SERMON I.

EPHESIANS iv. 10.

He that descended is the same also that ascended Jar above all heavens, that he might fill all things.

IF religion were not to bear only upon the unshakeable bottom of divine authority, but we might propose to ourselves in idea what could be fittest to answer and employ those faculties of man’s mind that are capable of religious obligation, reason would contrive such a religion as should afford both sad and solemn objects to amuse and affect the pensive part of the soul, and also such glorious matter and bright representations as might feed its admiration, and entertain its more sprightly apprehensions: for the temper of all men in the world is either sad and composed, or joyful and serene; and even the same man will find that he is wholly acted, in the general tenor of his life, by the vicissitude and interchange of these dispositions.

Accordingly Christianity, in those great matters of fact upon which it is founded, happily complies with man’s mind by this variety of its subject. For we have both the sorrows and the glories of Christianity, the depressions and the triumphs, the mournings and the hosannahs: we have the affecting sad nesses of Christ’s fasting, his bloody agony, his crucifixion, and the bitter scene of his whole passion in its several parts and appendages: on the other side we gaze at his miracles, admire his transfiguration, joy at his supernatural resurrection, and (that which is the great complement and consummation of all) his glorious ascension.

The first sort of these naturally suit with the composed, fixed, and monastic disposition of some minds, averse from all complacency and freedom; the second invite the joys of serener minds, happier constitutions, and brisker meditations.

Nay, such a divine chequer-work shall we find in the whole contexture of the story of our religion, that we have the light still with the advantage of the shade, and things exhibited with the recommending vicinity of their contraries; so that it is observed, that in the whole narrative of our Saviour’s life, no passage is related of him low or weak, but it is immediately seconded, and as it were corrected, by another high and miraculous.

No sooner was Christ humbled to a manger, but the contempt of the place was took off with the glory of the attendance, in the ministration of an gels. His submission to that mean and coarse ceremony of circumcision was ennobled with the public attestation of Simeon concerning him; his fasting and temptation attended with another service of angels; his baptism with a glorious recognition by a voice from heaven. When he seemed to show weakness in seeking fruit upon that fig-tree that had none, he manifested his power by cursing it to deadness with a word. When he seemed to be over powered at his attachments, he then exerted his mightiness, in causing his armed adversaries to fall backwards, and healing Malchus’s ear with a touch. When he underwent the lash and violent infamy of crucifixion and death, then did the universal frame of nature give testimony to his divinity; the temple rending, the sun darkening, and the earth quaking, the whole creation seemed to sympathize with his passion. And when afterwards he seemed to be in the very kingdom and dominions of death, by descending into the grave, he quickly confuted the dishonour of that, by an astonishing resurrection, and by an argument ex abundanti, proved the divinity of his person over and over, in an equally miraculous ascension.

Which great and crowning passage of all that went before it, however it is most true, and therefore most worthily to be assented to, yet still it affords scope for the nobler and higher actings of faith: for reason certainly would now very hardly be induced to believe that upon bare testimony and report, which even those who then saw it with their eyes, that is, with the greatest instruments of evidence, scarcely gave credit to.

For it is expressly remarked in Matt. xxviii. 17, that of those who stood and beheld his ascension, though some worshipped, yet others doubted.

It seems things were not so clear as to answer all the objections of their eyes, or at least of their in credulity. But he ascended in a cloud, as it is said; there was some darkness, something of mists and obscurity that did attend him. Yet a lively potent faith will scatter all such clouds, dispel such mists, conquer this and much greater difficulties: which faith, since it must rest itself upon a divine word, such a word we have here; and that a full, a pregnant, and a satisfying word, which, from the pen of a person infallibly inspired, assures us, that he who descended is the same also that ascended far above all heavens, that he might fill all things.

In the words we have these four things considerable.

I. Christ’s humiliation intimated and implied in those words; he that descended.

II. His glorious advancement and exaltation; he ascended far above all heavens.

III. The qualification and state of his person in reference to both these conditions; he was the same. He that descended is the same also that ascended.

IV. The end of his exaltation and ascension; that he might fill all things.

Of all which in their order. And when I shall have traversed each of these distinctly, I hope I shall have reached both the full sense of the text and the business of the day.

I. And first of all for Christ’s humiliation and descension. As every motion is bounded with two periods and terms, the one relinquished, the other to be acquired by it; so in Christ’s descension we are to consider both the place from which it did commence, and the place to which it did proceed. The place from whence, we are told, was heaven.

But the difficulty is, how Christ could descend from thence: according to his divine nature he could not; for, as God, he filled the universe; and all motion supposes the mover to be sometimes out of the place to which he moves, and successively to acquire a presence to it; so that nothing that adequately fills a place, can move in that place, unless it moves circularly; but progressively, or in a direct line, it is impossible. Whither then should the divine nature move where it is not prevented by its own ubiquity? whither should it go where it is not already? And as for Christ’s human nature, that could not descend from heaven, forasmuch as it was not first in heaven, but received its first being and existence here upon earth.

This argumentation, we see, is clear and undeniable; how then shall we make out Christ’s descension?

The Socinians, who allow Christ nothing but an human nature, affirm, that he is said to descend from heaven only in respect of the divinity of his original and production; as it is elsewhere said, that every good and perfect gift descends from above, namely, because it is derived from a divine principle. But his descending being here in the text opposed to his ascending, clearly shews, that there is a further and more literal meaning imported in the word.

I answer therefore, that Christ descended according to his divine nature, not indeed by a proper and local motion, as the former arguments sufficiently demonstrate, but because it united itself to a nature here below; in respect of which union to an earthly nature, it might metaphorically be said to descend to the place where that nature did reside: and thus much for the way and manner how Christ did descend.

We are now to direct our next inquiry to the place whither he descended; and for this we are to reflect an eye upon the former verse of this chapter, which tells us, that it was into the lower parts of the earth; but what those lower parts of the earth are, here lies the doubt, and here must be the explication.

There are several opinions to be passed through before we can come to the truth. I shall propose them all, that every one may be his own judge which of them carries in it the greatest probability.

1. Some understand it simply of the earth, as being the lowermost part of the world. But why then could not the apostle have said, that Christ descended εἰς τὰ κατώτερα τοῦ κόσμου, and not τῆς γῆς, to the lower parts of the world, not of the earth? but to call the earth the lower part of itself is an apparent violence to the naturalness of the expression, and indeed not more forced than ridiculous.

2. Some understand it of the grave, which is called the heart of the earth in Matt. xii. 40. The Son of men shall be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. Now the heart or middle of the earth is the lowest part of it, forasmuch as every progression beyond that is an access nearer to heaven, which encloses and surrounds the whole earth, and the nearer we come to heaven, the higher we are said to go: but this exposition is more artificial than natural, more ingenious than solid, and only to be valued as we do those things that are far fetched.

3. Some understand it of hell itself, the place of the damned; and our creed tells us, that Christ descended into hell: but to this I answer, that it relates not at all to our present purpose, whether Christ descended into hell or no; but the thing to be proved is, that hell, or the place of the damned, is the lower parts of the earth; which we deny, as being contrary both to the judgment of the church and of reason; it being hard to conceive what capacity there can be within the earth for the reception, not only of the souls, but of the bodies of all the persons that for six thousand years shall have peopled the world, the number only of those who shall be saved (which we are told are very few) being excepted.

4. But 4thly, the quicksighted Romanists, (forsooth,) who can see further into the earth than other men, have by the help of this text spied in it a place called purgatory, or rather the pope’s kitchen, for certain it is that nothing so much feeds his table. Now here, they say, are those lower parts of the earth, whither Christ descended: but before they prove that Christ came down hither, I would have them prove that there is such a place.

They say they prove it from 1 Pet. iii. 19, where it is said, that Christ by his spirit went and preached to the spirits in prison; the words in the Greek are, ἐν ᾧ καὶ τοῖς ἐν φυλακῇ πνεύμασι πορευθεὶς ἐκήρυξεν. But do these words imply that those spirits were in prison at that time that he preached to them? Not at all; but the entire sense of them is this: He preached to the spirits in prison; that is, Christ in the days of Noah, by his spirit, preached to and strove with those disobedient spirits, which spirits are now in prison, or in hold, for so ἐν φυλακῇ signifies; that is, they are held in chains of darkness to the judgment of the great day: as, suppose I should say, that Christ preached to many hundred souls in hell, does it follow hence, that they were in hell while he preached to them? No, but it must be took in a divided sense, that many hundreds, who are now in hell, were once preached to by Christ.

And thus having shewn the nullity of this argument, I think it is clear that Christ descended not into purgatory, for that which is not cannot be descended into. But I wonder why men should be so solicitous in finding out a purgatory; for if they go not to heaven, they need not doubt but that there is room enough in hell, without providing themselves of a third place.

5. In the fifth and last place therefore, I conceive these words in the text to bear the same sense with, and perhaps to have reference to, those in Psalm cxxxix. 15, where David, speaking of his conception in his mother’s womb, says, that he was framed and fashioned in the lowest parts of the earth. In like manner, Christ’s descending into the lowest parts of the earth may very properly be taken for his incarnation and conception in the womb of the blessed virgin.

That this is so, yet with submission to better judgments, I judge upon these grounds.

1. Because the former expositions have been clearly shewn to be, some of them, unnatural and forced, and others impertinent: but those four being removed, there is no other besides this assignable.

2. It is usual for the apostles to transcribe and use the Hebrew phrases of the Old Testament: and since Paul here uses David’s very words, it is most probable that he used them in David’s sense.

3. I add, that these words of Christ’s descending and ascending are so put together in the text, that they seem to intend us a summary account of Christ’s whole transaction of that great work of man’s redemption from first to last; which being begun in his conception, and consummate in his ascension, by what better can his descending be explained, than by his conception, the first part and instance of this great work, as his ascension was the last? So that by this explication the apostle’s words are cast into this easy and proper sense, that the same Christ, and eternal Son of God, who first condescended and debased himself so far as to be incarnate and conceived in the flesh, was he who afterwards ascended into heaven, and was advanced to that pitch of sublime honour and dignity, far above the principalities and powers of men and angels.

And thus much for the first thing, Christ’s humiliation and descension, both as to the manner how, and the place whither he did descend.

II. I come now in the next place to consider his exaltation and ascension. For shall he so leave his glory, as never to re-assume it? Shall such a sun beam strike the earth, and not rebound?

As for the way and manner how he ascended, I affirm, that it was according to his human nature, properly and by local motion; but according to his divine, only by communication of properties, the action of one nature being ascribed to both, by virtue of their union in the same person.

As for the place to which he advanced, it is, says the apostle, far above all heavens. In the exposition of which words it is strange to consider the puerile fondness of some expositors, who will needs have the sense of them to be, that Christ ascended above the empyrean heaven, the highest of all the rest, and there sits enthroned in the convexity and outside of it, like a man sitting upon a globe: for, say they, otherwise how could Christ be said to have ascended above the heavens? But if they will stick to this term above, let them also stick to the other, far above, and then they must not place him just upon the empyrean heaven, but imagine him strangely pendulous in those spatia extramundana, those empty spaces that are supposed to be beyond the world. How improper, and indeed romantic, these conceits are, you easily discern.

But the words of the text have something of figure, of hyperbole, and latitude in them; and signify not, according to their literal niceness, a going above the heavens by a local superiority, but an advance to the most eminent place of dignity and glory in the highest heaven.

Besides, the very common use of the word does not of necessity enforce the former interpretation; for we think we say properly enough, that a man is upon the top of an house or tower, if he be but in one of the uppermost parts of it, without his standing upon the weather-cock: but it is the usual fate of such over-scrupulous adherers to words and letters, to be narrow men and bad interpreters.

I have nothing else to add for explication of Christ’s ascension, but only to observe and adore God’s great and wise methods of exalting, exemplified to us by an instance in his dearest Son. He, we see, is depressed before advanced, crucified before enthroned, and led through the vale of tears to the region of eucharist and hallelujahs. He was punished with one crown before he was rewarded with an other, and disciplined by the hardships of shame and servitude to the glories of a kingdom.

And do we now think to have our whole course spun in one even thread? to live deliciously in one world, as well as gloriously in another? to tread softly, and to walk upon paths of roses to the mansions of eternal felicities?

No, it is the measure of our happiness, and ought to be so of our wish too, to be but like Christ. The preferments of heaven will be sure to meet us only in the state of an afflicted abject humility. Christ preached upon the mountain, but he lived and acted his sermons in the valley.

The way of salvation must needs be opposite to that of damnation. We must (as I may so speak) descend to heaven; for it was Adam’s aspiring that brought him down, and Lucifer’s fall was but the consequent of his ascension.

III. I come now to the third thing, which is the qualification and state of Christ’s person, in reference to both these conditions: he was the same; He that descended is the same also that ascended. Which to me seems a full argument to evince the unity of the two natures in the same person; since two several actions are ascribed to the same person, both of which, it is evident, could not be performed by the same nature.

As for Christ’s descending, I shew that it could not be by his human nature, for that received its first existence on earth, and therefore could not come down from heaven; but it was to be understood of his divine nature, though improperly, and only so, as it became united to a nature here below: but as for his ascending, it is clear that Christ did this by his human nature, and that properly and literally; and yet it is here affirmed, that it was the same Christ who both ascended and descended; a great proof of that mysterious economy of two natures in one hypostasis.

The school of Socinus, we have heard, affirms Christ to have descended from heaven, only in respect of his divine and heavenly origination: but how, according to their opinion, can they make it out that it was the same Christ who ascended? for they affirm concerning the body which lie had before his death, and after his resurrection here upon earth, that he did not carry that with him into heaven, but that was left here behind, whether by annihilation, or some secret conveyance of it into the earth by the power of God, they tell us not, nor indeed know themselves; but in the room of it, they say, he had a spiritual, ethereal body, with which he ascended into heaven; a body without flesh and bones, a refined, sublimated, angelical body; which are words enough, I confess, but where the sense is, we may go seek. I wonder they do not further explain their subtile notion, and say, that it is a certain body with out corporeity.

But though they will not allow the union of two complete natures in the same person, yet they and all the world must grant, that two distinct sub stances, the soul and the body, go to compound and integrate the man: and I know, according to their usual appellation of him, they will allow him to be the man Christ Jesus.

Now I demand of them upon what principles of reason or philosophy they will prove that to be the same compound, when one entire half, that goes to the making of it, is wholly another thing. When we take white, and mingling it with red, make a third distinct colour; if we could now separate that white from the red, and join it to a blue, do we think that this conjunction would make the same kind of colour that the former mixture did? In like manner can I affirm, that the same soul, successively united to two several bodies of a kind wholly diverse, if not opposite, makes the very same compound? If the whole be nothing else but its parts united, essential parts totally changed, I am sure, cannot be the same whole.

Neither let them reply, that this argument savours too much of philosophy; for by saying so, they say only that it savours too much of reason.

I confess there are some passages that fell out after Christ’s resurrection, that seem to persuade us that the body he then appeared in was not of the same nature with our bodies nowadays, nor with that which he himself had before his death; for we read, that he vanished out of some of the disciples’ sight, and that he came into them, the doors being shut.

Which considerations, I suppose, drove Origen to assert, that Christ’s soul had such a command over his body, and his body such a ductility to comply with those commands, that the soul could contract or expand it into what compass, or transfigure it into what shape it pleased; so as to command it through a chink, or crevice, or represent it sometimes under one form, sometimes under another.

But to this I answer, that however Christ’s body, as every body else, is capable of continuing the same, notwithstanding the alteration of its qualities and outward form; yet, that a body of such a dimension should be contracted to such a thinness, as to pass through a chink or crevice, cannot be effected without a penetration of the parts, and a mutual sinking into one another: which those who under stand the nature of body know to be a contradiction, and consequently impossible.

