving the love of the truth, is the choice of it, as of a thing transcendently good, and particularly agreeable to our condition. Generals, we commonly say, are fallacious; but it is certain that they are always faint. And therefore it is not merely what is good, as to the general notion of it, (which can minister to little more than bare theory and discourse,) but particularly what is good for me, which must engage my practice. To esteem a thing, we have shewn, is properly an act of the understanding; but to choose it, is the part and office of the will. And choosing is a considerable advance beyond bare esteem; forasmuch as it is the end of it, and consequently perfects it, as the end does every action which is directed to it. It is the most proper, genuine, and finishing act of love. For the great effect of love is to unite us to the thing we love; and the will is properly the uniting faculty, and choice the uniting act, which brings the soul and its beloved object together. Judgment and esteem, indeed, is that which offers and recommends it to the soul; but it is choice which makes the match. For the truth is, the soul of man can do no more, nor reach further, than first to esteem an object, and then to choose it. And therefore, till we have made religion our fixed choice, it only floats in the imagination, and is but the business of talk and fancy. But it is the heart, after all, which must appropriate and take hold of the great truths of Christianity for its portion, its happiness, and chief good. And then, and not till then, a man is practically and in good earnest a Christian; and that which before was but notion and opinion, hereby passes into reality and experience; and from a mere name, into the nature and substance of religion. For still, if a man would make his faith or religion a vital principle for him to live and act by, it must be such an one as the apostle tells us works by love; there must be something of this blessed flame to invigorate and give activity to it. But where a man neither loves nor likes the thing he believes, it is odds but in a little time he may be brought also to cast off the very belief itself; and, in the mean while, it is certain, that it can have no efficacy, no operation or influence upon his life or actions; which is worse than no belief at all; for better, a great deal, none, than to no purpose.

And thus having shewn what is meant by and implied in the receiving the love of the truth, it may, I conceive, help us to an easy and natural account of its opposite or contrary; to wit, the rejecting, or not receiving the same; the great sin, as we before observed, for which the persons here in the text stand concluded under so severe a doom. For the further explication of which, we may very rationally suppose the condition of those men to have been this, viz. that upon the preaching of Christianity, the truth of it quickly overpowered their as sent, and broke in upon their apprehensions with the highest evidence and conviction; but the searching purity and spirituality of the same doctrines equally encountering their worldly interests and their predominant beloved corruptions, soon caused in their minds a secret loathing of the severity of those truths, and so by degrees a direct hatred and hostility against them, as the great disturbers of those pleasures, and interrupters of the caresses of those lusts, which had so bewitched their hearts and seized their affections. It is wonderful to consider what a strange combat and scuffle there is in the soul of man, when clear truths meet with strong corruptions; one faculty or power of it embracing a doctrine, because true; and another, with no less fury, rising up against it, because severe and disagreeable. Thus, what should be the reason that those high and excellent precepts of Christianity, requiring purity of heart, poverty of spirit, chastity of mind, hatred of revenge, and the like, find so cold a reception, or rather so sharp a resentment in the world? Is it because men think they are not truths? By no means; but because they are severe, grating, uneasy truths; they believe them sufficiently, and more than they desire, but they cannot love them; and for that reason, and no other, they are rejected and thrown aside in the lives and practices of men; not because they cannot or do not convince their understandings, but because they thwart and bid defiance to their inclinations. Truth is so connatural to the mind of man, that it would certainly be entertained by all men, did it not by accident contradict some beloved interest or other. The thief hates the break of day; not but that he naturally loves the light, as well as other men; but his condition makes him dread and abhor that, which of all things he knows to be the likeliest means of his discovery. Men may sometimes frame themselves to hear and attend to the mortifying truths of Christianity; but then they hear them only as they use to hear of the death of friends, or the story of a lost estate; they are true, but troublesome and vexatious: so often does the irksomeness of the thing reported make men angry with the truth of the report, and sometimes with the very person of the reporter too. And therefore, let none wonder, if God inflicts so signal a judgment upon this sort of sin: for when men shall resolutely reject clear, pregnant, and acknowledged (as well as important) truths, only because they press hard upon their darling sin, and would knock them off from the pleasing embraces of the world and the flesh, and from dying in them; what do they else but sacrifice the glory of their nature, their reason, to their brutality? and make their noblest perfections bow down, and stoop to their basest lusts? What do they, I say, but crush and depress truth, to advance some pitiful, sensual pleasure in the room of it; and so, like Herod, strike off the Baptist’s head, only to reward the dances of a strumpet? This is the great load of condemnation which lies so heavy upon the world, as St. John tells us, that men see the light, but love darkness; bend before the truth of a doctrine, but abhor its strictness and spirituality: the doctrine of Christianity being in this, like that forerunner of Christ just now mentioned by us, who was indeed, as our Saviour himself styled him, a shining, but withal a burning light. And as the shining both of the one and the other, in the glorious evidence of truth beaming out from both, could not but, even in spite of sin and all the powers of darkness, be infinitely pleasing to all who had the sight thereof; so its burning quality exerting itself in the searching precepts of self-denial and mortification, was, no doubt, to all vicious and depraved minds, altogether as tormenting and intolerable. And so I proceed to the

Third particular proposed by us; which was to shew, how the not receiving the love of the truth into the will and affections, comes to dispose the understanding to error and delusion. Now, I conceive, it may do it these following ways.

1. By drawing off the understanding from fixing its contemplation upon a disgusted offensive truth. For though it is not in the power of the will, when the understanding apprehends a truth clearly and distinctly, to countermand its assent to it; yet it has so great an influence upon it, that it is able antecedently to hinder it from taking that truth into a full and thorough consideration. And while the mind is not taken up with an actual attention to the truth proposed to it, so long it is obnoxious to the offers and impressions of the contrary error. For the first adherencies, or rather applications of the soul to truth, are very weak and imperfect, till they are furthered and confirmed by a frequent converse with it, and so by degrees come to have the general notions of reason endeared and made familiar to the mind by renewed acts of attention and speculation; which ceasing, if a falsehood comes recommended to the soul with any advantage, that is to say, with agreeableness, though without argument, it is ten to one but it enters, and takes possession. And then the poison is infused; let the man get it out again as he can. He who will not insist attentively and closely upon the examination of any truth, is never like to have his mind either clearly informed of it, or firmly united to it. For want of search is really and properly the keeping off the due approximation of the object, without which a true apprehension of it is impossible. So that if a man has corrupt affections, averse to the purity and excellency of any truth, it is not imaginable that they will suffer his thoughts to dwell long upon it, but will do their utmost to divert and carry them off to some other object, which he is more inclined to and enamoured with; and then, what wonder is it, if, under such circumstances, the mind is betrayed by the bias of the affections, and so lies open to all the treacherous inroads of fallacy and imposture? As for instance, he whose corrupt nature is impatient of any restraint from morality or religion, will be sure to keep his mind off from them as much as possibly he can; he will not trouble himself with any debates or discourses about the truth or evidence of such things as he heartily wishes were neither evident nor true. In a word, he will not venture his meditations upon so unwelcome and so afflicting a subject. And thus having rid himself of such notions, the contrary documents of atheism and immorality still bringing with them a compliance with those affections which all thoughts of religion were so grievous to, will soon find an easy, unresisted admittance into an understanding, naked and unguarded against the several arts and stratagems of the grand deceiver. A man indeed may be sometimes so surprised, as not to be able to prevent the first apprehension and sight of a truth; but he is always able to prevent the consideration of it; without which the other can work upon him very little. For though apprehension shews the object, it must be consideration which applies it. But again,

2. A will vitiated, and grown out of love with the truth, disposes the understanding to error and delusion, by causing in it a prejudice and partiality in all its reflections upon and discourses about it. He who considers of a thing with prejudice, has judged the cause before he hears it, and decided the matter, not as really it is, but as it either crosses or comports with the principles which he is already prepossessed with: the understanding, in such a case, being like the eye of the body, viewing a white thing through a red glass; it forms a judgment of the co lour, not according to the thing it sees, but according to that by which it sees. And upon the like account it is, that the will and the affections never pitch upon any thing as odious, but that sooner or later they bribe the judgment to represent it to them as ugly too. We know the miracles, the astonishing works, and excellent discourses of our Saviour could not strike the hearts of those whom he preached to, through the mighty prejudice they had conceived against his person and country. But that they still opposed all, even the most cogent and demonstrative arguments he could bring for his doctrine, with that silly exception, Is not this the carpenter’s son? And that one ridiculous proverb, that no good could come out of Galilee, (as slight as it was,) yet proved strong enough to obstruct their as sent, and arm their minds against that high conviction and mighty sway of evidence, which shined forth in all his miraculous works; so that this senseless saying alone fully answered, or (which was as effectual for their purpose) absolutely overbore them all. In like manner, we find it elsewhere observed by our Saviour himself, of that selfish, rotten, and yet demure generation of men, the Pharisees, that they could not believe, because they received honour one of another, John v. 44. They had, it seems, bewitched the people into an extravagant esteem and veneration of their sanctity, and by that means had got no small command over their purses, their tables, and their families; nay, and more than ordinary footing and interest in the Jewish court itself. So that they ruled without control, getting the highest seats in synagogues, that is, in their chief assemblies or consistories; and they loved also to feed as high as they sat, still providing themselves with the best rooms, and not the worst dishes (we may be sure) at feasts. Nor would ever such pretenders have fasted twice a week, but that they knew it afforded them five days besides to feast in; so that having thus found the sweets of a crafty, long-practised hypocrisy, from which they had reaped so many luscious privileges, they could not but have an horrible prejudice against the strictness of that doctrine, which preached nothing but self-denial, humility, and a contempt of the honours and emoluments of the world, which they themselves so passionately doted upon; and therefore no wonder if they threw it off as a fable and an imposture, though recommended with all the attestations of divine power, which had in them a fitness to inform or convince the reason of man. So far did the corruption of their will advance their prejudice, and their prejudice destroy their judgment. But,

The third and last reason which I shall assign for proving that the will’s not embracing the love of the truth, betrays the understanding to error and delusion, is from the peculiar malignity which is in every vice, or corrupt affection, to darken and besot the mind, the νοῦς, the great guide and superintendant of all the faculties of the soul; for so near a connection, or rather cognation is there between the moral and intellectual perfection of it, (as I have elsewhere observed,

The reader may please to cast his eye upon a sermon in the second volume, p. 261-292, where this subject is more professedly and largely treated of.

Besides, if we weigh and distinguish things exactly, when the envious man groans under the gnawings and convulsions of his base sin, and the lewd person suffers the brand and disrepute of his vice; in all this, sin is not properly punished with sin; but the evil of envy is punished with the trouble of envy, and the sin of intemperance with the infamy of in temperance; but neither is a state of trouble nor a state of disgrace or infamy properly a state of sin; these are natural, not moral evils; and opposed to the quiet and tranquillity, not to the virtue of the soul; for a man may be virtuous without either ease or reputation. This way therefore is short of resolving the problem inquired into; which precisely moves upon this point, viz. Whether for the guilt of one sin God can, by way of penalty, bring the sinner under the guilt of another?