As for those scriptures which seem to give colour to the opinion that Christ, after his resurrection, had such an aerial fantastic body, before I answer them, I shall premise that great instance and affirmation that Christ gave of the reality of his body, to his disciples, being frighted at his presence, and supposing they had seen a spirit or apparition, Luke xxiv. 38, 39. Why, says he, do such thoughts arise in your hearts? Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have. What could be more plain and positive for the clearing of this particular? Certain it is, therefore, that he had the very same body, be the explication of other places that seem to imply the contrary never so difficult.

The first is in Luke xxiv. 31. He vanished out of their sight. To which I answer, that it is not at all absurd, to affirm, that Christ, by his divine power, might cast a mist before their eyes; or suspend the actings of their visive faculty in reference to himself, while he conveyed himself in the mean time away; or possibly he might depart with so quick a motion, that it was almost instantaneous, and so in discernible: for either the exceeding quickness or slowness of motion makes the successive progress of it not observable to the eye, as is manifest from an hundred daily experiments.

For the second place in John xx. 19, where it is said, that he came amongst his disciples, the doors being shut: this is capable of an explication that is obvious, and removes all difficulty. For it is not to be understood of the doors being shut in the very act of his entrance, but just antecedently to it; that is, Christ coming to the place found the doors shut; yet notwithstanding, by his immediate power, he caused them to fly open, as the angel did the prison doors at the release of Peter, Acts xii. and then he entered. Thus we read, that the lame walk, the blind see; not indeed while they continued lame and blind, but the lame and blind were first cured of those infirmities, and so made to walk and see.

So Christ did not enter, the doors continuing shut, but the doors that he found fast shut, he by a strange power opened, and so came amongst his disciples, which was enough to affright and amaze them.

But to reduce this to a familiar instance: Sup pose a stranger or suspicious person should come into an house, and the master of the house should ask his servant, whether the doors were shut or open when he came in? Surely his meaning is not, did he pass through the door while it was shut? But his sense is, did he find the door shut, and so broke it open, or did he find the door standing open, and so entered? This exposition is natural, and so clears the doubt, that the difficulty itself vanishes, and is but an apparition: and so much for the third thing.

IV. I proceed now to the fourth and last thing; which is, the end of Christ’s ascension, that he might fill all things.

This also is capable of various interpretation, for this term, all things, may refer,

1. Either to the scripture, that he might fill, or rather fulfil, (for the Greek πληρόω signifies both,) all those prophecies and predictions recorded of him in the books of the prophets.

2. Or secondly, it may refer to the church, that he might fill all things belonging to that with his gifts and graces; for it is subjoined, that he gave some, apostles; some, prophets; some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers: for the perfecting of the saints, and for the edifying of the body of Christ. Both these expositions, I confess, are probable. But,

3. In the third place, it may relate to all things in the world, within the whole compass of heaven and earth; and since the words so taken afford us an eminent proof, both of Christ’s essential deity, as also of the power with which he was endued as mediator; we shall not let so great a prize slip out of our hands, but prefer and follow this as the most genuine interpretation.

Now Christ may be said thus to fill all things in a double respect.

1. In respect of the omnipresence of his nature and universal diffusion of his godhead. The schools, in stating the manner how one thing is in another, whereas they make bodies present by circumscription, finite spirits definitive, that is, by being so here, as at the same time not to be there; not improperly, I think, make God to be in all things by repletion; that is, he is so in them, that they are rather in him; spreading such an immense fulness over all things, as in a manner swallows and folds them up within himself.

Such a fulness has Christ as God, by which he fills, or rather overflows the universe, et ad omnia praesentialiter se habet. Could there be a more full and apposite proof of this than that place, John iii. 13. No man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man, which is in heaven. He came down from heaven, and at that time was talking with Nicodemus upon earth; and yet even then he was still in heaven. How, but by the omnipresence of his divine nature, that scorned the poor limitations of place, diffused an immense presence every where, and could be in heaven without ascending thither?

But what I say of Christ, as to his divine nature, should I assert the same of his human, it would be both an error in divinity, and a prodigious paradox in philosophy.

Yet the Romanist will have Christ’s whole body to be in ten thousand places together, and at once; namely, wheresoever their host is celebrated, and in every particle of that host; which certainly is the greatest absurdity and most portentous piece of non sense that ever was owned in the face of the rational world.

And the Lutherans, who, by a dough-baked reformation, striking off from the Romish errors, have rather changed than corrected this grand absurdity, they assert a consubstantiation, and the consequent of it, the ubiquity of Christ’s human nature.

But certainly they have some unanswerable arguments that force their assent to such uncouth propositions. What they are, we shall hear. They argue thus:

Christ, in respect of his human nature, sits at God’s right hand; but God’s right hand is every where, and consequently Christ’s human nature must be so too.

If I might answer a foolish argument according to its folly, I might demand of them, if God’s right hand be every where, where then will they place his left? But do not they know that Christ’s sitting at God’s right hand is not taken in a metaphysical sense, for his coexistence with it; but is only a phrase, importing God’s advancing him to high dignity and honour, as princes use to place their favourites at their right hand?

But they proceed. If Christ’s human nature be united to the whole divine nature, then, wheresoever his divine nature is present, there must be also his human. But supposing that his human nature is not every where, and that his divine is, then in those places where the human nature is not, the divine is there without it; and so consequently in those places it is not united to it: for things intimately united must be present together in the same places.

But what pitiful, thin sophistry is this! whatever at the first sight it may appear: for they distinguish not a spiritual union from that which is corporeal, and between things having quantity. If indeed Christ’s human nature were united to his divine by way of adequate commensuration one to the other, it would then follow, that if one was where the other is not, the union so far would cease; but the union between these two natures is only by intimate, indissolvable relation one to the other; so that wheresoever the divine nature of Christ is present, though his human is not there present too, yet it still holds the same relation to it, as to a thing joined with it in one and the same subsistence. And so much in answer to a sophistical argument brought to defend a misshapen, monstrous assertion.

We see here the first way how Christ fills all things in the world; namely, by the essential omnipresence of his divine nature. But yet this is not the filling all things directly intended in the text; for that was to be consequent to his ascension; he ascended that he might fill all things; it accrued to him upon and after his ascension, not before; but his omnipresential filling all things being an inseparable property of his divine nature, always agreed to him, and was not then at length to be conferred on him.

2. In the second place therefore, Christ may be said to fill all things, in respect of the universal rule and government of all things in heaven and earth committed to him as mediator upon his ascension. This is the only filling all things that the school of Socinus will allow him; forasmuch as they make him to be God only by office, not by nature; and that his full deity bears date from his ascension; at which time he took possession of the government of the world.

But in this, I must confess, they are so much the less injurious to Christ, since they allow the Father himself to fill all things no otherwise: they acknowledge him indeed to have such an extent of power as to reach all places, persons, and things; but his omnipresence they deny, and confine his being to a circumscribed residence within the highest heaven; as we may see in Crellius’s book de Attributis Dei, chap. 1. So little ought we to wonder at their denying the deity of the Son, when they have even torn the fairest perfections out of the godhead of the Father.

But to look back upon Christ, now enjoying the end of his ascension, even the sovereignty of all things. This is he, that is now King of kings, and Lord of lords; who wields the sceptre of heaven and earth, and wears the imperial crown of the universe. Heaven is his throne, and the thrones of kings his footstool.

He now shines in the head of that glorious army of martyrs, and, wearing the trophies of conquered sin and death, possesses the kingdom of the world by the two unquestionable titles of conquest and in heritance. The angels, those immediate retainers to the Almighty, and ministers of Providence, are his attendants; they hear his will, and execute his commands with a quick and a winged alacrity.

All the elements, the whole train and retinue of nature, are subservient to his pleasure, and instruments of his purposes. The stars fight in their courses under his banner, and subordinate their powers to the dictates of his will. The heavens rule all below them by their influences, but them selves are governed by his. He can command nature out of its course, and reverse the great ordinances of the creation.

The government, the stress and burden of all things, lies upon his hands. The blind heathen have been told of an Atlas that shoulders up the heavens; but we know that he who supports the heavens is not under them, but above them.

And to give you yet a greater instance of his sovereignty, he extends his dominion even to man’s will, that great seat of freedom, that, with a kind of autocracy and supremacy within itself, commands its own actions, laughs at all compulsion, scorns restraint, and defies the bondage of human laws or external obligations.

Yet this, even this absolute principle, bends to the overpowering insinuations of Christ’s spirit; nay, with a certain event, and yet with a reserve to its own inviolate liberty, when he calls, it cannot but be willing. My earthly prince may command my estate, my body, and the services of my hand, but it is Christ only that can command my will: this is his peculiar and prerogative.

It remains now that we transcribe this article of our creed into our lives, express his sovereignty in our subjection, and, by being the most obedient of servants, declare him to be the greatest of masters: even the blessed and only Potentate, who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto.

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

SERMON II

EPHESIANS iv. 10.

—that he might fill all things.

THESE words exhibit to us the great end and design of Christ’s ascension, and, without any strain or force laid upon them, are capable of a threefold interpretation; a distinct survey of each of which shall be the business of the present exercise.

1. In the first place then, this term all things may refer to the whole series of prophecies and predictions recorded of Christ in the scriptures; which he might be said to fill, or rather to fulfil by his ascension; which signification, as it is most proper to the force of the Greek word, (forasmuch as all other places which we translate fulfil,) are expressed by this word πληρόω, so it is most agreeable to the method of the scriptures, speaking of Christ; of whom we never find any great action recorded, which was before pointed at by some prophecy, but it is immediately added, that it was done ἵνα πληρώσῇ, that such or such a scripture might be fulfilled. And for Christ’s ascension, and the consequent of it, his diffusion of the gifts of the Spirit, we have an eminent prediction of that in Psalm lxviii. 18, here referred to by the apostle; He ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men.

Concerning which place it must be confessed, that both the Hebrew and the Septuagint from the Hebrew render it, not, he gave gifts unto men, but he received gifts amongst men, ἀνέβης εἰς ὕψος, καὶ ἔλαβες δόματα ἐν ἀνθρώποις: and for this the Jews, who at all hands lie upon the catch, charge Paul as a perverter of the prophet’s meaning, in a false rendition of the sense of the place.

But to repel their calumny, and to salve the credit of our apostle, there may be a double answer applied to this.

1. That the apostle did not precisely tie himself to the very words, but followed only the design and sense of the text: and this was the same in both those different words, ἔλαβε καὶ ἔδωκε, he received and he gave. For the prophet, speaking of it as of a thing at that time future, says, that Christ received gifts, namely, from his Father: which gifts he was afterwards, in the fulness of time, to pour forth upon men. But the apostle, speaking of it as of a thing in his time past and fulfilled, mentions only his giving and actual bestowing those gifts, which in deed was the end for which he first received them of his Father.

2. But, secondly, if the Hebrew be rendered, not he received gifts for men, but from or amongst them, as the Jews contend that it ought; forasmuch as the prophet, in that psalm, relates the conquest God gave his people over their enemies; where upon he is said to have received gifts from them; as it is the custom for conquerors to set apart and consecrate some of their spoils to their god: I say, if this be admitted, as the plea is very plausible, we affirm then, that it was not Paul’s design to use these words, he gave gifts unto men, by way of citation out of David; but having by a kind of transumption and accommodation borrowed those former words of his, he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, to shew how great a triumph God made over those greater enemies, sin and death, in the ascension of Christ, that he might now also express how much this spiritual triumph did exceed those temporal ones that God wrought for his people over their temporal enemies; whereas the psalmist says, that upon those triumphs he received gifts from men. Paul here adds these words of his own, that upon this greater triumph in the ascension of Christ, he gave gifts unto men; according to which sense the words carry in them an elegant antithesis, designed to set forth the excellency of one above the other, by how much it is more excellent to give than to receive. And thus we have a full vindication of the apostle.

But here, for the further illustration of Christ’s filling all things in this sense, I cannot pass over that useful observation of Grotius about the word πληρόω, that it does not signify only a bare giving an event to a prophecy, many of which, though applied to Christ by the apostles, yet indeed were fulfilled before him; as particularly that place in Matt. ii, I have called my son out of Egypt, was fulfilled in the children of Israel, of whom it was first spoke. But because those prophecies had not only a literal and historical, but also a further and a mystical intention, therefore this word πληρόω signifies a completion even to a redundancy, a fulfilling them over and above; namely, such a one, as not only reaches their first and historical event, but also verifies their mystical and more remote sense.

SERMON III.

JOHN ix. 4.

—The night cometh, when no man can work.

THESE words, as they lie in the context, are a general maxim or assertion, assigned as a reason of Christ’s constancy and assiduity in the particular discharge of those works, which, as mediator, he was to perform while he was yet conversant in the world. And for the figurative scheme of the words, there is nothing more usual in the dialect of scripture, than to set forth and express the time allotted for this life by day; and the time and state after life, which is death, by night: the reasons of which similitude being very natural and obvious, to be exact and particular in recounting them would be but to tell men what they know already, and consequently a work both precise and superfluous.

The sense of the text seems most naturally to lay itself forth in these three propositions.

I. That there is a work allotted, begun, cut out, and appointed to every man, to be performed by him while he lives in the world.

II. That the time of this life being once expired, there is no further opportunity or possibility of performing that work.

III. That the consideration of this ought to be the highest and the most pressing argument to every man, to use his utmost diligence in discharging the work incumbent upon him in this life.

I. For the first of these, That there is a work cut out, &c. we must observe, that every man may be considered under a double capacity or relation.

1. As he is a part or member of the body politic, and so is not his own, but stands included in and possessed by the community. In which capacity he is obliged to contribute his proportion of help to the public; as sharing from thence with others the benefits of society, and so being accountable to make it some retribution in his particular station and condition.

2. A man may be considered as he is a member and subject of a spiritual and higher kingdom. And in this capacity he is to pursue the personal, yet great interest of his own salvation. He is sent into this world to make sure of a better; to glorify his Maker by studying to save himself; and, in a word, to aim at enjoyments divine and supernatural, and higher than this animal life can aspire unto.

Now these two capacities are very different; by the former, a man is to approve himself a good citizen; by the latter, a good Christian: and though these relations have their precise limits and distinctions, yet we are not to be ignorant of the subordination of one to the other, as its superior. So that if they chance to clash and thwart, the inferior must give way; nor must a man do any thing to preserve a civil interest that is contrary to a spiritual, and the greater obligations lying upon him with reference to the good of his soul, and the invaluable concerns of felicity in the other world. The distinction of a politic and a private conscience is a thing that true reason explodes, and religion abhors, as placing the matter of duty under a contradiction, and consequently can be nothing but an art to give a man satisfaction in the midst of his sin.

We have seen then how every man sustains a double capacity; according to which he has also a double work or calling.

1. A temporal one, by which he is to fill up some place in the commonwealth by the exercise of some useful profession, whether as a divine, lawyer, or physician; a merchant, soldier, mariner, or any inferior handicraft; by all which, as by so many greater and less wheels, the business of the vast body of the public is carried on, its necessities served, and its state upheld.

And God, who has ordained both society and order, accounts himself so much served by each man’s diligent pursuit, though of the meanest trade, that his stepping out of the bounds of it to some other work (as he presumes) more excellent, is but a bold and thankless presumption, by which the man puts himself out of the common way and guard of Providence. For God requires no man to be praying or reading when the exigence of his profession calls him to his hammer or his needle; nor commands any one from his shop to go hear a sermon in the church, much less to preach one in the pulpit.

God, as the lord and great master of the family of the universe, is still calling upon all his servants to work and labour; a thing so much disdained by the gallant and the epicure, is yet that general standing price that God and nature has set upon every enjoyment on this side heaven; and he that invades the possession of any thing, but upon this claim, is an intruder and an usurper. I have given order, says the apostle, 2 Thess. iii. 10, that if any one refuse to labour, neither should he eat. It is the active arm and the busy hand that must both purvey for the mouth, and withal give it a right to every morsel that is put into it.

Some perhaps think they are not born to labour, because they are born to estates. But the sentence that God passed upon Adam is universal; we find in it no exception or proviso for any noble or illustrious drone: no greatness can privilege a man to lie basking in sloth and idleness; and to eat the labours of the husbandman’s hand, and drink the sweat of his brow; to wallow and sleep in ease only, as an useless lump of well clothed, well descended earth: earth for heaviness only, but not for fruitfulness, serves no other end of society, but only to make one in a number.

But it may be replied, Shall those whom God has blessed in the world, and, as it were, by a particular mark of his providential favour exempted from the general curse of toil and labour, be obliged to work in a trade, or to be of such or such a laborious profession? No, I answer, that they need not, nor is this the thing contended for, but simply that they should labour and fill up all the hours of their time by employing themselves usefully for the public; and there are superior and more noble employments in which this labour may be sufficiently exerted. For is any one so rich or high as to be above the labour of doing good to a whole neighbourhood, of composing differences, studying the customs of his country, reading histories, and learning such arts as may render him both eminent and useful, serviceable to the public both in peace and war.

If it be answered, that he stands in need of none of all these, as being already abundantly supplied with all the plenties and supports of life: to this also I rejoin, that they are not only a man’s own personal needs, but the general needs of society, that command a supply and relief from his labour; add to this also, in the second place, that the obligation to labour, lying upon men, is not founded upon their needs and necessities, but upon God’s command, as its proper reason; which command he has laid universally and impartially upon all; and he that excuses himself from all labour, the common lot of mankind, by loading it with the odious name of servility, should do well to consider whether the custom of a place, the vogue of his dependants, and his own little arts of evasion, will be able to bear him out in so broad a contempt of an express command; and to rescue him from that thundering sentence leveled so directly at him in Matt. xxv. 30, Cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness, there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

2. Correspondent to a Christian’s other, that is, his spiritual capacity, he has also a spiritual calling or profession; and the work that this engages him to, is that grand one of working out his salvation; a work that a life is too little for, had a man any thing more than a life to bestow upon it; a work that runs out into eternity, and upon which depends the wo or welfare of an immortal soul.

Now this work is threefold.

1. To make our peace with God.

SERMON IV.

PREACHED AT THE

CONSECRATION OF DR. SETH WARD, BP. OF EXON.

JEREMIAH xv. 20.

I will make thee unto this people a fenced brazen wall: and they shall fight against thee, but they shall not prevail against thee: for I am with thee to save thee and deliver thee, saith the Lord.

I SHALL not pretend to derive episcopacy from the Old Testament, as some do presbytery from Jethro, in his humble petition and advice to Moses concerning the government of the Jews. Which presbytery, though some call the rod of Aaron, yet it more resembles those rods of Jacob, as being designed to midwive a piebald, mixed, ringstraked progeny of church-governors into the world. How ever, it is well that we see from whence it first came, even from Midian, an heathenish place, and unacquainted with the true worship of God, then confined only to the Jews.

But it is pity that the Old Testament does not describe the office of those elders, as well as mention the name; we reading scarce any thing of them there, but that some of them scuffled with Moses and Aaron in the classis of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. As also of their idolatry, Ezekiel vi. And of their private examination of Susanna in the story of Daniel; which book, though it be apocryphal, yet the practice remains authentic and canonical.

SERMON V.

TITUS i. 1.

Paul, a servant of God, and an apostle of Jesus Christ, according to the faith of God’s elect, and the acknowledging of the truth which is after godliness.

IN the last words of this verse, about which only our present discourse shall be concerned, we have a full though compendious account of the nature of the gospel, ennobled by two excellent qualities. One, the end of all philosophical inquiries, which is truth; the other, the design of all religious institutions, which is godliness; both united, and as it were blended together in the constitution of Christianity.

Those who discourse metaphysically of the nature of truth, as to the reality of the thing, affirm a perfect coincidence between truth and goodness; and I believe it might be easily made out, that there is nothing in nature perfectly true, but what is also really good. For although it is not to be denied, that true propositions may be framed of things in themselves evil, yet still it is certain that the truth of those propositions is good. Nothing so bad as the Devil, or worse than a liar; yet this affirmation, that the Devil is a liar, is hugely true and very good.

It would be endless to strike forth into the elogies of truth; for as we know it was the adored prize for which the sublimest wits in the world have always run, and sacrificed their time, their health, their lives, to the acquist of it; so let it suffice us to say here, that as reason is the great rule of man’s nature, so truth is the great regulator of reason.

I. Now in this expression of the gospel’s being the truth which is after godliness, these three things are couched.

1. That it is simply a truth.

2. That it is an operative truth.

3. That it is operative to the best of effects, which is godliness.

And first for the first of these; it is a truth, and upon that account dares look its most inquisitive adversaries in the face. The most intricate and mysterious passages in it are vouched by an infinite veracity; and truth is truth, though clothed in riddles, and surrounded with darkness and obscurity: as the sun has still the same native, inherent brightness, though wrapt up in a cloud.

Even those transcendent enigmas of the Trinity, the incarnation of the Son of God, and the resurrection of the dead, they all challenge our assent upon the score of their truth. And that three is one and one three, is altogether as true as that three is three, though far from being so plain. It is hard indeed to conceive a reparation of the same numerical body having been transformed by so many changes, yet we have the divine word for it; and death itself is not more sure, than that men shall rise from the dead.

Now the gospel being a truth, it follows yet further, that if we run through the whole catalogue of its principles, nothing can be drawn from thence, by legitimate and certain consequence, but what is also true. It is impossible for truth to afford any thing but truth. Every such principle begets a consequence after its own likeness.

2. The next advance of the gospel’s excellency is, that it is such a truth as is operative. It does not terminate in notion, or rest in bare, unactive speculation, but from the head it shoots forth into the hand, and sets all the faculties of our nature at work. It does not dwell in the mind like furniture, only for ornament, but for use, and the great concernments of life. Most sorts of human knowledge are like the treasures of a covetous man, got with labour and much industry; and being got, they lie locked up and wholly unemployed: and indeed the very nature of them abstracts from practice. The knowledge of astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, music, and the like, they may fill the mind, and yet never step forth into one experiment; but the knowledge of the divine truths of Christianity is quick and restless, like an imprisoned flame, which will be sure to force its passage, and to display its brightness.

3. The third and highest degree of its perfection is, that it is not only operative, but also operative to the best of purposes, which is to godliness: it carries on a design for heaven and eternity. Some things are indeed active, but the design of their action is trivial, cheap, and contemptible; so that, in effect, it is no more than a sedulous and a laborious doing of nothing; which kind of actions, should they be arrested with that question, Cui bono? the vanity of such performances would quickly appear, that they were but a shooting without any aim, a raising of a bubble, and a pursuing of the wind. Every thing is ennobled by its design; and an action is advanced in its worth, when it drives at an object grand and necessary; John xvii. 3, This is life eternal, to know thee the only true God, and whom thou hast sent, Christ Jesus. It serves the two greatest interests in the world, which are the glory of the Creator and the salvation of the creature; and this the gospel does by being the truth which is after godliness.

Which words may admit of a double sense.

1. That the gospel is so called, because it actually produces the effects of godliness in those that embrace and profess it. 2. That it is directly improvable into such consequences and deductions, as have in them a natural fitness, if complied with, to engage the practice of mankind in such a course.

In the former of these senses, the gospel cannot universally sustain this appellation; forasmuch as in many hearts it is no sooner conceived but it proves abortive; and like the seed falling upon stony ground, it is choked by the thorns of cares and lusts, and other corruptions growing up and hindering it, so that it never brings forth fruit to perfection. Many entertain principles which they defy by their practices, and unlive all that they have believed; so that that which was intended for the cure of sin, by accident becomes its aggravation. Wherefore the latter sense only can take place here; that is, that the gospel, in its nature, is the most apt and proper instrument of holiness in the world, the most naturally productive of holy living and a pious conversation; unless a man prevaricates with the articles of his faith, runs counter to his profession, and acts contradictions.

Now the truth that we have declared to have thus an influence upon godliness, consists in these two things.

SERMON VI.

TITUS i. 1.

—The acknowledging of the truth which is after godliness.

3. THAT doctrine that asserts, that it is in men’s power to supererogate, and to do works of perfection over and above what is required of them by way of precept, tends to the undermining and hinderance of a godly life. Works of evangelical perfection or supererogation are defined, such as a man may without sin not do, but, if he does them, they entitle him to a greater reward. Which assertion carries along with it this visible impiety, that a man is not obliged to do the utmost, in the way of holiness, that he can; for the law is the measure of men’s obligation, and no man is obliged to any thing as his duty, but what the law obliges him to: but if it is in his power to do some sublime works of holiness, over and above what the law exacts of him, it clearly follows, that without sin he may omit the doing of them; for where there is no law there is no sin: and here we suppose the obligation of the law not to extend thus far.

Now surely there can be no greater a stop to an active endeavour, than to state the proportions of men’s duty less than the proportions of their strength and ability; and to assure them, that they do all that is necessary for them to do, though they do much less than they are able. It seems by this, that God does not call for all their strength and all their souls, but they have great reserves of both left entirely in their own disposal; nay, and those of much greater worth and excellence than what the law demands from them; since the doing of these advances them to an higher perfection, and prepares for them a greater and a brighter crown than all the rest of their obedience.

But if this were so, how shall we make out the sense of those precepts that command us to strive to enter in at the strait gate; and to press forward to the mark of the prize of the high calling; and to use our utmost diligence to make our calling and election sure; that having done all, we may be able to stand; and the like. Certainly these are expressions that stretch endeavours to the highest, and determine in no less compass than the whole that a man by all the powers and faculties of his soul can perform.

Nor can it avail the persons that we contend with to reply, that God vouchsafes us those assistances of grace, that are able to bear men beyond the lines of mere duty; for the dispensations of grace would, upon these terms, put us into the same condition of perfection, that we are to expect only in a state of glory. Grace indeed extinguishes the reign of sin, but it does not wholly extirpate the inherence of it as to all the remainders. It makes a man that he will not devote and give himself over to the practice of sin, but it does not wholly rescue him from the surprise of many infirmities.

And were not these men fuller of pride than perfection, and more Pharisees than Christians, they would acknowledge so much, and let down those gaudy plumes of their high pretences of a double refined sanctity, upon the sight of their black feet and polluted goings. For surely they have not yet convinced the world of the feasibleness and truth of their propositions, by any manifest transcriptions of them upon their lives. But can these doctors style them selves angelical from any thing that they do, what soever they are pleased to teach? I cannot see but that a friar or a Jesuit is subject to the same passions and irregular motions that other men are. Nor can I perceive that their lives proceed in such a super natural strictness, and transcendency of piety, above the rest of the world. They should do well to prove their doctrines of perfection by instance and example; and to demonstrate that a thing may be done, by shewing that actually it has been done: but if they cannot, they should first acquit themselves in point of duty, before they flourish it with their supererogations; and think of paying their debts, before they go about to purchase.

Besides, to assert that the perfection, commanded by the law, is less than the perfection that the power of man can raise itself to, seems an high imputation upon God’s wisdom and holiness, as he is a legislator; the design of which must needs be to work up the creature to the highest conformity to himself, that a created nature is capable of. But he that, in stead of stretching himself to the latitude of the law, contracts the law to his own measures, will find that God, when he comes to deal with him, will have recourse to his own rule, and not correct a true original by a false copy.

4. That doctrine that places it in the power of any mere mortal man to dispense with the laws of Christ, so as to discharge any man, in any case, from being obliged by them, is highly destructive of holy living: but so does the doctrine of the church of Rome, that vests such a dispensing power in the pope; by which they raise the pretended chair of St. Peter above the throne of Christ himself: for the sovereign power resides not so much in him that makes the law, as in him that is able to do with the law what he pleases when it is made, by either continuing or suspending the obligation of it. Christ indeed has given laws to his church; but when it is at the pope’s pleasure, whether those laws shall oblige or not oblige, I leave it to the judgment of the meanest reason, who, in this case, must be accounted superior.

The laws of men are dispensable, because the nature of them subjects them to the reason of dispensation; that is, because no human lawgiver is of that wisdom, as to provide against all future inconveniences in the constitution of laws, but that the observation of them may sometimes run men upon greater mischiefs, than the making of them was designed to prevent: but Christ was of that infinite wisdom and knowledge, as to enact laws of that universal compliance with all the conditions of man, that there can be no new, emergent inconvenience unforeseen by him, that should at any time make the obligation of them to cease.

It is possible indeed, that the law may cease to oblige, upon the removal or want of the matter of the obligation. As it is every man’s duty to give alms; but if a man has nothing, he can give nothing: and to communicate is a duty, but if the materials of the sacrament, bread and wine, cannot be had, to communicate is impossible, and so no man can be obliged to it: but still, in all this, there is no dispensation with either of these laws; for the impossibility of their performance makes them, to such persons, under such circumstances, cease to be laws. But a law is then properly dispensed with, when it is capable of being obeyed; and the person capable of yielding such obedience to it is yet, by an intervenient power, discharged from his obligation to obey: the former case is like fire’s not burning, when it has no fuel, or matter, to fasten or prey upon; the latter is like the fire’s not burning the three children in the furnace, when both the fire was in full force, and also a proper combustible subject offered to it; but, by the interposal of a divine power, it was hindered from exerting that burning quality upon that subject. So here, the law is in full force, and the person under it in a capacity to do the thing commanded by it; but the pope tells him, that he shall not be obliged to it, he will dispense with him; and so the labour of obeying is saved.

But since bold encroachments seldom venture themselves without pretences, it concerns us to see what reason the pope assigns for his exercising such a power over the laws of Christ. Why his spiritual janizaries, the schoolmen and casuists, tell us, that where the observation of any command is impeditiva majoris boni, a stop and hinderance of a greater good than the non-observance of it would occasion, there the pope has power to dispense with the observation of that command, and to discharge men from it.

As for instance: a man has bound himself with a lawful vow or oath, and accordingly proceeds to the execution of it; but the priest finds, that the greatness of their church would be considerably advantaged by this person’s not observing his vow or oath, and accordingly persuades him to break it; but the man’s conscience is solicitous and tender, and asks who shall warrant him in the breach of a lawful oath: hereupon the pope says that he will; and though the law of God and nature ties a man to the keeping of his oath, yet because the not keeping of it will minister to a greater good, namely, the advantage of the church, this is a sufficient reason for him to dispense with his oath: for answer to which, I would inquire, whether the command of keeping oaths and vows is not clear and express; and whether there can be any greater good, than to obey an express command of God. I demand also, supposing that the advancement of their church be indeed a greater good, yet, whether the intending of such a good can legitimate an action in its nature sinful? and whether the breach of a clear command be not such an one? When these questions receive a full and a satisfactory resolution, then may the conscience acquiesce in the pope’s dispensation; but till then, it is safer to obey God in the precept, than man in the interpretation of it.

And now, who is there that deserves the name of a Christian, whose heart does not rise against such horrid and impious usurpations upon the prerogative of Christ? such gross and open methods of promoting the course of sin? If a command of Christ thwart that which the pope, in the behalf of his own inter est, will judge a greater good, the command must stand back, and his dispensation take place. All such bands upon the conscience are like the withes, or the cords, upon Samson; they fly asunder like flax burnt with fire; they are of no force or efficacy at all. For as it is in the pope’s power to dispense with a command, so it is also solely in his power to judge of the reason upon which he is to dispense with it; and we know that he is seldom the poorer for such dispensations.