Some seem to prove that he cannot, and that in the strength of this argument, that every punishment proceeding from God, as the author of it, is just and good; but no sin is or can be so; and therefore no sin can be made by God the punishment of another.

But nevertheless, the contrary is held forth in scripture, and that as expressly as words can well declare a thing; for besides the clear proof thereof, which the very text carries with it, it is yet further proved by those two irrefragable places in Rom. i. 24. The apostle has these very words, Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness; and again in the 26th verse, For this cause God gave them up to vile affections. Besides several other places pregnant to the same purpose, both in the Old Testament and the New. From all which it is certain, that God may make one sin the punishment of another. Though still it is to be remembered, that it is one thing for God to give a man over to sin, and quite another for God to cause him to sin; the former importing in it no more than God’s providential ordering of a man’s circumstances so, that he shall find no check or hinderance in the course of his sin; but the latter implying also a positive efficiency towards the commission or production of a sinful act; which God never does nor can do; but the other he both may, and in a judicial way very often does.

To the argument therefore alleged, I answer thus; that it is very consonant both to scripture and reason, to distinguish in one and the same thing several respects; and accordingly in sin, we may consider the moral irregularity of it; and so being in the very nature of it evil, it is impossible that there should be any good in it; or we may consider sin, as to the penal application of it to the person who committed it, and as a means to bring the just judgment of God upon him for what he had done; and so some good may be said to belong to it, though there be none at all in it.

Or to express the same thing otherwise, and perhaps more clearly and agreeably to vulgar apprehensions. Sin may be considered either, 1st, With reference to the proper cause of it, the will of man committing or producing it, and so it is absolutely and entirely evil. Or, 2dly, It may be considered as it relates to the supreme Judge and Governor of the world, permitting, ordering, disposing, and overruling the existence and event of it, to the honour of his wisdom and justice; and so far it may be called good, and consequently sustain the nature of a punishment proceeding from God. But you will reply, Can sin be any ways good? I answer, that naturally and intrinsically it cannot, but extrinsically, accident ally, and occasionally, as ordered to a subserviency to God’s glory, it may; and the providence of God is no further concerned about it: that is to say, it is good and just, that God should so order and dispose of an obstinate sinner, (as he did once of Pharaoh,) that he should, through his own corruption, fall into further sin, in order to his further punishment: but surely this does by no means infer, that the sins he thus falls into are good, though God’s ordering of them may be so; and darkness will be darkness still, though God can and often does bring light out of it. That the Jews having rejected the gospel so powerfully preached to them, should be delivered to hardness of heart and final impenitence, was just, and, by consequence, good. But this is far from inferring, that their hardness of heart and impenitence were so too. Sin may give occasion for a great deal of good to be exercised upon it and about it, though there be none inherent in it; and upon that account, when any good is ascribed to it, or affirmed of it, it is purely by an extrinsic denomination, and no more.

Now these distinctions, rightly weighed and ap plied, will fully and clearly accord the doctrine laid down by us both with the notions of human reason, and the holiness of the divine nature; and consequently render all objections and popular exclamations against either of them empty and insignificant.

Nor indeed is it very difficult, and much less impossible, to give some tolerable account, how God delivers a sinner over to further sins. For it may be very rationally said, that he does it partly by withholding his restraining grace, and leaving corrupt nature to itself, to the full swing and freedom of its own extravagant actings: whereby a man adds sin to sin, strikes out furiously and without control, till he grows obstinate and incurable. And God may be said to do the same also by administering objects and occasions of sin to such or such a sinner, whose corrupt nature will be sure to take fire at them, and so actually to throw itself into all enormities. In all which, God is not at all the author of sin, but only pursues the great works and righteous ends of his providence, in disposing of things or objects in themselves good or indifferent towards the compassing of the same; howbeit, through the poison of men’s vicious affections, they are turned into the opportunities and fuel of sin, and made the occasion of their final destruction.

But now, of all the punishments which the great and just God in his anger inflicts, or brings upon a man for sin, there is none comparable to sin itself. Men are apt to go on securely, pleasing themselves in the repeated gratifications of their vice; and they feel not God strike, and so are encouraged in the progress of their impiety. But let them not, for all that, be too confident; for God may strike, though they feel not his stroke, and perhaps the more terribly for their not feeling it. Forasmuch as in judgments of this nature, insensibility always goes deep est; and the wrath of God seldom does such killing execution when it thunders, as when it blasts. He has certainly some dreadful design carrying on against the sinner, while he suffers him to go on in a smooth, uninterrupted course of sinning; and what that design is, and the dreadfulness of it, probably will not be known to him, till the possibilities of repentance are cut off, and hid from his eyes; at present, it looks like the suffering a man to perish and die by a lethargy, rather than jog or awaken him. Believe it, it is a sad case, when the sinner shall never perceive that God is angry with him, till he actually feels the effects of his anger in another world, where it can neither be pacified nor turned away.

2. The second great consequence from the doctrine hitherto treated of by us, of the naturalness of men’s going off from the love of the truth to a disbelief of the same, shall be to inform us of the surest and most effectual way to confirm our faith about the sacred and important truths of religion; and that is, to love them for their transcendent worth and purity; to fix our inclinations and affections upon them; and, in a word, not only to confess, own, and acknowledge them to be truths, but also to be willing that they should be so; and to rejoice with the greatest complacency, that there should be such things prepared for us, as the scripture tells us there are. For we shall find, that truth is not so much upon terms of courtesy with the understanding, (which upon a clear discovery of itself it naturally commands,) as it is with the will and the affections, which (though never so clearly discovered to them) it is always almost forced to woo and make suit to.

I have been ever prone to take this for a principle, and a very safe one too, viz. that there is no opinion really good, (I mean good in the natural, beneficent sequences thereof,) which can be false. And accordingly, when religion, even natural, tells us, that there is a God, and that he is a rewarder of every man according to his works; that he is a most wise Governor, and a most just and impartial Judge, and for that reason has appointed a future estate, where in every man shall receive a retribution suitable to what he had done in his lifetime. And moreover, when the Christian religion further assures us, that Christ has satisfied God’s justice for sin, and purchased eternal redemption and salvation for even the greatest sinners, who shall repent of and turn from their sins; and withal has given such excel lent laws to the world, that if men perform them, they shall not fail to reap an eternal reward of happiness, as the fruit and effect of the forementioned satisfaction; as on the other side, that if they live viciously, and die impenitent, they shall inevitably be disposed of into a condition of eternal and insupportable misery. These, I say, are some of the principal things which religion, both natural and Christian, proposes to mankind.

And now, before we come to acknowledge the truth of them, let us seriously and in good earnest examine them, and consider how good, how expedient, and how suitable to all the ends and uses of human life it is, that there should be such things; how unable society would be to subsist without them; how the whole world would sink into another chaos and confusion, did not the awe and belief of these things (or something like them) regulate and control the exorbitances of men’s headstrong and unruly wills. Upon a thorough consideration of all which, I am confident, that there is no truly wise and thinking person, who, could he suppose that the forecited dictates of religion should not prove really true, would not however wish at least that they were so. For allowing, (what experience too sadly demonstrates,) that an universal guilt has passed upon all mankind through sin; and supposing withal that there were no hopes or terms of pardon held forth to sinners; would not an universal despair follow an universal guilt? And would not such a despair drive the worship of God out of the world? For certain it is, that none would pray to him, serve, or worship him, and much less suffer for him, who despaired to receive any good from him. And, on the other side, could sinners have any solid ground to hope for pardon of sin, without an antecedent satisfaction made to the divine justice, so infinitely wronged by sin? Or could the honour of that great attribute be preserved without such a compensation? And yet further, could all the wit and reason of man conceive how such a satisfaction could be made, had not religion revealed to us a Saviour, who was both God and man, and upon that account only fitted and enabled to make it? And, after all, could the benefits of this satisfaction be attainable by any, but upon the conditions of repentance and change of life; would not all piety and holy living be thereby banished from the societies of men? So that we see from hence, that it is religion alone which opposes itself to all these dire consequences, and (like the angel appointed to guard paradise with a flaming sword) stands in the breach against all that despair, violence, and impiety, which would otherwise irresistibly break in upon and infest mankind in all their concerns, civil and spiritual.

And this one consideration (were there no further arguments for it, either from faith or philosophy) is to me an irrefragable proof of the truth of the doctrines delivered by it. For that a falsehood (which, as such, is the defect, the reproach, and the very deformity of nature) should have such generous, such wholesome, and sovereign effects, as to keep the whole world in order, and that a lie should be the great bond or ligament which holds all the societies of mankind together, keeping them from cutting throats, and tearing one another in pieces, (as, if religion be not a truth, all these salutary, public benefits must be ascribed to tricks and lies,) would be such an assertion, as, upon all the solid grounds of sense and reason, (to go no further,) ought to be looked upon as unmeasurably absurd and unnatural.

But our Saviour prescribes men an excellent and unfailing method to assure themselves of the truth of his doctrine, John vii. 17. If any one, says he, will do the will of the Father, he shall know of my doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself. If men could but be brought to look upon the agenda of Christianity as suitable, they would never judge the credenda of it irrational. There is a strange intercourse and mutual corroboration between faith and practice. For as belief first engages practice, so practice strengthens and confirms belief. The body first imparts heat to the garment, but the garment returns it with advantage to the body. God beams in peculiar evidences and discoveries of the truth, to such as embrace it in their affections, and own it in their actions. There may be, indeed, some plausible, seeming arguments brought against the truth, to assault and shake our belief of it: but they generally prevail, not by their own strength, but by our corruption; not by their power to persuade, but by our willingness to be deceived. Whereas, on the contrary, true piety would effectually solve such scruples, and obedience answer all objections. And so I descend now to the

Third and last of the consequences deducible from the doctrine first proposed by us; and this shall be to give some account of the true cause and original of those two great evils which of late have so disturbed these parts of the world; to wit, atheism and fanaticism. And,

1. For atheism. Most sure it is, that no doctrine or opinion can generally gain upon men’s minds, but (let it be never so silly and fantastical) it must yet proceed from some real cause; and more particularly either from the seeming evidence of the thing forcing a belief of itself upon a weak intellect, or from some strange, unaccountable inclination of the will and the affections to such an hypothesis. For the first of these, I would fain see some of those co gent, convincing arguments, by which any one will own himself persuaded that there is no God, or that he does not govern the affairs of the world so as to take a particular cognizance of men’s actions, in designing to them a future retribution, according to the nature and quality of them here: it being all one to the world, whether there be no God, or none who governs it.