The truth is, he exposes the precepts of Christ to sale, and he that will bid most for the breach of a command shall carry it: which is such an intrenching upon all the offices of Christ, such an impudent defiance of that supremacy of which he pretends to be the vicar and substitute, that it is apparent that St. Peter’s pretended successor sells Christ’s power, as much as ever Judas did his person. Here is the making merchandise of religion, and with that of souls: here is the groundwork of indulgences, the quick market for pardons, by which the gospel, from the law of liberty, is turned into the instrument of licence; and the sure asylum for such as would live sinners, and yet die saints.

And thus much for the doctrines that tend to the undermining of a pious life, by perverting the great rule of living, the law of Christ. I come now to the third sort, which,

III. Are those that relate to repentance.

This follows in order of nature; for after a law is broke, there is no recovery but by repentance; so that the depravation of the nature of this, is a sin against our last remedy; and he that, having transgressed the divine law, abuses his conscience with false rules of repentance, does like a man, that first by his intemperance brings himself into a disease, and then puts poison into his physic.

Now the doctrine about repentance may be perverted in a double respect.

SERMON VII.

PROVERBS xxix. 5.

A man that flattereth his neighbour , spreadeth a net for his feet.

HE that shall set himself to fight against a custom, will find that the match is not equal; and that by speaking against a generally received practice, he only treads the dry paths of duty, without any reward or recompence, but only to be slighted for his pains. But since neither custom nor credit must authorize a vice so far, as to set it out of the preacher’s reach; surely an ill practice may be very safely and discreetly reprehended, while, in the mean time, persons are spared.

That which the text here offers for the subject of this discourse, is flattery; a thing condemned by the mouth of one who could very well judge, as being a king, and therefore experimentally acquainted with the ways and arts of flatterers; a sort of cattle that usually herd in the courts of princes and the houses of great persons.

The words of the text are so plain, that they can need no explication, and therefore I shall immediately fall upon the prosecution of the matter contained in them, which I shall manage under these three general heads.

I. I shall shew what flattery is, and wherein it does consist.

SERMON VIII.

PROVERBS xxix. 5.

A man that flattereth his neighbour spreadeth a net for his feet.

2. THE second thing wherein flattery consists is, the praising and defending the defects or vices of any person. This is a step much higher than the first, which was (as we may so call it) the negative part of flattery, as consisting only in silence, and a not reproving those things that both deserved and needed reproof. And as it goes higher, so it is much more inexcusable, and uncapable of those apologies that may be alleged, though not in justification, yet at least in mitigation of the former. For partly the timorousness, partly the bashfulness of some tempers, (affections not always at our command,) may silence the tongue, and seal up the lips from uttering those things which the mind and judgment frequently suggests upon these occasions. A man may be sometimes even dazzled and astonished into silence by the presence of some glistering sinners; so as to be at a loss both for words and confidence to vent those reproofs that fill the conscience, and are even struggling to break forth. Certain it is, that this or any other consideration can by no means warrant a silence there, where religion bids a man cry aloud; nor can any one plead his modesty in prejudice of his duty: yet surely there is something at least pleadable upon this account, for the bare not-reproof of a sin, that can with no face be urged for its defence.

For pusillanimity must first pass into a prostitute impudence, before a man can arrive to that pitch as to vouch himself the encomiast of sin, and to speak panegyrics upon vice: many a man may favour a malefactor, and wish his crime concealed or passed over, who yet would never endure to be his advocate. It is one thing for a man to shut his eyes, and so resolve not to see that which is black; an other for him, with an open eye and a shameless front, to affirm black to be white; and to undertake to persuade the world so much.

But so does he that attempts the commendation of any thing lewd or vicious: he transforms the Devil into an angel of light: he confounds the distinction of those things that God has set at an infinite distance: he outfaces the common judgment of sense and reason, and the natural, unforced apprehensions of mankind.

And though one would think that there is that commanding majesty in truth, as even to awe men into an acknowledgment of things to be as really they are, and generally do appear; and withal that ingenuity bred in every breast, as not to own any broad defiance of the clearest evidence: yet experience shews, that there is a sort of men in the world, that have wrought themselves to that hardiness, as to venture to tell one that has done passionately and rashly, that he did courageously and discreetly; that shall applaud him in all his follies; assuring him, that if men speak amiss of his behaviour, it is rather upon the account of envy and malice to his person, than any real disapprobation of his actions; and that he is not to measure himself by the words of his adversaries, that speak their prejudice, not their judgment; oftentimes valuing that inwardly which they inveigh against outwardly, and cherishing that in themselves, that they tax and discommend in him.

They shall tell him further, that though possibly such and such actions were faulty, and unbecoming in others, yet the difference of his condition alters the case, and changes the very quality of the action. For what should a great person have to do with humility? or the rich and the wealthy with temperance, industry, and sobriety? Why should a states man or politician restrain himself to the punctilios of truth and sincerity? These are the virtues of mean employments and lower minds; they may perhaps be commendable in country gentlemen and farmers, but persons that move in an higher sphere, must have a greater latitude and compass for their motion; and it were infinite weakness and inexperience to stick at a lie or an oath, or the taking away an innocent life, when reason of state requires it, and so unshackles its ministers from the bonds of those nice rules that are to hold and direct other mortals.

And if these actions have a cleanly and a successful issue, they shall certainly find sycophants enough to extol them for the greatest prudence and wisdom that in such grand and difficult affairs could be shewn: they shall at least be vouched necessary, and consequently lawful, or as good; and the authors of such actions seldom seek for or desire any further warrant for them than necessity, though it be of their own making.

But that people may not be wicked without some plea or pretence to cover and protect them from being thought so, there has a very serviceable distinction been found out and asserted by some, between a religious and a political conscience, in every one that is a governor; the former is to guide him as such a particular person, having a soul to save; the other to rule and direct him, as a person intrusted with the good, safety, and protection of those that are under his government, and consequently empowered to use all those courses that serve as means absolutely necessary to compass such an end: which two capacities, as they are very different, so it seems that they cannot both proceed by the same rule. Forasmuch as a governor, in many junctures and circumstances of affairs, cannot reach the ends of government, in protecting and se curing his people, but by sometimes having recourse to those ways and actions that perhaps are not allowable upon the strict rules and measures of religion, which, if rigidly and unseasonably adhered to in such instances, may possibly throw all into ruin and confusion.

For answer to which: it is not for me to inter pose in what concerns government and governors; it has its mystery, and those that manage it are to be presumed best to understand it: but as for this distinction between a religious and a political conscience, I shall make bold to give it its due, in saying, that in all those cases in which it comes to be practised, it subverts religion. For to affirm that there is any capacity or condition of man, of which religion is not a competent rule, is to make it a rule infinitely short and insufficient, as to the guidance and direction of the manners and actions of man kind; the great end for which God designs it.

Besides the gross absurdity of placing the same man under two contrary rules; which is to bring him under two contrary duties; and to make him at the same time obliged to do a thing, and yet upon another score discharged from that obligation; which is a ridiculous contradiction.

Many things indeed are distinguished in speculation, that perfectly coincide, and are inseparably the same in practice. And though it is not to be denied, that the capacity of a man and of a governor differ in apprehension; forasmuch as to be a man and to be a governor are not the same thing: yet when we come to behold those two capacities, as they really exist in nature, we shall find, that what is done by one is also done by the other, and what befalls one consequentially befalls the other. If the governor sins, the man will not be innocent;. and if the man is sick, the governor will find himself but ill at ease. He that breaks the law under one capacity shall suffer under both, and then, set ting aside all the niceties of speculation, if God condemns king Ahab, I believe it will be hard to distinguish the man Ahab out of the same condemnation.

But now, if to persuade men out of the acknowledgment of the evil and unlawfulness of their actions, be flattery; and further, to use arguments and acts to settle them in such a persuasion, be one of the grossest and most detestable sorts of it, especially if religion be abused to so base a purpose; then surely none are so deeply chargeable with flattery as these two sorts of men.

1. Such as, upon principles of enthusiasm, assure persons of eminence and high place, that those transgressions of the divine law are allowable in them, that are absolutely prohibited and condemned in others. For thus they reason: That the divine laws and precepts were intended only for the ordinary rules of life; but such as are extraordinary persons, raised up by God for some extraordinary work, are exempted from those common obligations; as being directed by an higher rule, namely, the immediate dictates of the Spirit speaking and acting within them, which Spirit, being God, is able to dispense with his own laws, and accordingly does so, as the exigence of those works, that he calls such persons to, shall require. So that for them to rob and plunder is as justifiable as for the Israelites to rob the Egyptians; and to slay and murder, though it be princes, is but like Phinehas’s standing up and executing justice; the inward motions of the Spirit countermanding the injunctions of the outward letter.

But to raise in any such an opinion of themselves, is surely one of the vilest and most destructive pieces of flattery that can be used by one man to another: for it is to make religion minister the same scope and licence to the most impious actions that atheism itself can allow; and that with this advantage, that it does not trouble the mind with the same stings and remorses that the professed despiser of religion usually feels in the midst of all his extravagancies: for if a man is brought to believe that he breaks the divine law with as good a conscience as others keep and observe it, there is no doubt but such a belief will keep him at perfect peace with himself, notwithstanding the most enormous violations of it.

I cannot believe that the authors of our late confusions could have ever acted in such a barefaced opposition to all laws, both human and divine, with so much satisfaction, serenity, and composure of mind, had not their seducing prophets throughly leavened them with this principle; that being the select people of God, and so stirred up and peculiarly called to serve him in their generation, (as the phrase then ran,) they were privileged from those ordinary rules and measures by which the lawfulness and morality of other men’s actions were determined. The saints indeed might do the very same actions which in other men were sinful, but yet they in so doing could not sin; and this was that persuasion that still patched up their conscience, after all the blows and wounds it had received by dashing against the divine precepts.

Such was the soul-destroying flattery by which those impostors encouraged many thousands in the way of damnation; like that lying prophet, that bid Ahab go and prosper, when he sent him to the battle in which he was to fall and perish.

2. The other sort of persons chargeable with this kind of flattery are the Romish casuists, who have made it their greatest study and business to put a new face upon sin, and to persuade the world that many of those actions that have hitherto passed for impious and unlawful, are indeed nothing such, but admit of such qualifications as clear them of all guilt and irregularity.

They are not indeed so absurdly impudent as to declare that murder is no sin; but they will order the matter so, that a man may be killed upon many punctilios of credit and reputation, and yet no murder be committed. They will not tell a man that it is allow able to steal; but they will teach that, in case a servant finds that his master will not afford him wages proportionable to what he judges his own service to be worth, he may take from him so much as will amount to a valuable compensation, and not be chargeable with the breach of that law that prohibits a man to steal. They will not deny many actions to be evil; but if a man have but the dexterity and art of directing his intention to some right end, or at least of not actually directing it to an ill, why then presently the whole action loses all its malignity, and becomes pure and innocent, by a wonderful, but a very easy transformation.

It were infinite to draw forth all particulars; but these are some of the ways by which these religious sycophants have poisoned the fountains of morality, and flattered mankind with such doctrines and assertions as shall soothe them up, and embolden them in the most vicious and lewd courses imaginable. They have opened a well, not only for sinners, but even for sin itself to wash in, and to be clean. So that if there be any persons in the world who may be justly accused for calling good evil, and evil good, these are the men; and they do it too, diligently, co piously, and voluminously; and consequently have the fullest and the fairest claim to the curse that is joined to that accusation.

But now this kind of flattery is so much the more to be abominated, because as it is of most mischievous consequence, so it is also of very easy effect, and meets with a strange success, seldom returning with out accomplishing the work of persuasion, or rather indeed of fallacy and delusion.

Of which a double reason may be assigned.

1. The first taken from the nature of man.

2. The other from the very nature of vice itself.

1. For the first of which; it is too apparent how fond and credulous most men are, and even desirous to be persuaded into a good estimation of whatsoever they do; and therefore as some people will buy and use flattering glasses, though they know them to be so, because they had rather please themselves with a false representation, than view their deformity by a true; so some will catch at any colour or dress, (though never so thin,) to give some varnish and better appearance to their vice.

A perverted, disordered mind, if it cannot have arguments and solid reasons to allege for the legality of what it does, it will content and satisfy itself with flourishes and shows of probability; and that deceiver that shall labour to furnish it with such, shall be welcome and honourable; his dictates shall be received as oracles, and never sifted by questions and examinations; for people are naturally averse from inquiring after that which they are unwilling to know; and therefore such an one shall be even prevented by a willing, forward assent. But it is easy for a man to finish his visit, that is met three parts of his way.

2. The other reason is from the very nature of vice itself, which oftentimes bears a great affinity to virtue, and so admits of the harder distinction. Upon which account, it is no difficult matter to persuade the prodigal person, that he is only very liberal; it being very hard to assign the precise point where liberality ceases, and prodigality begins. Upon the same ground, covetousness may easily pass for providence, and a proud mind be mistaken for an high and generous spirit; there being a great likeness in the actions respectively belonging to each of these, enough to impose upon unwary, undistinguishing minds, that are prone to receive every like for the same.

Now from these two considerations we may easily gather, how open the hearts of most men lie to drink in the fawning suggestions of any sycophant that shall endeavour to relieve their disturbed consciences by gilding their villainies with the name of virtues, and so smoothing the broad way before them, that they may find no rub or let in their passage to dam nation. This therefore is the second thing wherein flattery consists.

3. The third is, the perverse imitation of any one’s defects or vices, which seems to carry it higher than the former, forasmuch as actions are much more considerable than words or discourses. A man, for many causes, may be brought to commend that which he will never be prevailed upon to follow: but for any one to transcribe and copy out in himself whatsoever he sees ridiculous or impious in another, this argues a temper made up of nothing but baseness and servility.

And to any generous and free spirit it is really a very nauseous and a fulsome thing, to see some prostitute their tongues and their judgments by saying as others say, commending what they commend, dispraising whatsoever things or persons they dispraise, and framing themselves to any absurd gesture or motion that they observe in them; making them selves as it were an echo to their voice, and a shadow to their bodies. In a word, no man can be exact and perfect in this way of flattery, without being a monkey and a mimic, and a lump of wax for any fool to stamp his image upon.

But surely few would be so sottish and servile, as to break a leg or an arm, or put out an eye, because they see the great person whom they depend upon and adore, deprived of any of these parts. And if so, do they not consider, that a man is to be more tender of his manners and the dignity of his soul, than of any thing that belongs to his body, which would give him but a small preeminence above the brutes, were it not animated and exalted by a principle of reason?

Every kind of imitation speaks the person that imitates inferior to him whom he imitates, as the copy is to the original: but then to imitate that which is mean, base, and unworthy, is to do one of the lowest actions in a yet lower instance; it is to climb downwards, to employ art and industry to learn a defect and an imperfection; which is a direct reproach to reason, and a contradiction to the methods of nature.

And so much the more intolerable is it, because such persons are seldom seen to imitate the excellencies and the virtues of him whom they flatter; these are looked upon with distance and lazy admiration: but if there be any vice that sullies and takes off from the lustre of his other good qualities, that shall be sure to be culled out, and writ upon their lives and behaviour. Alexander had enough to imitate him in his drunkenness and his passion, who never intended to be like him, either in his chastity, or his justice to his enemies, and his liberality to his friends. And it is reported of Plato, that being crookshouldered, his scholars, who so much admired him, would endeavour to be like him by bolstering out their garments on that side, that so they might appear crooked too. It is probable that many of these found it easier to imitate Plato’s shoulders than his philosophy, and to stuff out their gowns than to furnish their understandings, or improve their minds.

I am confident there is none that does not deride and condemn this silly piece of officiousness, as scarce to be reconciled to common sense; yet we may find as bad daily in the behaviour of most parasites, who think they can never honour their great masters, but by exposing themselves. Which practice, though it is most irrational, yet it has this to encourage and continue it, that such grandees are wonderfully pleased to see their vices and defects aped by their followers and retainers; indeed much more than to see their perfections drawn into imitation.

And that, I conceive, for this reason; because vice, being weak and shameful, is glad to have any countenance and credit shewn it; which is done by no way so much as by having many followers. To be vicious alone is a great shame, and few natures are able to bear it; and therefore company gives a kind of authority to sin, and brings vice into fashion, which is able to commend and set off any thing. Nero’s killing his mother could not but be looked upon as an hideous and unnatural thing, for all the senate’s public thanking of him for it, and his courtiers applauding of the action; because in this, humanity was too strong for flattery, and suffered none of them to practise what their slavish disposition induced them to commend; which shews how much the greater number of flatterers speak against their conscience; for that which a man in the same condition would not do himself, he certainly dislikes in another.

4. The fourth and last thing that I shall mention, wherein flattery consists, is an overvaluing those virtues and perfections that are really laudable in any person. This is a different sort from all the former, which had no foundation of good at all to work upon, but were wholly employed in giving appearances where there was no substance, in painting of rotten sepulchres, and belying vice into the reputation of virtue.

But this is more modest and tolerable, there being some groundwork of desert, though much too narrow for those huge superstructures of commendation that some raise upon it; which therefore turn into flattery, which consists in a partial representation of any thing to be greater and better than indeed it is: for truth suffers as much by this as by the former; it being violated by any disproportion between the thing as it is expressed and as it does exist.

The flatterer views every little virtue or good quality in him whom he resolves to extol, as it were, with a microscope; such an one as shall swell a gnat into an elephant, and an elephant into a mountain. Ordinary, plain, homespun sense shall be magnified for extraordinary wit and fancy; and good, honest, flat words shall pass for propriety and exactness of expression.

But to go higher. Let a star be accounted, as in deed it is, a bright and a glorious thing; yet we are not therefore to persuade the world that it is a sun. Herod, no doubt, in Acts xii. 22, spoke like an eloquent man; yet that was short of speaking with the voice of a god, as his flatterers told him in that their impious and profuse acclamation. He that should celebrate a captain that had the good fortune to worst the enemy in a skirmish, to the degree of a Caesar or an Alexander, would wonderfully stretch and overdo, and render the poor man ridiculous, instead of glorious: and every one that measures his actions by any elogies given him by the flatterer, sets his reputation upon stilts, which is not the surest way of standing; and when he comes to be weighed in the balance of the impartial and the judicious, will be found wanting.

For look, as the detracter represents the perfections of him whom he hates, lessened and diminished from what they really are, partly by a malicious concealment, partly by calumny and direct slander; so the flatterer, whose design is managed by a contrary way, (though perhaps in itself the same,) greatens and advances every thing beyond the bounds of its real worth; describing all in hyperboles, high strains, and words of wonder, till he has puffed up that little thing that he commends, as we see men do a bladder, which owes all its bulk only to air and wind, upon the letting out of which, it returns and shrinks into a pitiful nothing.

And just so must the opinion, that a man conceives of himself from the delusions of flattery, vanish and have its end: for, like a feather, it was raised by a breath, and therefore, when that breath ceases, it must fall to the ground again.

And thus I have finished the first general head under which I cast the prosecution of the words; namely, to shew what flattery was, and wherein it did consist. I do not profess myself so skilful and experienced in it, or desirous to be so, as to affirm that I have recounted all the ways and methods, all the turnings and meanders, through which this various thing uses to wind and carry itself.

But these are enough to serve as a rule by which both to direct our own actions, and to judge of the actions and behaviour of other men. They may convince us how vast a difference there is between flattery and friendship, and between the crafty, low mind of a flatterer, and the generous disposition of a friend. But when I have said all of the baseness of this art, yet so long as men find it beneficial, and withal see the world full of those that are willing to be made fools of by it, I believe all that I shall persuade men of will be this, that they are like to get more by practising of it, than any one else shall get by speaking against it.

SERMON IX.

PROVERBS xxix. 5.

A man that flattereth his neighbour spreadeth a net for his feet.

II. THE second general head proposed for the prosecution of these words, was to shew what were the grounds and occasions of flattery on his part that is flattered. I shall mention three.

1. Greatness of place or condition. There is no thing that secures a man from flattery more than the confident and free access of ingenuous persons. But confidence and freedom are seldom found but where there is a parity of conditions: reproof being of the nature of those things that seldom ascend and move upwards; but it either passes to an equal, or descends upon an inferior. He that is great and potent casts an awe and a terror round about him, and, as it were, shuts and barricadoes himself in from all approaches, like mount Sinai, where the fire burning, and the voice thundering, would suffer none to come near it; so that such an one is still treated with silence and distance; his faults are whispered behind his back; he is scoffed at in little rooms and merry meetings, and never hears the severe, healing truths that are spoke of him; but lives muffled and blind fold, unacquainted with himself and the judgments of men concerning him.

Upon which account, great persons, unless their understandings are very great too, and withal unprejudiced with self-love, so as to be their own monitors, and impartial exactors of themselves, are of all others the most miserable. For though a reproof might open their eyes and correct their behaviour, and though there are not wanting those that are concerned for their good, yet they fright away all these remedies, and live and die strangers to their cure.

For in this case men consider, first, the great danger of speaking freely to great persons what they are not willing to hear: it may enrage, and make them their mortal enemies. It may render them as great in malice as they are in power and condition. It is at best a very bold venture, and greatness is not so tractable a thing, as to lay itself quietly open to the reprehender and the faithful admonisher, who speak for the man’s advantage more than for his pleasure, and bring him physic instead of sweetmeats. The experience men have in the world usually makes them fearful to engage in unpleasing offices. Especially when they consider further, how easy it is to be safe and silent; and how little it concerns them to court a trouble, a danger, and a potent displeasure, by endeavouring to do a man good against his will. They think it a great folly to put themselves upon an harsh, and the same also a thankless employment; to lose an interest, and a great friend, only for doing that which they could with much more ease have let alone.

Men see also how ill it has fared with such as have presumed to be free with the grandees of the world, in point of reproof and animadversion: they have been rewarded with frowns, sharpness, and disdain, and sent away with dejected countenances; as if the reprovers themselves had been the persons in fault. Majesty and power usually think virtue and happiness itself bought at too dear a rate, if it be at the price of an admonition.

For all which causes, persons of evil or low minds, which make up much the greater part of the world, are willing to follow their game, and to cajole and flatter a vicious greatness, since it turns so much to their profit and reputation; while the great one, that is abused according to his own heart’s desire, bids the flatterer sit at his right hand; in the mean time making his impartial friend and reprover his foot stool, slighting him for his upright dealing, and sending him to his own virtue for a reward.

2. The second ground of flattery, on his part that is flattered, is an angry, passionate disposition, and impatient of reproof. This also frights and deters men from doing the office of friends in a faithful reprehension. For some minds are more raging and tumultuous than the sea itself; so that if Christ himself should rebuke them, instead of being calm, they would rage and roar so much the louder. That admonition that would reclaim others, does but chafe and provoke them; as the same breath of wind that cools some things, kindles and inflames others. No sooner do some hear their behaviour taxed, though with the greatest tenderness and moderation, but their choler begins to boil, and their breast is scarce able to contain and keep it from running over into the heights and furies of bitterness and impatience. The man, instead of correcting his fault, will redouble it with a greater; add fierceness to his folly, affronting and reviling him that would unbesot and reform him.

Now it requires a person not only of friendship and fidelity, but also of courage and valour, to under take to be a reprover here; forasmuch as to reprove such an one, is, in effect, to give him battle: he must be able to bear, and, what is more, to slight and tame his rage; he must not sneak and fly back at every great word, nor suffer himself to be talked and vapoured out of countenance.

But few people are able, and fewer willing, to put themselves to so great an inconvenience for another’s good, and to raise a storm about their own ears, to do an odious, ungrateful piece of service for an ungrateful person; and therefore men usually deal with such currish, sharp natures as they do with mastiffs, they are fain to stroke them, though they deserve to be cudgelled. They flatter and commend them, to keep them quiet, and to compose the unruly humour which is ready to grow and improve upon the least check or opposition.

From the consideration of which we easily see the great misery and disadvantage of passionate, angry persons; their passion does not only bereave them of their own eyes, but also of the benefit of other men’s; which he that is of a gentle and a tractable nature enjoys in the midst of all his errors: for his friend sees, and judges, and chooses for him, when the present precipitation of his mind hurries him besides the steady use of his reason. He is reduced by counsel, rectified and recalled by one that sees his fault, and dares tell him of it; so that the cure is almost as early as the distemper.

SERMON X.

PSALM xix. 13. FIRST PART.

Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me.

THESE words, running in the form of a prayer or petition, may suggest these three things to our consideration.

1. The thing prayed against; presumptuous sins.

2. The person making this prayer; king David; one adorned with the highest elogies for his piety, even by God himself.

3. The means that he engages for his deliverance from the thing he prays against; namely, the divine grace and assistance: Keep back thy servant from presumptuous sins.

All these things lie naturally and evidently in the text; and there is no doubt, but that it may be most pertinently handled in a distinct prosecution of them. But I shall choose rather to frame my thoughts into another method, and designing to take in and comprehend all these in the progress of the following discourse, I shall cast the discussion of the words under these two general heads.

I. To shew what these presumptuous sins are.

II. To shew the reason of this so holy and excellent person’s so earnestly praying against them.

As for the first of these, what presumptuous sins are. In the handling of this, I shall do these three things.

SERMON XI.

PSALM xix. 13. SECOND PART.

Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins.

II. I COME now to the second, which is to as sign some of the most notable kinds of presumptuous sins.

Concerning which, I shall premise this in general; That there is no sin committible by man, as to the kind of it, but by circumstances is capable of being made a sin of presumption. Upon which account it would be infinite to set down all the several kinds; and therefore I shall only insist upon some of the greatest remark for their malignity, and such as it most concerns the souls of men to be clear and se cure from.

For a man to sin upon hopes or confidence of pardon or mercy, I cannot reckon as a particular kind of presumptuous sin; this being the general nature of presumption running through all the respective kinds and species of it. For he that presumes to offend, promises himself pardon from God’s mercy, without any warrant from God’s word.

The particular kinds therefore of presumptuous sin, that I shall cull out and insist upon, are these that follow.

1. The first is, to sin against the goodness of God, manifesting itself to a man in great prosperity. Every beam of God’s favour to a sinner in these outward enjoyments, is a call to repentance upon the stock of ingenuity. And the apostle’s expostulation in Rom. ii. 4 lies full against the neglecter of it; Despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffermg; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance? Every breath of air that the sinner takes in, is a respite given him by mercy from sin-revenging justice. Every morsel he eats, and every drop that he drinks, is an alms, and a largess, and a repast, that he has no claim to.

But when mercy shall rise higher, and from the benefit of a bare subsistence serve his convenience, and, what is more, his abundance; when Providence shall make his increase bigger than his barns, and his incomes to upbraid the narrowness of his coffers; when it shall add a lustre to his person, and at the same time multiply and advance his family; when it shall appoint angels for his guardians, and, in a word, set an hedge about all that he has: for such a one to rise up and spurn against his Maker, to make all his plenty and greatness the drudge of his luxury and ambition; so that his sins shall outvie his substance, and the very effects of mercy be made the weapons of unrighteousness; for him therefore to sin, because he is great, and rich, and powerful, that is, because Providence has by all this obliged him not to sin; is not this the height of ingratitude, as ingratitude is the height of baseness?

Samuel upbraided David for his two great sins, by recounting what God had done for him, and how openhanded Providence had been to him, in heaping upon him all external blessings, even to the anticipation and exceeding of his desires. Behold, says the prophet, in the name of God, 2 Sam. xii. 8, I had given thee suck and such things: and certainly these things are mercies; those, I am sure, that enjoy them, would confess them so in the want of them. For let such a one reflect upon the thousands and the ten thousands of calamitous persons round about him, and tell me a reason why he should stand exempted from the same lot; why Providence should be so fond of him, as to make him swim in pleasure, while others are sinking under their necessities? When he sees this man roaring under pain, that man languishing under sickness, another hauled to prison for poverty and debt, another starving with cold and hunger; let him tell us what obligation he has laid upon God, that he should be healthful in his person, flourishing in his condition, full in his revenues, and sit down to a table, the very scraps of which were a feast for many persons much more holy and virtuous than himself.

But to go a little further: while he is thus provided for, (as we have observed,) not only as to convenience, but also supplied as to affluence; can he tell me, why he is all this time permitted to live, and to tread the earth? why he is not in hell, roaring in the flames, and bemoaning himself in the regions of the damned? whether his sins have not long since deserved it, and whether both the mercy and justice of God might not be glorified in his destruction? and whether many, whose sins were fewer and smaller than his, have not been cut off from the earth in wrath, and disposed of into that remediless estate of torment? Can he ascribe this reprieve to any thing but to mercy, to mere undeserved mercy, that places the marks of its favour absolutely and irrespectively upon whom it pleases?

But now is there any gross sin, that such a one can commit, that is not a direct defiance to the designs of this mercy? There is not any temporal blessing that a man enjoys, that shall not be reckoned upon his eternal account. That sentence shall appear fresh and fierce against him, Son, thou receivedst thy good things. And it is not so much his having sinned that shall condemn him, as his having sinned in pomp, in plenty, and magnificence. His having sinned against the bounties and endearments of Providence; this is that, that shall rank him with those leading sinners, whose portion lies deeper in the bottomless pit than that of ordinary offenders.

2. A second sort of presumptuous sins, are sins committed under God’s judging and afflicting hand; than which there cannot be a more open and professed declaring of an opposition to God; it being little short of sending a challenge to Heaven. It is a striking of God, while God is striking us; and so, as it were, a contention who should have the last blow. For a child to commit that fault under the rod, for which the rod is upon him, shews an incorrigible disposition, and a malice too great to be chastised into amendment.

What does God send forth his arrows for, and shoot this man with sickness, another with poverty, and a third with shame, but to reclaim and to recover them? to embitter the sweet morsels of sensuality to them, and to knock off their affections from sinful pleasures? For God makes not the miseries of men his recreation; it is no delight to him to hear the groans and the sighs of a distressed person. It can be no diversion to the chirurgeon to hear the shrieks and the cries of him whom he is cutting for the stone; but yet he goes on with his work, for he designs nothing but ease and cure to the person whom he afflicts.

God would make men better by soft and persuasive means, he would draw them with the cords of a man; but when these prevail not, he is drove to the use of his whips and his scorpions: but if these prove ineffectual too, the man is too great a sinner to be corrected, and consequently to be saved. When a man comes three or four times out of God’s furnace with his dross about him, it is a sign of a reprobate and a castaway. God complains of the house of Israel, Ezek. xxii. 18, that they were dross in the midst of the furnace. When the flesh is so proud, that it scorns all the powers of a corrosive, it is an argument that it is incurable, and fit for no thing but to be cut off. God speaks it with a certain pathos and expostulation, and as if he were even brought to a nonplus, Esa. i. 5, Why should ye be stricken any more? ye will revolt still more and more. Some are so obstinately bad, and confirmed in their vice, that judgments and afflictions are but thrown away upon them; and God’s shooting at them is but like shooting at a mark, which indeed receives the arrow, but does not at all feel it.

But such persons must know that their sins are rendered infinitely more daring and provoking by the distress of their condition. God throws them upon the ground, and they, instead of being humbled, rage and rave, and throw the dirt in his face. This is properly a man’s hardening himself against God. The Holy Ghost speaking of a wicked prince of Judah, sets forth the height of his wickedness by this character, 2 Chron. xxviii. 22, In the time of his distress did he trespass yet more against the Lord: this is that king Ahaz. What a brand does he give him! as if he had said, This is that monster of men, that spot of nature, that prodigy of impiety. It is the property of dogs to snarl under the whip, and to fly in the face of him that strikes them.