But how pitiful and ridiculous are the grounds upon which such men pretend to account for the very lowest and commonest phenomena of nature, without recurring to a God and Providence! Such as, either the fortuitous concourse of infinite little bodies of themselves, and by their own impulse (since no other nature or spirit is allowed by these men to put them into motion) falling into this curious and admirable system of the universe: according to which notion, the blindest chance must be acknowledged to surpass and outdo the contrivances of the exactest art: a thing which the common sense and notion of mankind must, at the very first hearing, rise up against and explode. But if this romance will not satisfy, then in comes the eternity of the world, (the chief and most avowed opinion set up by the atheists to confront and answer all the objections from religion;) and yet, after all these high pretences, so great and inextricable are the plunges and absurdities which these principles cast men into, that the belief of a being distinct from the world, and before it, is not only towards a good life more conducible, but even for the resolution of these problems more philosophical. And I do accordingly here leave that old, trite, common argument, (though nevertheless venerable for being so,) drawn from a constant series or chain of causes, leading us up to a supreme mover, (not moved himself by any thing but himself,) a being simple, immaterial, and incorporeal; I leave this, I say, to our high and mighty atheists to baffle and confute it, and substitute some thing more rational in the room of it, if they can; and in order thereunto, to take an eternity to do it in.

But if this be the case, why then is it made a badge of wit, and an argument of parts, for a man to commence atheist, and to cast off all belief of Providence, all awe and reverence of religion? Assuredly, in this matter, men’s conviction begins not at their understandings, but at their wills, or rather at their brutish appetites; which being immersed in the pleasures and sensualities of the world, would by no means, if they could help it, have such a thing as a Deity, or a future estate of souls to trouble them here, or to account with them hereafter. No; such men, we may be sure, dare not look such truths as these in the face, and therefore they throw them off, and had rather be befooled into a friendly, favour able, and propitious lie; a lie which shall chuck them under the chin, and kiss them, and at the same time strike them under the fifth rib. To believe that there is no God to judge the world, is hugely suitable to that man’s interest, who assuredly knows, that upon such a judgment he shall be condemned; and to assert, that there is no hell, must needs be a very benign opinion to a person engaged in such actions as he knows must certainly bring him thither. Men are atheists, not because they have better wits than other men, but because they have corrupter wills; nor because they reason better, but because they live worse.

2. The next great evil which has of late infested the Christian church, and that part of it in our nation more especially, is fanaticism; that is to say, a pretence to and profession of a greater purity in religion, and a more spiritual, perfect way of worshipping Almighty God, than the national established church affords to those in communion with it. This, I say, was and is the pretence; but a pretence so utterly false and shamefully groundless, that in comparison of the principle which makes it, hypocrisy may worthily pass for sincerity, and Pharisaism for the truest and most refined Christianity.

But as for those who own and abet such separations, to the infinite disturbance both of church and state, I would fain have them produce those mighty reasons, those invincible arguments which have drawn them from the communion of the church into conventicles, and warranted them to prefer schisms and divisions before Christian unity and conformity. No; this is a thing which we may expect long enough, before they will so much as offer at, and much less perform; there being but little of argument to be expected from men professing no thing but inspiration, and the impulse of a principle discernible by none but by themselves. And for my own part, I must sincerely declare, that upon the strictest search I have been able to make, I could never yet find, that these men had any other reason or argument to defend themselves and their practices by, but that senseless and impolitic encouragement which has been all along given them. But for all that, men who act by conscience, as well as pretend it, will do well to consider, that in human laws and actions it is not the penalty annexed which makes the sin, nor consequently the withdrawing it which takes away the guilt, but that the sanctions of men, as well as the providence of God, may suffer, and even serve to countenance many things in this world, which shall both certainly and severely too be reckoned for in the next.

In the mean time, to give a true but short account of the proceedings and temper of these separatists. It was nothing but a kind of spiritual pride which first made them disdain to submit to the discipline, and from thence brought them to despise and turn their backs upon the established worship of our church; the sober, grave, and primitive plainness of which began to be loathed by such brainsick, fanciful opiniators, who could please themselves in nothing but novelty, and the ostentation of their own extemporary, senseless effusions; fit to proceed from none but such as have the gift of talking in their sleep, or dreaming while they are awake.

And for this cause, no doubt, God, in his just and severe judgment, delivered them over to their own sanctified and adored nonsense, to confound and lose themselves in an endless maze of error and seduction: so that, as soon as they had broke off from the church, (through the encouragement given them by a company of men which had overturned all that was settled in the nation,) they first ran into presbyterian classes, from thence into independent congregations: from independents they improved into anabaptists; from anabaptists into quakers: from whence being able to advance no further, they are in a fair way to wheel about to the other extreme of popery: a religion and interest the most loudly decried, and most effectually served by these men, of any other in the world besides.

But whosoever, in the great concerns of his soul, would pitch his foot upon sure ground, let him be ware of these whirlpools, and of turning round and round, till he comes to be seized with such a giddiness, as shall make him fall finally and irrecoverably, not from the church only, but even from God himself, and all sense of religion. And therefore, to prevent such a fatal issue of things, let a man, in the next place, consider, that the way to obtain a settled persuasion of the truth of religion, is to bring an ho nest, humble, and unbiassed mind, open to the embraces of it; and to know withal, that if he chooses the truth in simplicity, God will confirm his choice with certainty and stability.

To which God, the Father of lights, and the Fountain of all truth, be rendered and ascribed, as is most due, all praise, might, majesty, and dominion, both now and for ever more. Amen.

But then, if a man’s condition be such, that all his cares are to terminate in his own person, and that he has neither sons nor daughters to lay up for, but that his whole family lives and dies with him, and one grave is to receive them all, why then covetousness will urge to him the necessity of hoarding up against old age, against the days of weakness and infirmity, when the strength of his body and the vigour of his mind shall fail him, and when the world shall measure out their friendships and respects to him only according to the dimensions of his purse. Upon which account, one would think, that all a man’s gettings and hoardings up, during his youth, ought to pass but for charity and compassion to his old age; which must either live and subsist upon the stock of former acquisitions, or expect all that misery, which want, added to weakness, can bring upon it. The sight of an old man, poor and destitute, crazy and scorned, unable to help himself, or to buy the help of others, is a shrewd argument to recommend covetousness to one, even in his greenest years, and to make the very youngest and j oiliest sparks, in their most flourishing age, look about them. It having been the observation and judgment of some, who have wanted neither wisdom nor experience, that an old man has no friend but his money. And I heartily wish I could confute the observation.

But the like and no less plausible a plea will this vice also put in for providing against times of persecution, or public calamity; calling to a man’s mind all the hardships of a civil war, all the plunders and rapines, when nothing was safe above-ground; but a man was forced to bury his bags, to keep himself alive. And therefore, though, at present, there should be peace, and all about us calm and quiet; yet who knows how soon a storm may arise, and the spirit of rebellion and fanaticism put it into men’s heads once more to raise armies to plunder and cut throats in the Lord; and then, believe it, when the great work shall be thus carrying on, and we shall see our friends and our neighbours reformed out of house and home as formerly, it will be found worth while to have secured a friendly penny in a corner, which may bid us eat, when we should otherwise starve, and speak comfort to us, when our friends will not so much as know us.

With these and such like reasonings, fallaciously applied, will covetousness persuade a man both of the necessity and lawfulness of his raising heap upon heap, and joining house to house, and putting no bounds to his gains, when his hand is once in. And it must be confessed, that there is some shew of reason for what has been alleged. But when again we shall consider, that the forementioned cases are all but future contingencies, which are by no means to be the rule of men’s actions, our duty is only to look to the precept, and the obligation of it, which is plain and present, and may be easily known; and for the rest, to commit ourselves to the good providence of God. For while we are solicitously providing against the miseries of age and persecution, how do we know, whether we shall ever live to be old? or to see the calamity of our country? or the persecution of our persons? But however, if God shall see it for his honour to try and humble us with the miseries of any of these conditions, it is not all our art and labour, all our parsimony and providence, which can prevent them. And therefore, how plausible soever the pleas of covetousness may seem, they are far from being ration ah But,

3dly and lastly, Covetousness is apt to prevail upon the minds of men, by reason of the reputation which riches generally give men in the world, by whatsoever ways or means they were gotten. It is a very great, though sad and scandalous truth, that rich men are at the very same time esteemed and honoured, while the ways by which they grew rich are abhorred and detested: for how is griping and avarice exclaimed against! how is oppression branded all the world over! All mankind seems agreed to run them down; and yet, what addresses are made, what respects shewn, what high encomiums given to a wealthy miser, to a rich and flourishing oppressor! The lucky effect seems to have atoned for and sanctified its vile cause; and the basest thing covered with gold, lies hid itself, and shines with the lustre of its covering.

Virtue, charity, and generosity, are indeed splendid names, and look bright in sermons and panegyrics, (which few regard:) but when we come to practice and common life, virtue, if poor, is but a sneaking thing, looked upon disdainfully, and treated coldly; and when charity brings a man to need charity, he must be content with the scraps from the table of the rich miser or the great oppressor. For no invitations are now made, like that in the gospel, where messengers are sent, with tickets, to bring in guests from the hedges and highways. No, it is not the way in our days to spread tables or furnish out banquets for the poor and the blind, the hungry and the indigent. For in our times, (to the just shame of the fops our ancestors, as some call them,) full bellies are still oftenest feasted; and to them who have shall be given, and they shall have more abundantly. This is the way of the world; be the discourse of it what it will.

And as this is the general practice of the world, so it must needs be the general observation of the world too; for while men reproach vice, and caress the vicious; upbraid the guilt of an action, but adore its success; they must not think, that all about them are so without eyes or common sense, as not to spy out the prevarication, and to take an estimate of their real value of things and persons, rather by what they do, than by what they talk. Since therefore it is so natural for every one to desire to live with as good esteem and reputation in the world as he can, it is no wonder, if covetousness makes so strong a plea for itself in the hearts of men, by promising them riches, which they find so certain a way to honour and respect. And thus much for the first general reason of the caution, given by our Saviour, against covetousness; namely, its great aptness to prevail upon and insinuate into men’s minds.

2. The other general reason is, the exceeding great difficulty of removing it, when it has once prevailed. In which and the like cases, one would think it argument sufficient to caution any man against a disease, if we can but convince him of the great likelihood of his falling into it; and not only of that, but, in case he should fall into it, of the extreme difficulty (sometimes next to an impossibility) of his recovering, and getting out of it. Both which considerations together, certainly should add some thing more than ordinary to the caution of every wise man, and make him double his guards against so threatening a mischief. And as for covetousness, we may truly say of it, that it makes both the alpha and omega in the Devil’s alphabet, and that it is the first vice in corrupt nature which moves, and the last which dies. For look upon any infant, and as soon as it can but move an hand, we shall see it reaching out after something or other which it should not have; and he who does not know it to be the proper and peculiar sin of old age, seems himself to have the dotage of that age upon him, whether he has the years or no. For who so intent upon the world commonly, as those who are just going out of it? Who so diligent in heaping up wealth, as those who have neither will nor time to spend it?