There is never an affliction that befalls any man, but it comes with this motto written upon it by the finger of God himself; Go, sin no more, lest a worse evil come unto thee. Has any man felt the hand of God upon his body, his estate, or his family, or any concernment that is dear unto him? Why let him hear his voice also; his admonishing, his counselling voice, Sin no more, lest a worse evil happen unto thee. Has God snatched away a man’s child? God can snatch away his estate too. Has God took away his estate? he can take away his friends also. Has he bereaved him of his friends? he can likewise bereave him of his reputation. Has he blasted his reputation? he can proceed to touch him in his health, and with the most miserable of distempers to smite him with madness, phrensy, and distraction. And after all this, God has more ways to plague his rebel creature, than our poor, short apprehensions can reach unto.

But now for a man to sin against all this; to laugh at all these warning periods of Heaven; what is it but a kind of waging war with God? Well may every serious person be still putting up this prayer, Lord, keep me from this kind of presumption: for certainly, wheresoever it is, it places a man but a finger’s breadth from destruction.

3. A third sort of presumption is, to commit a sin clearly discovered and directly pointed at by the word of God, either written or preached. The word sometimes meets the sinner with that power and clearness, that his conscience even forces him to cry out and arraign himself; This is my sin, and I am that sinner that is preached against. He finds it not in the power of his invention, by any art or evasion, to elude or shift off the charge, it comes so home and close to his condition. It is to his sin, as a looking-glass to his face; it represents it in every shadow, lineament, and proportion: so that the preacher might be even thought to have had a correspondent in the man’s breast, and to have held intelligence with his heart: he gives him so exact and particular an account of the several ways, methods, and actings of his sin.

Now for a man to turn his back upon all these bright discoveries of his sin, to commit it, as it were, with the word yet sounding in his ears, and full and quick in his memory; it is like a man’s offending, not only against a law, but a law rubbed up, renewed, and set afresh before men’s eyes, by the king’s proclamation.

It is but too usual to see some persons, who at church feel their consciences searched and lanced, and the word even lashing their sin over the face; yet presently, like Samson after the Philistines had been upon him, to go out and shake themselves a little, and forthwith become the very same men that they were before. They are as ready for their cups, for their rotten, obscene, and profane discourse; and, in a word, for all kind of lewdness; as if the preacher had not reproved their vice, but produced new arguments to encourage it; and exhorted them to persevere diligently in those blessed paths, in which they are sure to have the Devil for their leader, and their lust for their companion.

But the word of God will not be baffled and put off so: where it finds no reception, it will be sure to leave a guilt, and no man can despise it securely: the more clearly it informs, being rejected, the more fiercely it condemns. For surely we cannot imagine that the great God of heaven is so cheap in his addresses to men’s souls, as, according to his own expressions, to wait, to rise up early, and all the day long to stretch forth his hands to the sons of men, in setting out the nature and danger of sin before them; only that they may have opportunity to shew how little these things change and move them; how hardy and obstinate they can be in holding fast their vice, as it were, in spite of Heaven, and maugre all the divine warnings, threats, and admonitions.

This is none of the least degrees of presumption: for supposing that the sinner has not shook off the first principle of self-preservation; while he ventures and proceeds confidently in a sin marked out for vengeance by the voice of God himself, he must needs question either his truth, that he will not, or his power, that he cannot, make good what he says, by punishing as severely as he threatens.

4. A fourth sort of presumption is, to commit a sin against certain passages of Providence, particularly thwarting, and, as it were, lying cross to the commission of it. God is so merciful to and careful of some men’s souls, that when his words make no impression, he is pleased in a manner to put forth his hand, and, by some kind of force, to withhold a man from the perpetration of his intended villainy, as by dashing the opportunities of sinning with some unlooked-for accident, so that the thread and chain of all his fine contrivances is, for the present, broke.

It were infinite to recount particulars; each man may collect enough from his own observation. The drunkard’s merry meetings are put off and defeated by the interposal of emergent, unexpected business; the designs of the revengeful person, by the intervention of company, perhaps by sickness, or some other misfortune disabling him for the execution of his malicious purposes: nay, and sometimes the frustration and disappointment shall be so repeated, and withal so strange, that the sinner’s conscience can not but tell him that the finger of God is in the whole affair, and that the Almighty himself with stands him: in which case, for him still to hold on his wicked design, and to look for new opportunities to bring it to birth; to make fresh attempts, and to try other courses; it argues a man furiously and invincibly set upon offending God, and pursuing the satisfaction of his sin over all those mountains of opposition that Heaven has raised in his way.

Thus we see nothing could withhold Pharaoh and his host from following the Israelites; for in Exod. xiv. 24, 25, it is said first, that God troubled them; then, that he took off their chariot wheels, so that they drove heavily; and lastly, such a terror seized them, that they cried out, Let us flee from the face of Israel; for the Lord fighteth for them against the Egyptians: yet nothing could recall Pharaoh, till Moses stretched out his rod upon the sea, and it returned and swallowed up him and his whole army, so that they sunk like lead in the mighty waters.

And then for Balaam, whose story we have in the 22d of Numbers: his heart was all that time upon the rich, enticing offers of the king of Moab; yet how many rubs and repulses did God cast in his way, and with what difficulty did he go after the ways of unrighteousness: yet go after them he did, and upon that score stands recorded in scripture for as presumptuous and resolved a sinner as any is mentioned in the sacred story.

Those who break through all those mounds and hinderances that God has laid between them and the gratification of their vice, imitate Balaam’s sin, and may expect to inherit his damnation.

5. A fifth kind of presumptuous sins are, sins against the inward checks and warnings of conscience about the evil of any course or action. We may call them the checks of conscience, though I doubt not but that sometimes they are the immediate whispers of God’s Spirit in the soul; but it matters not much which they are, it coming all to one result; whether God speaks immediately by himself, or by his interpreter, for so is the conscience littering every thing in the name and authority of God: that there are such inward checks and startings of the soul at the attempt of any great sin is most certain; and I appeal to the mind of every particular person that hears me, whether lie has not often found a struggle within himself, and a kind of pull-back from the sin that he has been about to engage in, raising such questions in his heart as Joseph put to himself, How shall I do this great wickedness, and sin against God, and how shall I answer it at the last day? and, What if I should die before I repented of it? and, May it not, for all its present promises of pleasure, be bitterness in the latter end? I know every one (none excepted) feels something like this within himself: it is a thing of universal experience, and no man can deny it.

Now from whence and for what can all these suggestions be sent into the heart? What is the reason that there is such a kind of thing within us, ready, as it were, to catch us by the arm, and to bid us hold our hand when we are putting it forth to the commission of any sin? Surely they are the spiritual engines of God, planted by him in the soul to wield it this way and that way, to the prosecution of virtuous, and from the pursuit of vicious courses: they are the characters of every man’s duty drawn and engraven upon his heart; they are the expositors and faithful reporters of the mind of God to a man concerning the quality of every action that he is about to do.

And to thwart and trample upon them, is to presume upon God to that degree that is called a resisting of his Spirit. It is to extinguish the eternal light; and to shut our eyes, that we may the more boldly leap down this dismal precipice into the arms and embraces of our sin. However, such presumers must learn, that he who now warns us from sin in a still voice, when he comes to reprove and judge for sin will do it in thunder. And there is not one of these inward, gentle, and (as they think,) inconsiderable movings and endeavours of the conscience against sin, but shall one day come into account, and be reckoned in the catalogue of its aggravations.

So that if we should imagine a sinner pleading the excuse of his sin before God, that he was pushed on to the acting of it by a clamorous, furious principle within him, his violent affections, his mouth would quickly be stopped, and all his plea cut off by this one demand; Whether he did not find another principle within him, as much protesting against that sin, as passionately dissuading and drawing him off from it, painting the evil of it before his eyes, and laying the sad consequents of it home to his heart. All this will and must be granted; and therefore he that sins against these inward checks, presumes, and, what is more, he presumes inexcusably.

6. A sixth sort of presumptuous sins are, sins against that inward taste, relish, and complacency that men have found in their attempts to walk with God, and comply with the precepts of the gospel. The former are sins against the sight, these against the taste of God’s favour. For the explication of which we must observe, that some persons, wrought up and warmed by the word into good resolutions, set forth for heaven, and intend with themselves a dereliction of the world, and a living up to those divine rules of piety taught and proposed by the Saviour of the world, the great instructor of souls. Hereupon, by reason of the native suitableness of those excellent things taught by him to the generous principles of virtue, naturally planted in every mind, a man, upon the least compliance with them, finds a strange, exalting pleasure and satisfaction arising from thence, much superior to all the poor delights of sensuality. This is called, in Matt. xiii. 20, a receiving the word with joy: and it is said of Herod, in Mark vi. 20, that upon the Baptist’s preaching he did many things, and heard him gladly: and there is mention of some, in Heb. vi. 4, that had tasted of the heavenly gift.

Now this is that relish and inward complacency that I spoke of, and which I said might be sinned against. For I doubt not but God gratifies new beginners in the ways of piety with certain strictures and tastes of spiritual pleasure, in vain to be sought for any where else: they are transient discoveries of himself; the very glimpses of heaven, and drops of an overflowing bounty.

And I doubt not also, but many, who have been admitted to a participation and experience of these privileges, have yet, through the force of temptation, the entanglements of the flesh, and the deceitfulness of their own hearts, been so far turned aside, as to have all these impressions worn off their minds, and in the issue prove wretched apostates. For these are not the peculiar mercies of the elect, who are loved with an everlasting love, but kindness of a lower degree. God may drop such manna upon those that shall never enter into Canaan: many, like Moses, may have a short view of that which they shall never enjoy.

But this is that that we drive at, that every apostasy and sinful backsliding after the soul has been thus treated by God, is thereby inflamed to the nature of a great unkindness and a vast presumption. For can a man do any thing more heinous than this? After God has met him in his prayers, embraced him in sacraments, and given him hope of the pardon of his sins; after all this, to turn rebel? to hear the Baptist gladly, and within a while to behead him? Can there be a viler and blacker presumption? He that only has a cordial by him, and balks the use of it, dies without remedy; but he that also tastes it, and then spits it out again, dies without pity.

And let this be observed, that if such persons, who, like Agrippa, were almost Christians, and have been, as it were, in the skirts and out-courts of heaven, chance to apostatize finally, and to perish, the consideration of this will make the worm of conscience bite much more terribly, and the everlasting flame burn ten times more violently, than if they had gone to hell at the common rate of sinning, with such as never thought of any other god but their belly, nor any religion beside their sensuality.

7. The seventh and last sort of presumptuous sins that I shall mention is, the returning to and repeated commission of the same sin; which surely is the greatest demonstration of a bold, stiff, resolved sinner that can be. Flies are accounted bold creatures, and that for a very good reason; for drive them off from a place as often as you will, yet presently they will be there again. It is not a thing so clear, but it has been disputed by divines, whether a relapse into the same sin, if a gross one, be pardonable. There is great cause to conclude, that it may and is: the contrary assertion being a limitation of mercy, where the word sets no limits to it: yet surely the case is dangerous, and those two things may be very well consistent, that a disease is curable, and yet not one of five hundred ever cured of it.

And if one, of so many sinning presumptuously in this nature, has been, by the singular grace of God, recovered, and in the end saved, I should think it would be but a small encouragement to any, to presume that he shall be the one picked out of so great a number. David presumed upon the goodness and justice of God broadly and foully enough in those his two great sins; and so did Peter in denying his master. But we read of no more murders or adulteries in David, or denials of Christ in Peter: and God knows, if there had, what would have been the issue of such a presumption in either of them.

This is a sinning against the common methods of nature, as well as the obligations of grace. For it is natural to all men, nay, even to most brute animals, to avoid that thing or place where they have met with some notable mischief or disaster. There is a lasting horror of it imprinted upon the spirits, that presently works and shews itself upon the sight of the hurtful thing. Some stomachs never can abide a liquor or meat wonderfully grateful to them before, after they have had some loathsome physic conveyed to them in it: now there can no reason be assigned why men should not be thus affected also as to spirituals.

A man commits a gross sin, and by it makes a great breach upon the peace of his conscience, loses all present sense and feeling of the favour of God, and perhaps, over and above, finds some outward, fierce expressions of his wrath in the discomposure of his worldly affairs, so that both within and with out the man is distempered and disordered, and in finitely at a loss how to resettle himself in his former calm condition. But at length, by divine favour, he does regain his former ground; and perhaps, within a while, his former sin also presents itself to him with fresh enticements and little renewed arts of persuasion; What will the man do now? Will he let the old, stale cheat, new dressed, be acted over upon him the second time? Will he venture the loss of God’s favour once more? and try whether his pardoning mercy will hold out as long as he is pleased to abuse it? Will he have his conscience about his ears again, and break his leg, because once, by much pain and misery, he got it set in the like case?

If he does, let him know that he is incorrigibly presumptuous, he crucifies the Son of God afresh, is a professed despiser of mercy, and by this daring return to his former sin, that had so fearfully mauled and shattered him, has, to say no more, put his repentance, his recovery, and salvation, under a very great improbability. And thus much for the second branch of the first general head, which was, to assign some of the most notable kinds of presumption.

SERMON XII.

PSALM xix. 13.

Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins, lest they get the dominion over me.

THE prosecution of these words was first disposed under these two general heads.

I. To shew what these presumptuous sins was.

II. To shew the reason of this so excellent and holy person, the Psalmist’s, so earnest praying against them.

The first of these I proposed to be handled under these three particulars.

1. To shew what it was in general to presume.

2. To shew and assign some of the most remarkable kinds of presumption.

3. To propose some remedies against these sins.

The two first of which being despatched, I proceed now to the third and last.

The grand and general remedy against presumptuous sins surely must be, to arm the understanding, and to check the exorbitance of the will, by consideration: for the employment of which, with matter in reference to the sins we are treating of, these three things offer themselves to be considered.

1. Let a man endeavour to fix in his heart a deep apprehension and persuasion of the transcendent evil of the nature of sin in general: which is no less than a direct affront to our Creator and Governor in a breach of that law that he values as a transcript of his own holiness, and enforces by the penalty of eternal death threatened to the violators and transgress ors of the least iota of it. The foundation of men’s apostasy from God seems to be laid in the under valuing thoughts they have of sin. It is but as a mote in their eye, not for any trouble that it gives them, but for their opinion of its smallness. The easiness of the commission of it hides the monstrous greatness of the provocation: and men can sport away a soul so quickly and so easily, that they can scarce be brought to think themselves any poorer for the loss.

But since it is difficult to view the nature of a thing immediately in itself, let men read the nature of sin in the dismal history of the effects and consequents of it. And for this, let them first see the ruin of a whole species, and the fall, not of man only, but of mankind, effected by it. Let them view Adam tumbled out of paradise, embased in his nature, and cursed in his actions, with a perpetual toil and misery entailed upon his descending posterity. Let them also see a deluge breaking in upon the earth, and the whole world lying under the destroying element; and they shall find that it was sin that opened the sluices of heaven, and brake up the fountains of the great deep. Sin was the thing that made God almost unravel the works of an whole creation, and deface the draughts of his own hand.

He that shall read the several captivities, bondages, dispersions, and massacres of the Israelites, reads so many comments upon sins, so many lively descriptions of the destructive force of a mighty guilt. But he that would bring the matter to a compendium, and see all in one, let him see the only Son of God fetched out of the bosom of his Father, to bleed and suffer, and die upon the cross; that is, to die a vile, cursed, ignominious death. Let him see his very Father his executioner, and preparing him a cup full of the dregs of an infinite, flaming fury, to be drunk off by him. And all this, not for any personal sin of his own, but for the sins of others, took upon himself merely by imputation: so that being found under this, neither the dignity nor innocence of his person could secure it against the nails and the spear, the scoffs and the flouts, the gall and the vinegar, that our sins had prepared and infused for him.

And lastly, to add a later, since there can be no greater instance of the malignity of sin: when we shall have the fabric of this beautiful frame of all things unfixed and torn down about us, the elements melting with fervent heat, and the heavens passing away with a noise; when the universe shall be reduced to its first principles, and time shall be no more; when the judgment shall be set, and the books opened; then we shall understand that it was sin that made all these desolations, that kindled these fires, and will be yet kindling much greater.

Now let a sinner consider all these passages, and when he has considered them, let him know, that there is unspeakably more evil in sin than in all these. For God can destroy and confound a world, but he cannot sin: and Christ could submit to all the violences of cruelty, all the loads of contumely; but he who could do all this, could not be brought to commit the least sin.

Nor is this to be wondered at; for as every quality flows much more plentifully in the cause than in the effect; so sin, that causes and produces all these evils, must needs contain a much more redundant evil in itself. But now, after all this, the presuming sinner must yet further consider, that all the evil he has hitherto heard of is but the evil of sin considered barely as sin: and then let him collect, that presumption is the very poison and gall of sin itself, the highest degree of it. Sin then reigns and sits in its throne, when it is once advanced to the nature of being presumptuous: so that presumption is a sin (if it were possible) something more than sinful.

2. Let a man most seriously consider and reflect upon God’s justice. The hands of justice are not so tied up by mercy, but that they are loose enough upon those who have no title to mercy: and such the greatest part of the world are, who may possibly, by a redundant bounty, enjoy, but they cannot claim it; for as God deals with men upon a double account, either of the gospel or of the law, the tenor of the former of which is, that there is no condemnation to such as are in Christ Jesus; that is, to such as believe and repent, and become new creatures: and the tenor and voice of the latter is, Cursed be every one that continueth not in all things written in the law to do them; so these two dispensations divide and comprehend all mankind; whereupon those who are not under one are certainly ranged under the other. Those who have not, by sincere repentance and the fruits of it, reached the conditions of the gospel, are under the lash and dint of the law. In the execution of whose sentence the divine justice reigns and shews itself, as the other is the proper scene of mercy.

But now, while a sinner presumes and sins confidently, upon what grounds of certainty, or indeed of rational probability, can he conclude himself to be within the verge and compass of the second covenant? There is not a greater and a more dangerous symptom of a person wholly estranged from all right to the evangelical privileges. For none can be entitled to these but the penitent; and can any man evidence his penitence by his presumption? his sorrow for sin by a resolved progress and continuance in it? And if he can make out no title here, let him consider, and tremble under the consideration, that he lives every minute obnoxious to the arrests of that fierce attribute of God, his justice: he is absolutely under the power of the law, that law that cries for wrath and revenge upon the violators of it.

So that, as presumptuous, he is the proper object for wrath and justice to discharge itself upon. Mercy indeed wards off all these dreadful blows; but it does not this universally and promiscuously for all, but for those only who by certain conditions are qualified for the proper subjects of mercy, as others are of justice. Where we may observe, that each of these attributes confine their working within their proper object, and encroach not upon the respective bounds of each other. He that is a vessel of mercy is out of the reach of justice; and he whom the law consigns over to justice, so long can have no protection from mercy.

The impartial thought of which, surely, should be sufficient to disabuse the confidence of the presumptuous, and to rectify his wild, unlimited apprehensions of that pardoning grace, which speaks pardon to none while they presume upon it.

3. Let a man correct his presumptuous humour, by considering how much such offences would exasperate even men. It is well, if some men can pardon once. But when they see that an offender grows upon them, takes heart, and reiterates the provocation over and over, their patience is out of breath, tires, and can hold out no longer. Peter thought, according to the rate of the world’s pardoning, that he extended charity to a vast compass, when he discoursed of pardoning his brother seven times. He thought that then surely the acts of pardon were in their number of perfection.

No man of spirit will endure that his clemency should prostitute his honour to the saucy invasions of a bold and a growing impudence. No father will endure that his son should abuse his goodness, as if it served for nothing else but only to suffer and for give. And this is a thing so known to men, so implanted in them by nature, that such as have not wholly shook off all modesty, dread the very sight of a man whom they have much presumed upon: and though they fear no punishment from him, yet they find those rejolts from humanity, that deject their countenance, and make them sneak, and fly the presence of an affronted person.

Which being so, has not every presumptuous sinner reason thus to school and upbraid himself: Shall I fear to deal thus and thus with a man, a sinful man like myself; a worm, a piece of living dirt; one whose breath and life are in his nostrils? and shall I venture to pass the same and greater affronts upon the omnipotent Creator of the world, that can crush me to nothing, that can frown me into hell, and even look me into endless destruction? Shall I fear an anger that lasts but a moment, and can do but little while it lasts; an anger that is but as the spleen of a wasp, a short fester, and huff of passion: and shall I provoke such a displeasure as the very angels tremble at; a displeasure that for its duration is eternal, and for its weight intolerable?

Men see and converse with that every day, in the ordinary passages of common life, that might invincibly argue them into a better behaviour towards their Maker. Could we but treat God as a king, as a magistrate, or a master, of all sins those of presumption would be the fewest. For in the courts of men people seldom expect to be pardoned the second time. But as for God, his mercy, they say, is infinite; and therefore they resolve that their rebel lions shall be so too, since there is no exhausting, no coming to the bottom of an infinite: and thus they presume to be pardoned so often, that in the issue they fall short of being pardoned once.

And thus much for the third and last branch of the first general head; which was, to prescribe remedies against sins of presumption.

II. I proceed now to the other general head proposed at first for the handling of the words; which is, to shew the reason of this holy and excellent person’s, the Psalmist’s, so earnest praying against these sins.

I suppose the prosecution of the first head, which was to declare to us what presumptuous sins were, might be argument enough to declare to us the second also, in shewing the cause why the Psalmist so fervently prays against them. He prays against them, as against so many pests, so many direful causes of God’s wrath, so many devourers of souls; and every prayer made against such things carries its reason too visibly writ upon it to be long inquired after.

But yet, for a more full and explicit discussion of the point in hand, I shall endeavour to give some more particular account of the reasons inducing this holy person with so much zeal to engage his prayers against presumptuous sins. And I conceive the principal of them may be brought under these two heads.

1. The danger of falling into these sins.

2. The sad consequences of them, if fallen into.

And first for the danger of falling into them; this appears in several respects.

1. In respect of the nature of man, which is generally apt to be confident, and to measure its belief by its desires; still presaging the best, flattering itself, and building broad superstructures upon narrow foundations. Few men feel their conditions so bad, but they find room for hope: and that which is hope in some cases, will rise into arrogance and presumption in others.

Most men are of a debonair, sanguine, jolly disposition, which never fails to supply those builders with materials, who are apt to rear castles in the air: so that we may well avouch, that where despair has slain its thousands, presumption has slain its ten thousands.

For despair seldom breeds but in the melancholy temper, that inclines men to be thoughtful and suspicious, or in such breasts as have been forced into a preternatural melancholy by conversing with unskilful spiritual guides, of an indiscreet severity, and pinning their faith upon ill-managed discourses about predestination. But these are but a very small portion of mankind, in comparison of the other: these go in handfuls, the other in herds, thronging into the broad way, where mirth and confidence carry them, hop ping and laughing into perdition. Let this therefore be the first reason of the danger of men’s falling into presumptuous sins.

2. The second reason is from the object of presumption, God’s mercy: which though I shew was limited, and not as boundless and absurd as some men’s imaginations; yet there is no doubt but, according to the present economy of God’s actings, the exercise of it is of much more latitude and extent than the exercise of his justice. The time of this life is a time of mercy, and God delights to make the experiments of it splendid and illustrious.

Hereupon presumption strikes in, and advances it into endless and irrational; and uses it not only as an argument for repenting of past sins, (the sole proper use of it,) but as an antecedent inducement to warrant sin for the future. The largeness of mercy has made it apt to be abused by the corruption of man’s heart, which is ready to suck poison out of the fairest flowers of God’s garden; and to make the most amiable of his attributes serve the interest of its vilest affections.

Let both law and gospel denounce death against the commission of such or such a sin; and presumption shall interpose, and tell the sinner in the Devil’s own words, Thou shalt not surely die; and then mercy shall be alleged for a proof of this assertion: that shall be brought for an encouragement, that God intended only for a cure of sin.

3. Thirdly and lastly. A third reason of the danger of falling into presumptuous sins is from the tempter, who chiefly busies and concerns himself to engage men in this kind of sin. It is said of David, concerning his sin in numbering the people, which put the sword in the hand of the destroying angel, to give his whole kingdom such a blow, that Satan stood up and provoked David to number Israel, 1 Chron. xxi. 1. And of Judas it is most particularly remarked, in Luke xxii. 3, that Satan entered into Judas; and so by a kind of immediate possession acted him to the betraying of his master. And for Ananias who prevaricated about the price of his lands, and so endeavoured, as it were, to put a trick upon the Spirit of God, the apostle Peter tells him, in Acts v. 3, that it was Satan that filled his heart to lie to the Holy Ghost. Nay, and in that notable temptation in which he accosted our Saviour himself, the sin he drove at was a high presumption, namely, that Christ should cast himself headlong from a pinnacle of the temple; because God had charged his angels to keep him in all his ways; that is, that he should presume to promise himself the divine protection in an action wholly uncommanded, and consequently unwarranted, because God had engaged to secure and guard him in the commanded instances of duty and obedience.

It is clear therefore, that the Devil lays a more than ordinary stress upon this; and if so, he will be sure to employ all his engines to push his design forward; for he knows that one great sin does his work compendiously, and destroys at a blow. He knows also, that his design, like a twoedged sword, may chance to cut both ways. For first he will make a man presume to commit a sin, and then, if possible, he will make him despair for having committed it. Wherefore, if all the arts and stratagems of our mortal enemy can endanger us, we are in danger of being entangled in this sin; this fatal, destructive sin, which is the very masterpiece of the Devil, and the gate of hell; and consequently have cause, with bended knees and bowed hearts, night and day to invoke the almighty assistances of Heaven for our rescue from that sin; in the commission of which every man so really proves the murderer of his own soul.

And thus much for the first reason of David’s so earnest praying against presumptuous sins, namely, the danger of falling into them; as also the several causes from whence that danger does arise.

I proceed now to the other reason, which is, the sad consequences of these sins, if once fallen into: amongst which we may reckon these that follow.

1. This kind of sin is marvellously apt to grow and prevail upon him that gives way to it; which ill consequence of it is deservedly mentioned by me, in the first place, it being that great and only one that David mentions instead of all the rest; Keep, says he, thy servant from presumptuous sins, lest they get the dominion over me. Every presumption is properly an encroachment, and all encroachment carries in it still a further and a further invasion upon the person encroached upon. It enters into the soul as a gangrene does into the body, which spreads as well as infects, and, with a running progress, carries a venom and a contagion over all the members. Presumption never stops in its first attempt. If Caesar comes once to pass Rubicon, he will be sure to march further on, even till he enters the very bowels of Rome, and break open the capitol itself. He that wades so far as to wet and foul himself, cares not how much he trashes further.

When the tenderness of the soul is lost, and its first awe of God and religion broke by a bold sin, it grows venturous, and ready to throw itself upon all sorts of outrages and enormities. It does not demur and tremble as it used to do, when any thing gross and foul was proposed to it; but it closes with it readily, and steps undauntedly into that stream that is like to carry it away, and swallow it up for ever.

This growing, encroaching mischief perhaps first fastens but upon the thoughts, and they take the liberty to settle upon some unlawful, base thing, like flies upon a carcass; from these it advances a step further, and seizes the desires, which presently are carried out with a restless eagerness after the same vile object; and these at length meet with some friendly opportunity, by the help of which they break forth into actual commission; which actual commission grows from one into many, and comes to be frequent and repeated, till it settles into a custom, and fixes itself immoveably and for ever in a man’s behaviour.

This is the nature and quality of presumption; much like what our Saviour says of the mustard seed, which at first is the least of all seeds, but being grown up is greater than all herbs, so that the birds of the air lodge in the branches of it. In like manner presumption first sows itself in a thought, the least of all sins for the matter of it; but from thence shooting up into a custom and an habitual practice, it grows mighty and wide, opens its arms, and spreads out its branches for every unclean bird, every sinful action and abomination to come and lodge and rest upon.

No man can assign the limits, the ne plus ultra of presumption, where it will stay, and with what pitch of villainy it will be contented: it is as unruly as power, as boundless as rebellion; and therefore, he that would preserve his conscience, and the peace of it, has cause to keep a perpetual guard upon his heart, to stave it off from a first admission.

2. The second ill consequence of presumptuous sins is, that of all others they prove the most difficult in their cure, forasmuch as they take away that which is the proper disposition to it, tenderness of conscience; leaving the heart fixed and hardened, and not easily capable of any healing impression. It is impossible for any man to be brought off from sin, but by the sense and feeling of sin: which sense, every presumption does by degrees weaken and dull, and in the issue utterly extinguish.

For I shew before, that the proper effect of such sins w^as custom in sinning; and with what difficulty that is removed we are told in Jeremiah xiii. 23. Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil. The Ethiopian’s blackness and the leopard’s spots are natural to them; and there is no washing away nature, no purging off the essential properties of things; and therefore this is mentioned as a difficulty but one remove from an impossibility.

Custom and frequency in sin breeds a familiarity with it that produces an affection to it, and ends in a resolved continuance in it. And as it is said by the apostle upon another occasion, that perfect lone casts out fear; so, where custom has fastened a man’s love upon sin, the awe and the dread of it vanishes; and the sinner can break a precept under the very eye of sin-revenging justice, without trembling; without feeling any inward wound or blow upon his heart: which is a frame of spirit, leaving a man not far from a reprobate mind and a seared conscience; a disease that laughs at all the applications of the spiritual physician; Jerem. li. 9, We would have healed Babylon, but she is not healed. And the truth is, he who comes recovered out of a course of presumptuous sinning, has plucked his foot out of a mortal snare, a deliverance never vouchsafed but to the favourites of mercy, supplying the defect and weakness of the means by an invincible grace. And we may say of such an one very properly, as of a man rising from a swoon, and the very neighbourhoods of death, that he is come to himself.

3. As sins of presumption are more difficultly cured, so they waste the conscience infinitely more than any other sins. As really as blows and wounds and bruises weaken the body, and by degrees dispose it to its final dissolution; so certainly do some sins shake, and batter, and tear down the constitution of the soul. Guilt upon the conscience, like rust upon iron, both defiles and consumes it, by degrees gnawing and creeping into it; as that does, till at length it has eat out the very heart and substance of the metal. The inward as well as the outward man has his proper health, strength, and soundness naturally belonging to him; and in proportion, has also his diseases and distemper, arising from an irregular course of living. And every act of presumption is to him as a spiritual debauch or surfeit: things that bring a present disorder, and entail a future decay upon nature.

David was a sufficient example of this, who complained in Psalm xxxviii. that there was neither soundness in his flesh, nor rest in his bones, by reason of his sin: and that his wounds even festered and grew noisome because of his foolishness, so that he became as a man in whom there was no strength. He lost that vigorous, athletic habit of soul, which before made him eminent and mighty in the ways of God; and now he began to droop and languish like a man that had drank a poisonous draught, that ever after wasted and consumed his spirits; so that in Psalm xxxix. and the last verse, he prays to God to spare him a little, that he might recover strength, before he went hence, and was seen no more. He that would see what desperate stabs and gashes the guilt of presumptuous sinning gives the conscience, should do well to acquaint himself with the case of David, as he himself (dolefully enough) expresses it all along in his Psalms; and if that does not warn him of his danger, he is like to learn it too late by the woful instructions of smart and experience.