If we should insist upon the reason of things, no thing seems more a prodigy, than to observe, how catching and griping those are, who are utterly void of all power and capacity of enjoying any of these things which they so eagerly catch at. All which shews, how fast this vice rivets itself into the heart, which it once gets hold of; how it even grows into a part of nature, and scarce ever leaves the man, who has been enslaved by it, till he leaves the world.

Now, if we inquire into the reason of the difficult removal of this vice, we shall find, that all those causes, which promoted its first insinuation and entrance into men’s affections, contribute also to its settlement and continuance in the same; as the same sword which enables to conquer, enables also to reign and rule after the conquest. Covetousness, we shew, prevailed by its likeness and resemblance to virtue, by the plausibility of its pleas, and by the reputation of its effects. All which, as they were so many arguments to the soul, first to admit and take in the vice, so they are as potent persuasives not to part with it. But the grand reason, I conceive, which ties the knot so fast, that it is hardly to be untied, is this; that covetousness is founded upon that great and predominant principle of nature, which is self-preservation. It is indeed an ill-built superstructure, but yet it is raised upon that lawful and most allowed foundation. The prime and main design of nature, whether in things animate or in animate, being to preserve or defend itself; which since it cannot do, but by taking in relief and succour from things without, and since this desire is so very eager and transporting, it easily overshoots in the measure of what it takes in, and thereby incurs the sin and contracts the guilt of covetousness; which is properly an “immoderate desire and pursuit of even the lawful helps and supports of nature.”

Men dread want, misery, and contempt, and therefore think they can never be enough provided with the means of keeping off these evils: so that, if want, misery, and contempt were not manifestly enemies to, and destructive of the enjoyments of nature; and nature were not infinitely concerned to secure and make good these enjoyments; and riches and plenty were not thought the direct instruments to effect this; there could be no such thing as covetousness in the world. But even money (the desire of all nations) would sink in its value, and gold itself lose its weight, though it kept its lustre. For to what rational purpose should men prowl and labour for that, without which nature could continue in its full, entire fruition of whatsoever was either needful for its support, or desirable for its pleasure? But it is evident, that men live and act under this persuasion, that unless they have wealth and plenty enough, they shall be needy, miserable, and despised, and that the way to have enough, is to let nothing, if possible, go beside them. So that herein lies the strength of covetousness, that it acts in the strength of nature, that it strikes in with its first and most forcible inclination; which is to secure itself, both in the good it actually has, and against the evil it fears.

In short therefore, to recapitulate the foregoing particulars. If caution and vigilance be ever necessary for the prevention of any evil, it must be of such an one as insinuates itself easily, grows upon a man insensibly, and sticks to him immovably; and in a word, scarce ever loses its hold where it has once got it. So that a man must be continually watching and fencing against it, or he shall be sure to fall by it.

And thus much for the first general part of the text, to wit, the dehortation from covetousness, expressed in these words, Take heed, and beware of covetousness. A vice, which no character can reach the compass, or fully express the baseness of, holding fast all it can get in one hand, and reaching at all it can desire with the other. A vice which may but too significantly be called the

Viz. Insatiabilis edendi cupiditas; sive morbus, quo laborantes, etiam post cibum esuriunt. Tusanus.

And first, if we take them, as they are an entire proposition in themselves, so they offer us these two things.

1. Something supposed, which is, that every man has something or other which he accounts his treasure, or chief good. And,

2. Something expressly declared, namely, that whatsoever a man accounts his treasure, or chief good, upon that he places his heart, his whole desires and affections. And,

1. For the thing supposed or implied in the words; to wit, that every man has something or other which he accounts his treasure, or chief good. The truth and certainty of which proposition will appear founded upon these two things.

1 . The activity of man’s mind. And,

2. The method of his acting. And,

1. For the first of these. The mind of man is of that spirituous, stirring nature, that it is perpetually at work. Something it is still in pursuit of, either by contemplation or desire: the foundation of which latter, I shew, was want; and consequently, as man will be always wanting something or other, so he will be always sending forth his desires to hunt after, and bring that thing in, which he wants: which is so true, that some men having compassed the greatest and noblest objects of their desires, (so that desire could no longer ascend, as being already at the top,) they have betook themselves to inferior and ignoble exercises; so that amongst the Roman emperors, (then lords of a great part of the world,) we find Nero at his harp, Domitian killing flies, and Commodus playing the fencer; and all this only to busy themselves some way or other; nothing being so grievous and tedious to human nature as perfect idleness.

But now, there is not any thing (though never so mean and trivial) which a man does, but he antecedently designs himself some satisfaction by the doing of it; so that he advances to every action as to a degree of happiness, as to something which, according to its measure and proportion, will gratify or please him, and without which he would be in that degree uneasy and troublesome to himself. The spirit of a man, like a flame, being of such an operative, and withal of such a catching quality, that it is still closing in with some desirable, suit able good, as the food that nourishes, and the subject that supports it; so impossible is it, that desire should wholly lie still. For though the soul had actually all that it could enjoy, yet then desire would run out into the future, and from the present fruition project the continuance and preservation of its beloved object. In short, what blood is to the body, that desire is to the soul; and as the blood will circulate while the body lives, so desire will act and range about while the soul subsists; and no thing but the annihilation of one can supersede or stop the motion of the other.

And the truth is, this innate restlessness of desire implanted in the soul of man, is the great engine by which God would draw it to himself: and if men would be so far true to themselves, and to the most ruling principles of their nature, as to keep desire still upon the advance, till it fixed upon something which would absolutely and fully satisfy it, it were impossible but that, in the issue, it should terminate in God. But that which makes this great principle so ineffective of any true happiness to man is, that he does not carry it constantly and directly forward, but often suffers it to recur, or turn aside to former false satisfactions; first tasting an object, and then, upon trial, leaving it for its emptiness; and yet afterwards returning to it again, from a vain hope to speed better than he had done before. So that by this means there is a continual restless circulation from one empty thing to another. The soul, in this case, being just like a sick man, still altering his postures in order to his ease; though, when he has tried all, he finds no more ease in one than in another; a certain demonstration, that the soul itself, in the present state of nature, is in a most deplorably sick and disordered condition. But,

Secondly, the second argument to prove, that every man has something or other which he accounts his treasure, his peculiar, or chief good, shall be taken from the method of his actings, which still proceeds by a direction of means to one great and last end. For as an infinite progress is exploded in all matters of ratiocination, as absurd and impossible, so it is equally absurd in matters of practice; it being not more necessary to assign and fix some first principle of discourse, than to state some last end of acting: all a man’s practicks hanging loose and uncertain, unless they are governed and knit together by the prospect of some certain end.

Now it is the same thing which sustains these several denominations of last end, chief good, or treasure; all and every one of them signifying neither more nor less than the grand and ultimate term, to which a rational agent directs all his actions and desires: every man naturally and necessarily intending some one principal thing; to the acquiring of which, all that he does, thinks, or desires, is subservient, and in which, as in a kind of centre, all his actions meet and unite.

For though a man has not continually and actually the prospect of that end in every one of his actions, yet he has it habitually and virtually; forasmuch as, being once designed by him, all his actions tend to and promote the compassing of it: as it is not necessary that a traveller should have his journey’s end in his thoughts every step that he takes; but it is enough that he first designs it, and in the strength of that design is by every step carried nearer and nearer to it: every man has some prime, paramount object, which employs his head, and fills his heart, rules his thoughts, and, as it were, lies in his bosom; and is to him above and instead of ail other enjoyments whatsoever. And thus much for the thing supposed or implied in the words, namely, that every man has some peculiarly valued thing, which he accounts his treasure, or chief good. But,

2. The other thing to be considered by us is that which is expressly declared in the text, namely, that whatsoever a man places his treasure or his chief good in, upon that he places his heart also. Where, according to the language of scripture, the word heart compendiously denotes to us all the powers and faculties of man’s soul, together with their respective motions and operations. And since the word treasure is a metaphorical term for a man’s prime or chief good, we are to take an account how a man prosecutes this good, from the analogy of those actions which he exerts with reference to a treasure; and which, I conceive, may be reduced to these four. As,

1. A restless and laborious endeavour to acquire and possess himself of it. There is no man, who heartily and in good earnest desires to be rich, or great, or learned, who can be idle. For desire is the spring of diligence, and the heart infallibly sets both head and hands, and every thing else on work. Great desire is like a great fire, and all difficulties before it are like stubble; it will certainly make its way through them, and devour them. From whence it is, that it generally proves so dangerous, and too often fatal, to stand between a man (especially if in place and power) and that which he most desires; and many innocent and brave persons have to their cost found it so. For dangers and death itself shall be nothing; conscience and religion nothing; nay, the very hopes of heaven and the fears of hell shall be accounted as nothing, when a furious, headstrong desire shall resolve to break through them all; and, like Hannibal in his march, cut through rocks and mountains, till it either finds or makes a way to its beloved object. What made Jacob think those seven years of hard service for Rachel but a few days, as it is said in Gen. xxix. 20, but the extraordinary and invincible love which he bore to her? And what makes the trader into foreign countries defy the winds and the seas, and hazard the safety which he actually has and loves, but the wealth which he loves more? All the stupendous instances of courage, patience, industry, and the like, which have so swelled the volumes of history, and amused the world, have been but the effects of great and victorious desire; they are all of them but the instruments of love, to compass the things which men have first set their hearts upon: so that when courage takes the field for battle, we may be sure that it is desire which leads it on; filling the mind with glorious ideas of the prize it contends for. All the noble violences done to nature have been resolvable into this cause; nay, the very restraints of appetite have been but the effects of an appetite more controlling and predominant.

What is it that a man more naturally affects than society and converse? (it being a kind of multiplication of himself into every person of the company he converses with.) And what, by consequence, can be more uneasy to this ζῶον πολιτικὸν, this sociable creature, than the dry, pensive retirements of solitude? Nevertheless, when a nobler thing shall have seized his imagination, and his desires have took a flight above the first inclinations of his nature, by inspiring him with the diviner love of knowledge, or being serviceable to his country; why then, he can with delight retreat into his cell, dwell with himself, and converse with his own thoughts, and, in those higher speculations, forget all his merry-meetings and companions; nay, and his very food and rest, and live not only above the pleasures, but almost above the wants of nature too. In Prov. xviii. 1, Solomon tells us, that, through desire, a man having separated himself, seeketh and intermeddleth with all wisdom. So that it is this mighty thing, desire, which makes a man break off, and sequester himself from all those jollities, those airy, empty diversions, which use to court and win the appetites of vulgar souls. Thus nature, we see, is forced to bend to art; art is the daughter and issue of necessity; and the standard and measure of this necessity is desire; desire, which nothing almost can withstand or set bounds to; which makes paths over the seas; turns the night into day; and, in a word, charges through hunger and poverty, and all those hardships which human nature is so apt to shrink under; but it will, at length, arrive at the satisfaction which it is in pursuit of.

What high and vast achievements does the apostle, in the 11th of the Hebrews, ascribe to faith! As the subduing of kingdoms, stopping the mouths of lions, quenching the violence of fire, out of weakness making men strong, and that to such a degree, as to endure tortures, cruel mockings, scourgings, bonds and imprisonments; nay, and to be stoned, sawn asunder, and slain with the sword. But how did faith do all this? Why, in the strength of love; faith being properly the eye of the soul, to spy out and represent to it those excellent, amiable things, the love and desire of which should be hotter than fire and stronger than death; bearing a man through and above all the terrors of both, for the obtaining of so transcendent a good. In short, faith shews the soul its treasure; which being once seen by it, naturally inflames the affections; and they as naturally engage all the faculties and powers of soul and body, in a restless, indefatigable endeavour after it. And thus, in all those heroic instances of passive fortitude, faith wrought by love, and therefore it wrought wonders.

2. Whatsoever a man accounts his treasure, that he places his whole delight in; it entertains his eye, refreshes his fancy, feeds his thoughts, and, next to his conscience, affords him a continual feast. It fills and answers all his capacities of pleasure; and to please, we know, is much more than barely to support. It is the utmost limit of enjoyment; the most refined part of living; and, in a word, the last and highest thing which nature looks for. It quenches a man’s thirst, not only as water, which just keeps nature alive, but as wine, which both sustains and gratifies it too; and adds a pleasure, as well as serves a necessity.

Nothing has so strong and fast an hold upon the nature and mind of man, as that which delights it: for whatsoever a man delights to do, by his good will he would be always doing: delight being that which perpetuates the union between the will and the object, and brings them together, by the surest, the most voluntary and constant returns. And from hence, by the way, we may affirm it as a certain, unfailing truth, that no man ever was or can be considerable in any art or profession whatsoever, which he does not take a particular delight in; for that otherwise he will never heartily and assiduously apply himself to it; nor is it morally possible that he should.

Men indeed, in the course of this world, are brought to do many things, mere necessity enforcing them, and the want and weakness of their condition creating that necessity. But still, in all such cases, the man goes one way, and his desires another; for he acts but as a slave under the eye of a severe master; the dread of some greater suffering making him submit to the disciplines of a less. But unshackle his nature, and turn his desires loose, and then you shall see what he will choose in order to his pleasure, and the free unrestrained enjoyment of himself. An epicure may be brought to confine himself to his chamber, and take physic, (as none generally need it more;) but will he look upon the potion with the same eye with which he uses to see the wine sparkle in the glass? or rejoice in the company of his physician as much as in that of his boon companions? No, the actions of pleasure carry quite differing signs and marks upon them from such as are forced; marks, above all the arts of dissimulation or the powers of compulsion. For so far as any thing pleases the heart, it commands it; and the command is absolute, and the obedience cheerful.

3. Whatsoever a man accounts his treasure, from that he derives the last support of his mind in all his troubles. Let an ambitious man lose his friends, his health, or his estate; yet, if the darling of his thoughts, his honour and his fame, continue entire, his spirit will still bear up. And let a voluptuous man be stripped of his credit and good name, his pleasures and sensuality, in the midst of all his disgrace, shall relieve him. And lastly, to name no more, let a covetous miser have both pleasure and honour taken from him, yet so long as his bags are full, and the golden heaps glister in his eyes, his heart will be at ease, and other losses shall affect him little; they may possibly raze the surface, but they descend not into the vitals of his comforts.

The reason of all which is, because an ambitious person values honour, a voluptuous man pleasure, and a covetous wretch wealth, above any other enjoyment in the world; all other things being but tasteless and insipid to them, in comparison of that one which is the sole minion of their fancy, and the idol of their affections. And accordingly it would be found but a vain and fruitless attempt, to go about to move the heart of any of these persons, but by touching upon the proper string that ties and holds it; so that the way to humble and bring down an ambitious, aspiring man, is to disparage him, to expose and shew his blind-side, (which such kind of persons never fail to have;) and the most effectual course to make a covetous man miserable, in the right sense, is to impoverish him: and when such a change of condition once passes upon such persons, they become like men without either life or spirit, the most pitiful, forlorn, abject creatures under heaven, and full of that complaint of Micah, in Judges xviii. 24, Ye have taken away my gods, and what have I more? For whatsoever a man accounts his chief good, so as to suffer it to engross and take up all his desires, that he makes his god, that he deifies and adores, whether he knows so much or no. For certain it is, that if he would lay out himself never so much in the acts of religion, he could do no more even to God himself than love him, trust in him, and rely upon him, and, in a word, give him his heart; nor indeed does God require any more; for it is a man’s all. Take the heart, and you have the man by consequence. Govern the spring, and you command the motion. The whole man (as I may so express it) is but the appendix of his own heart.

4thly and lastly, Whatsoever a man accounts his treasure, for the preservation of that he will part with all other things, if he cannot enjoy that and them together. See a merchant in a storm at sea, and what he values most he will be sure to throw overboard last; every man, when he is exposed to any great and imminent danger, marshals his enjoyments just as Jacob did his family, when he was to meet his brother Esau, whom he was in such fear of, Gen. xxxiii. 2; the handmaids and their children he put foremost; Leah and her children next; but Rachel and her children the hinder most of all. The reason of which was, because he had set his heart most upon her, and therefore would have her furthest from the danger, if it might be escaped, and last in the suffering, if it proved unavoidable. A father will be rather stripped .of his estate, than bereaved of his children; and if he cannot keep them all, he will (though with the loss of the rest) redeem the son of his affections.

It is possible indeed, that a man himself may not always perfectly know what he loves most, till some notable trial comes, which shall separate between him and what he has, and call for all his enjoyments one after another; and then presently his eyes shall be opened, and he shall plainly find, that the garment which sits nearest to him, shall by his good-will be last torn from him. Bring a man under persecution, and that shall tell him, whether the peace of his conscience, or the security of his fortune, be the thing which he prefers and values most. That shall tell him, whether he had rather be plundered or perjured; and whether the guilt of rebellion and sacrilege does not strike a greater horror into him, than all the miseries of an ejectment or sequestration. But if, at the critical time of trial, such an one shall surrender up his conscience, that he may continue warm in his house and his estate, let him no longer doubt what it is that is his treasure, and what lies deepest in his heart. For it is that which he can most hardly be without. But his conscience, it seems, he can easily shake hands with; and therefore, wheresoever he may place his religion, it is certain that he places his happiness somewhere else.

Skin for skin, and all that a man has will he give for his life, (commonly speaking;) but let a man love any thing better than his life, and life itself shall be given for it. And the world has seen the experiment; for some have loved their country better than their lives, and accordingly have died for it: and some their parents, some their honour, to that degree, as to sacrifice their dearest blood for the preservation of one, and vindication of the other. But still, this is the sure, infallible test of love, that the measure of its strength is to be taken by the fastness of its hold. Benjamin was apparently dearest to his father, because he was still kept with him, while the rest of his brethren were sent from him. He was to him as the apple of his eye; and therefore no wonder if he could not endure to have him out of it.

And thus I have done with the first consideration of the words; namely, as they are an entire proposition in themselves. I come now to the

Second; to wit, as they are an argument relating to, and enforcing of the foregoing precept in the 19th and 20th verses, Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust do corrupt, and thieves break through and steal: but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust do corrupt, nor thieves break through and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. The force of which argument is founded upon this clear and convincing ratiocination; to wit, that it is infinitely foolish, and below a rational creature, to place his heart upon that, which is by no means worth the placing of his heart upon; and therefore, since it is undeniably evident, that a man will place his heart upon that which he makes his treasure, it follows, that he cannot with out extreme folly make any thing his treasure, which can neither be secured from rapine nor preserved from corruption; as it is certain that nothing in this world can.

This, I say, is the sum and force of our Saviour’s argument: in pursuit of which, we are to observe, that there are two things which offer themselves to mankind, as rivals for their affections; to wit, God and the world; the things of this present life and of the future. And the whole strength of our Saviour’s discourse bears upon this supposition, that it is impossible for a man to fix his heart upon both. No man can make religion his business, and the world too: no man can have two chief goods. It is indeed more impossible than to serve two masters; forasmuch as the heart is more laid out upon what a man loves, than upon what he serves. Besides that the soul is but of a stinted operation; and cannot exert its full force and vigour upon two diverse, and much less contrary objects. For that one of them will be perpetually counterworking the other; and so far as the soul inclines to one, it must in proportion leave, and go off from the other; so that an equal adhesion to them both implies in it a perfect contradiction. For why else should the word of truth so positively tell us, that if we love the world, the love of the Father is not, cannot be in us? 1 John ii. 15. Men, I know, think to join both, but it is because they understand neither. For a man must first have two hearts, and two souls, and two selves, before he can give an heart to God and an heart to the world too. And therefore Christ does not state this mat ter upon a bare priority of acquisition, as if he had bid men first lay up treasures for themselves in heaven, and after that allowed them, with the same earnestness, to provide themselves treasures here on earth likewise, (and so by that means successively grasp the full happiness of both worlds:) for he knew that the very nature of the thing itself made this impracticable, and not to be effected; forasmuch as the acquisition of either world would certainly engage and take up the whole man, and consequently leave no thing of him to be employed about acquiring the other.

Whereupon Abraham speaking to the rich man in the gospel, who had flourished in his purple and fine linen, and fared deliciously every day, tells him, that he, in his lifetime, had received his good things. His they are called emphatically, his by peculiar choice. They were the things he chiefly valued and pitched upon, as the most likely to make him happy; and consequently, having actually enjoyed them, and thereby compassed the utmost of his desires, his happiness was at an end: he had his option; and there was no further provision for him in the other world: nor indeed was it possible that he should find any, where he had laid up none. Those words of our Saviour being most assuredly true, whether applied to men’s endeavours after the things of this life, or of another; that verily they have their reward. That is to say, the result and issue of their labours will still be suitable to the end which governed and directed them. For where men sow, there they must expect to reap; it being infinitely absurd to bury their seed in the earth, and to expect a crop in heaven. And accordingly, in the 11th of the Hebrews, we find, that at the same time the saints of old (there spoken of) declared themselves expectants of a land of promise hereafter, they also declared themselves strangers and pilgrims here. And therefore, let not men mock and deceive themselves, by thinking to compass heaven with one hand, and earth with the other; and so to reign as princes in both. For the wisdom of God has decreed it otherwise; and judged one world enough for one man, though it gives him his choice of two.

It being clear therefore, that a man cannot set his heart both upon God and the world too, as his treasure, or chief good; let us, in the next place, see which of these two bids highest for this great prize, the heart of man. And since there are but these two, there cannot be a more expedite way to evince that it belongs to God, than by proving the absurdity of placing it upon the world. And that will appear upon a double account.

1. If we consider the world in comparison with the heart or mind of man. And,

2. If we consider it absolutely in itself. And,

1. If we consider it in comparison with the heart of man, we shall find that the heart has a superlative worth and excellency above any thing in this world besides; and therefore ought by no means to be bestowed or laid out upon things so vastly inferior to itself. For it is that noble part of man which God has drawn and imprinted a lively portraiture of his own divine nature upon; that part which he has designed for his own peculiar use. For God made the heart for no other purpose but that he might dwell in it; giving us understandings able to pierce into and look through the fairest and most specious offers of this world, together with affections large enough to swallow and take down all that the whole creation can set before them, and yet remain hungry and unsatisfied still. And are such faculties as these, think we, fit to be entertained only with froth and wind, emptiness and delusion? And those things can be no more, which are always promising satisfaction, but never give it. For surely such low enjoyments as meat, drink, and clothes, are not sufficient to satisfy or make a man happy; and yet all the necessities of the natural life are fully answered by these; and whatsoever, upon that account, is desired more, is but the result of a false appetite, founded in no real want, but only in fancy and opinion. Nevertheless, there are, I confess, spiritual wants, which nothing can satisfy but what is supernatural.

And therefore the great and good God, who gave us our very being, and so can need nothing that we either are or have, yet vouchsafes to solicit, and even court our affections; and sets no other price upon heaven, glory, and immortality, nay, and upon himself too, but our love; there being nothing truly great and glorious, which a creature is capable of enjoying, but God is ready to give it a man in exchange for his heart.

How high is reason, and how strong is love! and surely God never gave the soul two such wings, only that we might creep upon the ground, and place our heart and our foot upon the same level. Let the epicure therefore, or voluptuous man, from amongst all his pleasures, single out that one which he reckons the best, the fullest, and most refined of all the rest, and offer it to his reason and affections, and see whether it can so acquit itself to the searching impartial judgment of the one, and the unlimited ap petite of the other, that, when he shall have took his utmost fill of it, and gone off from the enjoyment, he shall be able to say, Here have I found all the satisfaction that could be thought of, or imagined; or his affections be able to tell him, Here have we had all the sweetness that could be wished for or desired. But, on the contrary, do they not rather depart thirsty and melancholy, and abashed with the present sense of their disappointment, and still casting about for something or other, to piece up the flaws and defects of such broken fruitions? So vast a difference is there in these matters between surfeit and satisfaction.

The heart of man is intimately conscious to itself of its own worth and prerogative; and therefore is never put to search for any thing of enjoyment here below, but it does it with a secret regret and disdain, scorn and indignation; like a prince imprisoned, and forced to be ruled and fed by his own subjects: for so it is with that divine being, the soul, while depressed by the body to a condition so much below itself.

But God sent not man into the world with such mighty endowments, so much to enjoy it, as to have the honour of despising it; and, upon a full experience of its woful vanity, to find cause in all his thoughts and desires to return and fly back to his Maker; like the dove to the ark, when it could rest no where else. But,

2. We are to consider the world absolutely in itself; and so we shall find the most valued enjoyments of it embased by these two qualifications. 1. That they are perishing. And, 2. That they are out of our power. One of them expressed by moths and rust corrupting them, and the other by thieves breaking through, and stealing them. The first representing them as subject to decay from a principle within; the second, as liable to be forced from us by a violence from without; and so upon both accounts utterly unable to make men happy, and consequently unworthy to take possession of their hearts.

1 . And first for the perishing state and quality of all these worldly enjoyments: a thing so evident, or rather obvious to common sense and experience, that no man in his right wits can really doubt of it, and yet so universally contradicted by men’s practice, that scarce any man seems to believe it. No, though the Spirit of God in scripture is as full and home in the character it gives of these things, as experience itself can be; sometimes expressing them by fashions, which, we know, are always changing; and sometimes by shadows, which no man can take any hold of; and sometimes by dreams, which are all mockery and delusion: thus degrading the most admired grandeurs of the world from realities to bare appearances, and from appearances to mere nothings.

Nor do they fail only, and lose that little worth they have, but they do it also by the vilest and most contemptible things in nature; by rust and cankers, moths and vermin, things which grow out of the very subject they destroy, and so make the destruction of it inevitable. And how can any better be expected, when men will rather dig their treasure and comforts from beneath, than fetch them from above? For it is impossible for such mortals to put on immortality, or for things, in the very nature of them calculated but for a few days, to last for ever. All sublunary comforts imitate the changeableness, as well as feel the influence of the planet they are under. Time, like a river, carries them all away with a rapid course; they swim above the stream for a while, but are quickly swallowed up, and seen no more. The very monuments men raise to perpetuate their names, consume and moulder away themselves, and proclaim their own mortality, as well as testify that of others. In a word, all these earthly funds have deficiencies in them never to be made up.

But now, on the other side, the enjoyments above, and the treasures proposed to us by our Saviour, are indefectible in their nature, and endless in their du ration. They are still full, fresh, and entire, like the stars and orbs above, which shine with the same undiminished lustre, and move with the same unwearied motion, with which they did from the first date of their creation. Nay, the joys of heaven will abide when these lights of heaven shall be put out; and when sun and moon, and nature itself shall be discharged their stations, and be employed by Providence no more, the righteous shall then appear in their full glory; and, being fixed in the divine presence, enjoy one perpetual and everlasting day; a day commensurate to the unlimited eternity of God himself; the great Sun of righteousness, who is always rising, and never sets.

2. The other degrading qualification of these worldly enjoyments is, that they are out of our power. And surely that is very unfit for a man to account his treasure, which he cannot so much as call his own; nor extend his title to, so far as the very next minute; as having no command nor hold of it at all beyond the present actual possession; and the compass of the present, all know, is but one remove from nothing. A rich man to-day, and a beggar to-morrow, is neither new nor wonderful in the experience of the world: for he who is rich now, must ask the rapacity of thieves, pirates, and tyrants, how long he shall continue so; and rest content to be happy for just so much time as the pride and violence, the cruelty and avarice of the worst of men shall permit him to be so; a comfort able tenure, doubtless, for a man to hold his chief happiness by.

But now, on the contrary, nothing is so absolutely and essentially necessary to render any thing a man’s treasure or chief good, as that he have a property in it and a power over it; without which, it will be impossible for him to be sure of any relief from it when he shall most need it. For how can he be sure of that, of which he has no command? And how can he command that, which a greater force than his own shall lay claim to? For let those puny things, called law and right, say what they will to the contrary, if the matter comes once to a dispute, all the good things a man has of this world will be his, who has the strongest arm and the sharpest sword, or the corruptest judge on his side. They are the prey of the mighty, and the prize of victorious villainy; subject to be torn and ravished from him upon all occasions.

Nor has the providence of God thought it worth while to secure and protect the very best of men in their rights to any enjoyment under heaven; and all this to depress and vilify these things in their thoughts; that so they may every day find a necessity of placing them above, and of bestowing their pains upon that which, if they pursue, they shall certainly obtain; and if they obtain, they shall impregnably keep. My peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you, says our Saviour; not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Why? What was the difference? He tells us in John xvi. 22, Your joy no man taketh from you. It was such a joy or peace as was to be above the reach of either fraud or force, artifice or assault; which can never be said of any earthly enjoyment whatsoever, either as to the acquisition or possession of it: God having made no man any promise, that, by all his virtue and innocence, all his skill and industry, he shall be able to continue in health, wealth, or honour; but that, after his utmost endeavour to preserve those desirable things, he may in the issue lose them all.

But God has promised and engaged to mankind, that whosoever shall faithfully and constantly persevere in the duties of a pious, Christian life, shall obtain an eternal crown of glory, and an inheritance that fadeth not away. A man cannot indeed by all his piety secure his estate, but he may make his calling and election sure; which is infinitely and unspeakably more valuable, than all the estates, pleasures, and greatness of the world. For all these are without him, and consequently may be taken from him, and, which is yet worse, may do him no good, even while they stay with him. But the conscience is a sure repository for a man to lodge and preserve his treasure in, and the chest of his own heart can never be forced open.

Now the use and improvement of the foregoing particulars shall be briefly to convince us of the extreme vanity of most men’s pretences to religion. A man’s religion is all the claim he has to the felicities of another world. But can we think it possible in nature, for a man to place his greatest happiness where he does not place his strongest affections? How little is the other world in most men’s thoughts, and yet they can have the confidence to pretend it to be the grand object of their desires. But why should men, in their greatest concern, be so false to their own experience, and those constant observations which they make of themselves in other matters? For let any man consult and ask his own heart, whether, having once fixed his love upon any thing or person, his thoughts are not always running after it? Strong love is a bias upon the thoughts; and for a man to love earnestly, and not to think almost continually of what he loves, is as impossible, as for him to live, and not to breathe.

But besides this, we have shewn several other marks and properties, by which men may infallibly judge of the truth and firmness of their love to God and to religion; as for instance, can they affirm religion to be that which has got such hold of their hearts, that no time, cost, or labour, shall be thought too much to be laid out upon it? Is it the prize they run for? Is it the thing they delight in? the thing with which, in all their distresses, they support and keep up their sinking spirits? And lastly, is it that which they value to such a degree, as to be willing to part with all the world rather than lose or renounce it? These are great things, I confess; and yet nothing less will reach the measures of Christianity.

But the lives of men (unanswerable arguments in this case) are a sad demonstration how few they are who come up to these terms. Men may indeed now and then bestow some scattering thoughts upon their souls and their future estate, provided they be at full leisure from their business and their sports, (which they seldom or never are;) and if at any time they should be so, this could amount to no more than their being religious when they have nothing else to do. Likewise, when the solemn returns of God’s public worship, and the law and custom of the nation shall call them off from their daily employments to better things, they may perhaps, by a few devout looks and words, put on something of an holy day dress for the present; which yet, like their Sunday clothes, they are sure to lay aside again for the whole week after. All which, and a great deal more, is far short of making religion a man’s business, though yet, if it be not so, it is in effect nothing.

And this men know well enough, when they are to deal in matters of this world; in which no pains nor importunity shall be thought too great, no attendance too servile, nothing (in a word) too hard to be done or suffered, either to recruit a broken for tune, or to regain a disgusted friend; though, after all, should a man chance to recover both, he cannot be sure of keeping either. In like manner, let the trading person suffer any considerable damage in the stock with which he trades; what care, what parsimony, what art shall be used to make up the breach, and keep the shop still open? And the reason of all this is, because the man is in earnest in what he does, and accordingly acts as one who is so. Where as, in men’s spiritual affairs, look all the world over, and you shall every day see, that the sins which wound and waste, and make havock of the conscience, which divide and cut it off from God, are committed easily, and passed over lightly, and owned confidently; with a bold front and a brazen face, able to look the pillory itself out of countenance; nor does any one almost think himself so mortally struck, even by the foulest guilt, as to need the balsam of an immediate repentance, and a present suing out of pardon at the throne of grace. And yet if a man dies, as to his temporal condition, poor and bankrupt, he is not at all the worse; but if he goes out of the world unreconciled to God, it had been good for him that he had never come into it. For what can it avail a man to pass from misery to misery, and to make one wretched life only a preparative to another?

In fine, this we may with great boldness venture to affirm, that if men would be at half the pains to provide themselves treasures in heaven, which they are generally at to get estates here on earth, it were impossible for any man to be damned. But when we come to earthly matters, we do; when to heavenly, we only discourse: heaven has our tongue and talk; but the earth our whole man besides.

Nevertheless, out of an earnest (and I hope very justifiable) desire, partly to pass a due encomium (or such an one at least as I am able) upon so noble a seat of the Muses as this renowned school has been always accounted hitherto, and partly to own the obligation and debt lying upon me to the place of my education, I have here at length presumed to publish it. So that although neither at the time appointed for that solemn meeting, nor ever since, have I had any opportunity given me to preach this sermon myself, yet, how that it is printed, possibly some other may condescend to do it, as before in several such cases the like has been too well known to have been done.

These things, I say, and a thousand more, they are to be perpetually inculcating into the minds of their children, according to that strict injunction of God himself to the Israelites, Deut. vi. 6, 7. These words shall he in thine heart, and thou shalt diligently teach them thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. Such discourses should open their eyes in the morning, and close them in the evening. And I dare undertake, that if this one thing had been faithfully and constantly practised, even but since the late restoration, (which came upon these poor kingdoms like life from the dead,) the fanatics had never been so considerable, as to cause those terrible convulsions in church and state, and those misunderstandings between the king and his people, which we have seen and trembled at, and must expect to see, as long as the same spirit, which governed in forty-one, continues still so powerful (as it does) amongst us. For I am sure no king and that can ever reign quietly together.

But some perhaps may here very sagely object. Is not this the way to sour and spoil the minds of children, by keeping the remembrance of the late rebellion always fresh upon them? I answer, No; no more than to warn them against poisons, pits, and precipices is likely to endanger their lives; or to tell them by what ill courses men come to the gallows is the ready way to bring them thither. No; nothing can be too much hated by children, which cannot be too much avoided by men. And since vice never loses its hold where it keeps its reputation, the minds of youth can never be sufficiently fortified against villainous and base actions, but by a deep and early abhorrence, caused by a faithful representation of them. So preposterous a method will it be found to bring a crime out of fashion, by making panegyrics upon the criminal.

In short, let parents prevent and seize the very first notions and affections of their children, by engaging them, from the very first, in an hatred of rebellion; and that, if possible, as strong as nature, as irreconcileable as antipathy; and so early, that they themselves may not remember when it began, but that, for ought they know, it was even born with them. Let them, I say, be made almost from their very cradle to hate it, name and thing; so that their blood may rise, and their heart may swell at the very mention of it. In a word, let them by a kind of preventing instinct abhor it, even in their minority, and they will be sure to find sufficient reason for that abhorrence when they shall come to maturity. And so much for parents.

2. The second sort of persons intrusted with the training up of youth are schoolmasters. I know not how it comes to pass, that this honourable employment should find so little respect (as experience shews it does) from too many in the world. For there is no profession which has, or can have, a greater influence upon the public. Schoolmasters have a negative upon the peace and welfare of the kingdom. They are indeed the great depositories and trustees of the peace of it, as having the growing hopes and fears of the nation in their hands. For generally, subjects are and will be such as they breed them. So that I look upon an able, well principled schoolmaster as one of the most meritorious subjects in any prince’s dominions that can be; and every such school, under such a master, as a seminary of loyalty and a nursery of allegiance.

Nay, I take schoolmasters to have a more powerful influence upon the spirits of men than preachers themselves. Forasmuch as they have to deal with younger and tenderer minds, and consequently have the advantage of making the first and deepest impressions upon them. It being seldom found that the pulpit mends what the school has marred, any more than a fault in the first concoction is ever corrected by the second.

But now, if their power is so great and their influence so strong, surely it concerns them to use it to the utmost for the benefit of their country. And for this purpose let them fix this as an eternal rule or principle in the instruction of youth; that care is to be had of their manners in the first place, and of their learning in the next. And here, as the foundation and groundwork of all morality, let youth be taught betimes to obey, and to know that the very relation between teacher and learner imports superiority and subjection. And therefore, let masters be sure to inure young minds to an early awe and reverence of government, by making the first instance of it in themselves, and maintaining the authority of a master over them sacred and inviolable; still remembering, that none is or can be fit to be a teacher, who understands not how to be a master. For every degree of obstinacy in youth is one step to rebellion. And the very same restive humour which makes a young man slight his master in the school, and despise his tutor in the university, (a thing lately much in fashion,) will make him fly in his prince’s face in the parliament house. Of which, not many years since, we have had some scurvy experiments.

There is a principle of pride universally wrapt up in the corrupt nature of man. And pride is naturally refractory, and impatient of rule; and (which is most material to our present case) it is a vice which works and puts forth betimes; and consequently must be encountered so too, or it will quickly carry too high an head, or too stiff a neck to be controlled. It is the certain companion of folly; and both of them the proper qualifications of youth; it being the inseparable property of that age to be proud and ignorant, and to despise instruction the more it needs it. But both of them are nuisances which education must remove, or the person is lost.

And it were to be wished, I confess, that the constitution of man’s nature were such, that this might be done only by the mild addresses of reason and the gentle arts of persuasion, and that the studies of humanity might be carried on only by the ways of humanity; but unless youth were all made up of goodness and ingenuity, this is a felicity not to be hoped for. And therefore it is certain, that in some cases, and with some natures, austerity must be used; there being too frequently such a mixture in the composition of youth, that while the man is to be instructed, there is something of the brute also to be chastised.

But how to do this discreetly, and to the benefit of him who is so unhappy as to need it, requires, in my poor opinion, a greater skill, judgment, and experience, than the world generally imagines, and than, I am sure, most masters of schools can truly pretend to be masters of. I mean those plagosi orbilii, those executioners, rather than instructors of youth; persons fitter to lay about them in a coach or cart, or to discipline boys before a Spartan altar, or rather upon it, than to have any thing to do in a Christian school. I would give those pedagogical Jehus, those furious schooldrivers, the same advice which, the poet says, Phoebus gave his son Phaeton, (just such another driver as themselves,) that he should parcere stimulis, (the stimulus in driving being of the same use formerly that the lash is now.) Stripes and blows are the last and basest remedy, and scarce ever fit to be used, but upon such as carry their brains in their backs; and have souls so dull and stupid, as to serve for little else but to keep their bodies from putrefaction.

Nevertheless, since (as I have shewn) there are some cases and tempers which make these boisterous applications necessary, give me leave, for once, to step out of my profession so far, (though still keeping strictly within my subject,) as to lay before the educators of youth these few following considerations; for I shall not, in modesty, call them instructions.

1. As first, let them remember that excellent and never to be forgotten advice, that boys will be men; and that the memory of all base usage will sink so deep into, and grow up so inseparably with them, that it will not be so much as in their own power ever to forget it. For though indeed schoolmasters are a sort of kings, yet they cannot always pass such acts of oblivion as shall operate upon their scholars, or perhaps, in all things, indemnify themselves.

Well, then, when a long sunshine of mercy had ripened the sins of the nation, so that it was now ready for the shakings of divine vengeance, the seeds of faction and rebellion having for a long time been studiously sowed by seditious libels, and well watered with schismatical lectures; the first assault was made against the clergy, by a pack of inveterate avowed enemies to the church, the fury of whose lust and ambition nothing could allay, but a full power and liberty (which they quickly got) to seize her privileges, prostitute her honours, and ravish her revenues; till at length, being thus mangled, divided, and broke in pieces, (as the Levite’s concubine was before her,) she became a ghastly spectacle to all be holders, to all the Israel of God.

Such, therefore, was then the woful condition of our church and clergy, upon the Puritans invasion of their rights, at the breaking out of the late civil war: in which, as we hinted before in the Levite’s case, so amongst ourselves also, the cause of our oppressed church was owned and sheltered by the royal standard, and the defence of the ministry (as most properly it should be) managed by the defender of the faith. But, alas! the same angry Providence still pursuing the best of kings and causes with defeat after defeat, the lion falling before the wolf, as Judah (the royal tribe) sometimes did before Benjamin, the king himself came to be in effect first unkinged, and all his royalties torn from him, before the year forty-five; and then at last, to complete the whole tragedy in his person as well as office, Charles was murdered in forty-eight.

And this is the black subject and occasion of this day’s solemnity. In my reflections upon which, if a just indignation, or indeed even a due apprehension of the blackest fact which the sun ever saw since he hid his face upon the crucifixion of our Saviour, chance to give an edge to some of my expressions, let all such know, the guilt of whose actions has made the very strictest truths look like satires or sarcasms, and bare descriptions sharper than invectives; I say, let such censurers (whose innocence lies only in their indemnity) know, that to drop the blackest ink and the bitterest gall upon this fact, is not satire, but propriety.

And now, since the text here represents the whole matter set forth in it, in these most significant and remarkable words, that there was no such deed done or seen for many ages before; and with which words I shall clothe the sad subject before us; I conceive the most proper prosecution thereof, as ap plied to this occasion, will be to shew wherein the unparalleled strangeness of this deed consists. And for this, since the nature is not to be accounted for, but from a due consideration of the agent, the object, and all that retinue of circumstances which do attend and specify it under a certain denomination, I shall accordingly distribute my discourse into these materials.

I. I shall consider the person that suffered.

II. I shall shew the preparation and introduction to his suffering.

III. Shew the quality of the agents who acted in it.

I answer, that as to the simple apprehensions of these two senses, one takes in its respective object by as sure a perception as the other, though perhaps not so quick nor so refined. But the mistake in either of these is not from any failure in the bare simple perception of its proper object, but from the judgment passed by the understanding faculty upon the said perceptions, in wrongly affirming or denying something concerning them. Thus in the present case, Thomas, on the one side, had seen his Lord dead, and buried, with his own eyes; and on the other, heard that he was risen from the dead, from the mouth of several known witnesses unanimously affirming it: in which argument the point turns not upon this, that the sight represents and reports its object more surely than the hearing, but upon the qualifications of the witnesses attesting what had passed concerning the objects of either. And this being so much more advantageous, in point of credibility, on the disciples side than on Thomas’s, had there really been an inconsistency between both their testimonies, that of the disciples ought in reason to have outweighed and took place of his. But to render his unbelief so much the more inexcusable, there was no inconsistency at all between what had been affirmed by Thomas himself, and what was afterwards testified by his fellow-disciples. For as Thomas was an ocular witness of Christ’s death and burial, so were the other disciples of his resurrection, having actually seen him after he was risen. And as he had no cause to doubt of their veracity in what they told him, so neither had he any reason to doubt of the credibility of the thing told by them. Forasmuch as Thomas himself had seen three instances of persons raised from the dead by our Saviour, during the time of his converse with him. All which must needs, upon the strictest terms of reason, render his unbelief and doubting of our Saviour’s own resurrection (so unquestionably attested) utterly indefensible. But to proceed.

3. It being above objected also, that several reports, found at last to be confessedly false, have yet for some time been as confidently vouched for true, as this now before us was or could be; and moreover, that there is hardly any report so false, strange, and unusual, but that some have been as positively affirmed by others to have been eyewitnesses of the same:

In answer to which, all this must be granted to be extremely true, but withal nothing to the purpose, since if it proves any thing, it must prove a great deal too much, viz. That there is no credit to be rationally given to any thing that we hear, how credible soever in itself. For certain it is, that many, even the grossest falsehoods, have been reported, received, and actually believed as true; and many stories certainly true have (for a considerable time at least) been absolutely rejected as false: and if this must pass for a sufficient reason to deny, or so much as to suspect and question every thing else reported to us to be so likewise, then farewell all rational belief, credit, and certainty, as being hereby quite sent packing out of the world. But

4. It is yet further argued, that as the united testimony and report of all places and ages will not gain credence against so much as one particular experiment of sense; so, much less can the particular report of a few persons conclude any thing against the universal experience of all.

To this I answer, that the account given by those few disciples, of our Saviour’s resurrection, was so far from being contrary to the universal experience and sense of mankind, especially those of the Jewish church and nation, that the Old Testament, as well as the New, has several examples upon record, of persons who had been raised from the dead; which being so well known to the Jews, might justly pass rather for so many proofs and confirmations of the credibility of our Saviour’s resurrection, than that our Saviour’s resurrection, after such preceding instances of so like a nature, should be supposed to carry any thing in it contradictory to the common sense and opinion of the world. Besides all which, those words of Herod, upon his hearing of the miracles of Christ, seem here very observable. It is John, says he, whom I beheaded; he is risen from the dead, &c.

These words, I say, so readily uttered by him, without any previous demur, or strain of thought, could not but shew, that the resurrection from the dead, of some particular persons, even as to this life, was no such strange, unheard of notion with him and the rest of the Jews, but that they were so far at least acquainted with it, as to account it neither impossible nor incredible. But

5. It is again alleged, for the invalidating of the report made by the disciples concerning our Saviour, that the fright and disturbance they were under, upon our Saviour’s crucifixion, and the rage expressed by the Jews against his disciples, as well as against himself, might naturally enough bring upon them such a confusion of thought and aptness to mistake, as might very well lessen the certainty, and consequently take off much of the credit of their testimony.

To which I answer, that fears or frights do not so operate upon the outward senses, as to supersede or hinder them in their first and simple apprehensions of their respective objects, which are also naturally the clearest and most impartial. I grant, indeed, that fear, and some other passions, may so divert the steadiness and intention of the intellectual judging faculty for some time, that it cannot presently form so exact a judgment upon the objects tendered to it by the senses, as otherwise it might do. But still this is only an interruption of the acts, rather than any disablement of the faculty; which, as soon as the present passion is over, comes to debate and judge of all objects presented to it, as perfectly as it did before. It is disputed, I know, in natural philosophy, whether the sense being duly qualified, and the object as duly proposed, and the medium fitted to both, the sense can be deceived in the apprehension of its object; and it is generally held in the negative. But supposing that the sense might be deceived, this would make nothing against us in the present case; forasmuch as natural fallibility may very well consist with actual certainty; nothing being more true, than that as a man is capable of being mistaken, so on the contrary he is oftentimes actually not mistaken; and whosoever is not mistaken, is, as to that particular act, and with reference to that particular object, truly and properly certain. And this was the very case of the disciples affirming Christ’s resurrection, from a full conviction of their sight and other senses; a conviction too strong and sure to admit of any reason sufficient to overbear it. For as to the foregoing objection, from the greatness of the fear, then supposed to have been upon them, we have shewn the weakness or rather nullity of that already; and not only so, but the very proceedings of the Jews themselves give us an irrefragable confutation of the same. For if a report, coming from persons under an extreme fear, ought upon that score to lose all credibility, surely this should, on a very eminent and peculiar occasion, have took place in the guards set by Pilate to watch Christ’s sepulchre; who (as we read in Matth. xxviii. 4) were seized with such an amazing, dispiriting fear, that they shook, and became as dead men. Nevertheless the priests (no fools, though something else) looked upon them as very credible witnesses of what they had seen, and after wards related to them: and consequently judged their testimony, if contrary, like to prove so disadvantageous to their design, that they thought they could not bribe them too high, nor buy their silence at too dear a rate; which, had they thought that all that was told them was but idle tales, and founded only in a panic, unaccountable consternation, no doubt, they would never have done at such a price. For Jews, of all men, are not wont to part with their money for nothing, or an idle tale, which was no more.

6. Some again argue, that since Christ had so expressly and openly beforehand declared and fore told his resurrection from the dead, that his adversaries, as well as his followers, had took particular notice thereof; no doubt his disciples thereupon could not but be highly concerned, that their master should make good that his word and promise in the face of the world: and accordingly (as great desire naturally disposes to facility of belief) they might be apt to persuade themselves, that the event had indeed answered the prediction; and that he was now actually risen, as he had several times promised them, while he lived and conversed with them. Thus their zeal for their Lord’s honour might cause them strongly to desire, and that desire as strongly incline them to believe, his resurrection. So, I say, some argue.

To which I answer, that as the objection before this represented the disciples in this whole business as persons extremely weak, so this would represent them as equally wicked; the former, as men wretchedly deceived, and this latter, as designing to deceive others; and that by a vile, fraudulent intrigue, contrived and carried on by them, both for their master’s and their own reputation; an intrigue so very fraudulent, that the known, unblemished simplicity, integrity, and veracity of the persons concerned, and so remarkable throughout the whole course of their lives, makes it morally impossible, and consequently incredible, that persons of such a character should ever be guilty of so foul a practice and so base a collusion. And no more needs be said for their vindication from so impudent a calumny. But

7. Whereas it is suggested, that nothing could be so powerful and effectual a means to cause and propagate a belief of Christ’s resurrection, as to have shewn himself, after he was risen, to the Scribes and Pharisees, and the unbelieving Jews, openly in the temple or the market-place, which yet he did not; I answer, that supposing that Christ, after he was risen, had appeared so publicly amongst the Jews, as the objection here requires, no doubt they would have offered to lay violent hands upon him, as they had before designed to kill Lazarus, and that for the same reason. In which case, had our Saviour vanished out of their sight and hands, (as question less he would have done, and as he had once or twice done from the eyes of his own disciples,) what would the Jews have concluded from hence, but that they had seen a ghost, a spectre, or apparition? And what conviction would that have wrought in them? Why, none at all, but that their senses had been abused, and imposed upon by some magical illusion. And what good effect could this have had upon their minds, for the bringing them to a belief, that Christ was truly risen? and much less that he was the Messias? which yet was the grand doctrine to be proved by the resurrection, and of which he had given them abundant proof before, by raising Lazarus and others from the dead; which yet we find had no such effect upon the generality of them at all. This to me seems as clear reason, and as natural consequence, as the mind of man, in such a case, can well be determined by. And no doubt, Almighty God foresaw this, and many more such consequences, which our short reason can neither reach nor pierce into; forasmuch as his ways and counsels may, and ought in all reason to be allowed, to proceed by measures quite different from ours; and accordingly, that he might not think fit to vouchsafe the Jews the highest evidence of Christ’s resurrection, which it was capable of, who had rejected such high evidence of the like nature before; but rather judged it enough for him to afford them such evidence of it, as was in itself sufficient to convince them, and consequently to render their disbelief thereof irrational and unexcusable; besides that the highest evidence of an object proposed to be believed, may not consist with such a worth and merit in the said belief, as may fit it for a reward; as our Saviour’s words to Thomas in the text manifestly import. From all which, I think we may, upon solid grounds, conclude, that the foregoing objection (how plausible soever it may seem at first) argues nothing against the belief of our Saviour’s resurrection. But

8. It is moreover objected, that there is no small disagreement found in the main report about our Saviour’s resurrection; as, that some of his disciples relate him to have appeared in one form, or shape, and some in another, whereas one man naturally can be allowed but one form and shape: and with al, that he came in to his disciples while the doors were shut; which seems wholly inconsistent with the essential dimensions of an human body, which cannot possibly pass through crevices or keyholes; the nature of quantity making such a penetration confessedly impossible.

To which I answer, according to the second preliminary consideration above laid down by us, that the bare measures of nature, after so many miracles done by our Saviour on the one side, and attested and owned by the Jews, as surpassing all power, merely natural, on the other, ought by no means to be a rule for us to proceed by in the present case. And therefore, to give the objection its full force and advantage, supposing it urged by some Jew against the truth of Christ’s resurrection, may we not hereupon ask the said Jew this plain question? Were the Jews eyewitnesses of the miracles and supernatural works done by our Saviour, or were they not? The latter cannot possibly be said, there being hardly a man in Jerusalem who had not personally seen some of them done. And if the former be granted, upon what ground of reason could those Jews deny, but that he, who acted by such a supernatural power in some things, might as well do the same in others? Or pretend that he who had raised Lazarus from the dead might not, if he pleased, present himself in different shapes and forms; whether it were by differently qualifying his own body, as the object then offered to be seen, or by differently disposing the visive faculty and organs of sight, in such as were to see it? (as we read he actually did to two of his disciples, whose eyes were so held, that though they looked upon him, yet they could not actually know him, Luke xxiv. 16.) And upon the same ground likewise, might he not as well by his supernatural power appear amongst his disciples, while the doors were shut? John xx. 19. Though these words, taken in sensu diviso, as the logicians speak, and not in sensu composito, may be accounted for upon very intelligible grounds; that is to say, that Christ came not through the doors continuing shut, or through chinks, or keyholes, (as some profanely word it,) while he passed into the room; but that, finding them shut, he, without any noise or difficulty, caused them by his supernatural power to fall open before him. And even this was enough to surprise his disciples so far, as to fright, and make them think that they saw a spirit. Which sense of the words, as it is fair, and unforced, and agreeable to the common way of speaking, so it infers not in the least that great absurdity in philosophy, of a penetration of bodies; though still it must be confessed and owned, that, in all this dispute, our Saviour’s body, after his resurrection, was not to be looked upon as a natural, but supernatural body; that is to say, of quite different qualities from what it had before, albeit we still grant it to have been the same in substance. Upon which account, for bare human reason to be able to assign what could or could not be done by a body so supernaturally qualified, (and as it were spiritualized,) I think it no reproach to it at all, freely to confess itself wholly at a loss; and consequently, that to argue from the state and natural properties of such bodies as we carry about us, to those of our Saviour’s body, after he was risen from the dead, would be a manifest transition a genere ad genus; and so a notorious fault, and fallacy in argumentation.

And thus, I hope, I have at length throughly examined and gone over all or most of those plausible arguments, which are or may be brought for the justification of this doubting disciple’s backwardness in believing his master’s resurrection; and trust, that I have given sufficient and satisfactory answers to them all. But as for that objection, or rather senseless lie, invented and made use of by the Jews, (as the evangelists record,) of Christ’s body being stolen and conveyed away by his disciples in the night, while the soldiers (set to guard it) slept; it is attended with so many improbabilities and absurdities, and those not more directly contrary to reason than to common sense and experience, that it hardly deserves a serious confutation.