4. Fourthly and lastly. These sins have been always followed by God with greater and fiercer judgments than any others; and for this also we need go no further than David for an eminent in stance and demonstration: for after those two horrid sins committed by him, did not God raise up a rebel against him, not only out of his own house, but also out of his own loins? one that defied him both in the relation of a father and of a king, that trampled upon his authority, and abused his wives in the face of all Israel? Did not God also punish his adultery with an infamous lewd action in his family? his son committing incest with his own sis ter: and moreover the sword was never to depart from his house. To all which may be added the ignominy, the scoffs and reproaches that were in whole volleys discharged at him from all sides: hard usage for majesty and sovereignty to be treated with: yet by all this, God was pleased to give him some taste of the poison of his presumptions.

And to proceed to other instances: Did not the villainy and lewdness of a few Benjamites, set and resolved upon their sin against all admonition, almost consume and reap down an whole tribe? Did not the violence and uncleanness of Hophni and Phinehas, bring a disaster and a defeat upon the armies of Israel? and withal perpetuate an hideous destructive curse upon their father’s house? Did not the apostasy and ingratitude of Solomon against that God that made him shine like a star of the first magnitude amongst all the neighbouring princes, rend away ten tribes from his son at once?

But above all, take that notable instance of Manasses, whose sins indeed were of that high strain, that they seemed to surpass all those of the kings of Israel and Judah, that were either before or after him; yet, notwithstanding this, both he himself proved a penitent and a convert at the last; and as for his son and successor Josiah, he was as eminently transcendent for his piety, as his father had been for his sin; and extended a reformation every way as large and wide as the former’s corruption. So that one would have imagined that he had cleansed the land, and even atoned his father’s abominations: whereupon the Spirit of God gives him this bright and glorious character; 2 Kings xxiii. 25, 26, That like unto Josiah there was no king before him that turned to the Lord with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses, neither afterwards arose any like unto him. And now what follows after all this? Why in the next verse, Notwithstanding this, the Lord turned not from the fierceness of his great wrath, wherewith his anger was kindled against Judah, because of all the provocations that Manasses had provoked him withal. Josiah’s goodness could not expiate Manasses sin. The son’s penitential tears could not wash away the father’s guilt.

And now for the sinner that we have been hitherto discoursing of; if all the former considerations will not move him, yet let him at least arrest his presumption with this last. Perhaps the growing, contagious nature of his sin moves him not; the difficult cure of it, peradventure, prevails upon him as little; and it is like, that its aptness to waste, and harden, and debauch the conscience may make but small impression upon him; yet shall not the effects of it, the confusion, the disaster, and the curse that it is big with, the curse that will descend like rottenness into his bones, and strike like a dart through his liver; shall not all this terrify him into caution and prayer, into reformation and amendment?

It is the concernment of God’s justice and his honour, to meet and confound an audacious sinner in his course with some remarkable instance of his vengeance. It is a clearing of his Providence to the rational world. Men surely have cause to pray against the commission of that sin, which, if once committed, may leave a guilt that no repentance can so wipe off as to discharge the sinner wholly from all punishment in this world. God, upon the intercession of Moses, was reconciled to the Israelites after their making of the golden calf; yet the pardon was mingled with a bitter allay; Exod. xxxii. 34, Nevertheless, saith God, in the day when I visit I will visit their sin upon them. And it was an usual saying of the Jewish rabbies, that there was no affliction or judgment that ever befell the children of Israel but had an ounce of the golden calf in it.

And no sinner can assure himself but that, after all his prayers, and tears, and humiliations, nay, and what is more, his reconcilement with God, as to his eternal estate, yet, as to his temporal, the anger of the same God may, for the guilt of some gross, presumptuous sin, stick in his skirts, and never cease to pursue and dog him to his grave, sealing his offence with that dreadful sentence in Isaiah xxii. 14, Surely this iniquity shall not be purged from you till you die. Which sentence as every presumption will deserve, so it is only in his power that pronounces it to prevent.

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

SERMON XIII.

PSALM cxxxix. 3.

Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.

IN this Psalm David endeavours to possess himself with an holy admiration of the excellency of God’s knowledge, which is one of those divine perfections which we call attributes; all of which, though they are so many expressions of God condescending to our capacities, yet they are so exceeding glorious in themselves, that when we study to search them out, we must needs conclude, that they are objects much fitter for our admiration than our understanding. And one of the greatest of these is that which we are now about, to wit, God’s knowledge.

It is such a knowledge as sees and comprehends all things, but is comprehended by none; and the best of human knowledge is so far from equalling of it, that it is its greatest perfection to be able to express it. But when we have said all concerning it that we can, when we have spent our inventions and our words, we must set down and confess with David, that such knowledge is too wonderful for us; since our highest and most devout expressions of God rather testify our reverential desires of honouring him, than at all express his nature. Now the knowledge of God is chiefly wonderful, in respect of the extent and latitude of its object, as it takes in all things knowable. But here the prophet considers it in a more restrained sense, as it is conversant about the secret and hidden things of man, and in this respect it is admirable. It was no small testimony of the divinity of our Saviour’s knowledge, that he knew what was in man, and needed not that any one should tell him, John ii. 25. Certainly none can find out those many windings and turnings, those strange intricacies of the mind, but the great artificer that framed them. From the 1st verse to the 17th we have many rare, full, and elegant expressions setting forth God’s accurate discernment of the most hidden contrivances of men; who, by one cast of his eye, looks through the whole scene of our lives. Whether rising up or lying down; waking or discoursing; thinking, yea, before we think; yet unborn and enclosed in the womb, he clearly sees and beholds us. The words that I have read unto you seem to be a metaphor, taken from soldiers surrounding the ways with an ambush, or placing scouts and spies in every corner, to discover the enemy in his march: thou compassest my path; thou hast, as it were, thy spies over me, wheresoever I go. By path is meant the outward actions and carriage of his ordinary conversation. By lying down is signified to us the private and close actions of his life; such as were attended only by darkness and solitude. In the 36th Psalm, verse 4, it is said of the wicked, that he deviseth mischief upon his bed, to denote, not only his perverse diligence, but also his secrecy in it: and God is said to hide his children in the secret of his pavilion. So that these places of rest and lying down are designed for secrecy and withdrawing. When a man retires into his chamber, he does, in a manner, for a while, shut himself out of the world. And that this is the fine sense of that expression of lying down, appears from the next words, Thou art acquainted with all my ways; where he collects in one word, what he had before said in two; or it may come in by way of inference and deduction from the former. As if he should say, Thou knowest what I do in my ordinary converse with men, and also how I behave myself when I am retired from them; therefore thou knowest all my actions, since a man’s actions may be reduced either to his public or private deportment. By the other expression of my ways is here meant the total of a man’s behaviour before God, whether in thoughts, words, or deeds, as is manifest by comparing this with other verses. In the 2d verse it is said, Thou understandest my thought afar off; and in the 4th verse it is said, There is not a word in my mouth, but thou knowest it altogether. And thus we see, that it was David’s scope to shew, that the most dark counsels of men are exposed to God’s view, and this he does by a distinct enumeration of all the particulars: Thou knowest my down-sitting and my uprising; thou understandest my thoughts; thou compassest my path and my lying down; there is not a word in my mouth, but thou knowest it; thou hast beset me before and behind; thou coverest me in my mother’s womb, and seest my substance being yet imperfect. He might have comprised all this in short, as in some such like expression; Lord, there is nothing in the life of man so concealed, but it is open and manifest to thy discernment. But he chose rather to dilate himself; because a distinct and particular mention of each several passage shews not only God’s bare knowledge, but also his observance of these things. From hence therefore I shall gather this doctrinal observation, viz.

That God knows and takes strict and accurate notice of the most secret and retired passages of a man’s life.

In the prosecution of this doctrine I shall only prove it by some reasons, and afterwards make application, which I chiefly intend.

The reasons shall be of two sorts.

I. Such as prove that it is so, that God knows the most secret passages of our lives.

II. Such as shew whence it is, that he takes such notice of them.

The first reason proving that God does observe the secret passages of man’s life is, because he rules and governs them. Government is such a thing, as requires the highest and most perfect endowments of knowledge: the very wheel and hinge even of human government is intelligence. Can a man deprived of his sight manage a chariot through by and dark ways with a steady hand? Can God that carries the rule of all things in so constant and fixed a course, and yet not observe those things? Certainly he could not govern the world by his power, unless he governed his power by his knowledge. In Ezek. i. 18, God’s providence in the administration of all things here below is expressed by a wheel full of eyes, to signify God’s quicksighted knowledge in his government, and to express also, that those eyes were always in motion.

The Spirit of God attributes the like knowledge to Christ in his providential ruling the church; Zech. iii. 9, Upon one stone shall be seven eyes. By the stone is here meant Christ, to whom is ascribed perfect knowledge; by eyes is signified knowledge, and the number denotes perfection. Now there are three ways by which God governs the most secret projects of man, to all of which there is required a distinct knowledge.

1. He governs them by discovering of them. Now how is it possible for any one to make that known to another which he does not know himself. God prudently overrules most plots by a seasonable revealment of them, as the sun may be said to rule the day, as it is in Gen. i. 16, because of his universal sight, by which he discovers all things. In Matt. ii. 13, God disappointed Herod’s design of killing Christ, by making it known to Joseph: and God made ineffectual the treacherous intentions of the men of Keilah, in delivering David to Saul, 1 Sam. xxiii. 12, by discovering to David what they intended against him: wherefore it must needs follow, that since God makes hidden things open to men, they must of necessity be much more open and manifest to himself.

2. He governs the most secret intentions by preventing of them. For assuredly, if God should permit all the sin that men conceive in their thoughts to break forth into action, the world would not be able to continue, by reason of the overflowing sinfulness of men. God does therefore prevent and hinder it, and as it were stifles it in the very birth. Now to be able to prevent an evil, argues a clear knowledge of its approach. How many secret villainies, thought of and intended, and even ready for execution, have been turned aside, by God’s interposing providence! In Gen. xx. 6, God says of Abimelech, that he withheld him from sinning against him, and suffered him not to touch Sarah. Adultery, in all likelihood, would have followed, had not God stepped in between the intentions and commission of it; and does not this argue God to be a strict discerner of our most private actions? Wisely to prevent, is an act of the highest prudence and experience: that watchman must have his eyes open, that discerns an enemy coining while he is yet afar off.

3. God governs the secret designs of men, by directing them to other ends than for which they were intended. Man may resolve, but God often secretly blows upon his counsels, and scatters all his resolutions. In vain do the Syrians take counsel to invade Judah, when God says, in Isaiah vii. 7, It shall not stand, neither shall it come to pass. If God can turn the designs of men which way soever he pleases, he cannot but also see and observe them. To be able to divert a river in the midst of its most violent course from its native channel, shews more than ordinary skill. When a sinner in the full career of his intentions is rushing into sin, like a horse into the battle, then for God to wind him to his own purposes, it shews him to be of an infinite wisdom, and withal to have his eye continually fixed upon that man’s ways. How privately did Joseph’s brethren carry on their plot against him, with an evil and malicious intent; yet God observes their treachery; and what they intended for his misery, God turns to be a miraculous means of their own preservation, Gen. xlv. 5. And thus did Judas plot in secret with the rulers of the Jews to betray his Master; God sees his design, and withal orders the most cursed intention that ever was, to the best and most glorious end: most excellent therefore must the knowledge of God be, that describes the most hidden, sinful actions of men, so as to manage them contrary to their natural tendency: the sinner shoots the arrow, but God takes the aim, and directs it to his own marks. Let a man sin as secretly as he can, yet he shall not be able to avoid God’s knowledge, nor to contradict his will, I mean his efficacious and hidden will; which, by a secret influence, controls all actions, even the most wicked, to the glory of God. From hence we may be assured, that God is both privy to and observant of our most concealed iniquities, since he is able to see further into them, than the sinner himself that commits them. And thus much concerning the first reason, proving that God observes the most secret passages of our lives, because he governs them, and that both by discovering, by preventing, and by directing them to his own ends.

The second reason proving the same is, because he gives laws to regulate the most secret passages of our lives, and therefore he must needs know and observe them. It is absurd for any governor to impose laws upon men in respect of those actions which cannot come under his knowledge. Hereupon all human laws tend only to the regulation of the outward man, and proceeds no further. But God extends his law to the most secret behaviour of men, even to the thoughts. Hence our Saviour interprets the lust of the heart, and the first motions thereof to uncleanness, to be adultery, Matt. v. 28. Hence also the word, or law, of God, is said, in Heb. iv. 12, to be quick and powerful, and a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. And in Heb. iii. 12, the Spirit of God commands them not to entertain an evil heart of unbelief, nor so much as in their desires to depart from the living God. If God took no notice of secret unbelief, if he did not know or regard all the private excursions of the mind to sin, it were vain and fruitless to limit them by a law. But since he has set a law even to these also, since he does not only restrain our secret actions, but even our thoughts and desires, we may very well collect that all these are in his view, that he evidently beholds and searches them out, and that his knowledge is not shorter than his commands.

The third reason is, because he will judge the most secret passages of our lives, therefore they are manifest to him. Knowledge is so requisite to judgment, that our earthly judges cannot judge rightly in matters that they do not know: hence Job, to shew how uprightly he judged, said, that he searched out the cause that he knew not, Job xxix. 16, implying that it was impossible for him other wise to award a righteous sentence. Justice indeed is pictured blind, not because it is to be without the eye of knowledge, but the eye of partiality. Now shall not God, that is the judge of ah 1 the earth, do right? Shall he condemn and punish men for such sins as he knows not whether they have committed or not? Certain it is, that he judges men for secret sin; therefore it is also certain that he knows them. In Eccles. xi. 9, Solomon says of the voluptuous man, that for the ways of his heart, which are his secret and his hidden ways, God will bring him to judgment; and in Eccles. xii. 14 it is said, that God shall bring every work into judgment with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil; and no wonder, since there is not so much as the least rising of the heart to sin but he views it; no circumstance so inconsiderable to our apprehensions, but he ponders it: he does, as it were, severely winnow every action, and discerns that which is good in it, from that which is vile and sinful. Now there are two seasons wherein God will judge men for their secret sins. First, in this life, wherein he often gives sinners a foretaste of what he intends to do in the future: and though he does reserve the whole weight of his judgment till after death, yet he frequently dispenses some strokes of it by way of earnest before. Because not only men’s desires, but also their belief, is chiefly satisfied by things present; wherefore God sometimes follows secret sins with present judgment. When Moses declared the law of God to Israel, and withal denounced punishments to the disobedient, he applies himself especially to those that were guilty of secret disobedience; and lest they should rid themselves of the fear of those punishments, by looking upon them as future and remote, he shews how dreadfully God intends to deal with such sinners even in this life: Deut. xxix. 18-21. Here we see sin was very secret, shut up in the private reasonings and debates of the mind; but God fetches the sinner out, and purges him, with present temporal judgment; for, as it appears from the foregoing chapter, the curses here mentioned were chiefly such as touched men in their life, their estate, and outward relations. Such is the irrational atheism of most men, that although they have no thought, and consequently no fears, of hell, yet they accordingly dread temporal affliction. Like a child, that does not so much fear the loss of his life, as the loss of his apple. Let such men know, that it is very probable that by their secret sins they may bring down the curse of God upon themselves in this world; and although their hell be completed hereafter, they may begin it here. Whence is it that some men are so strangely blasted in their parts and preferment, but from some hidden sin, that rots and destroys all: whence is it that many large estates do undiscernedly shrivel away and come to nothing, but perhaps from the guilt of some secret extortion, perjury, or the like, that lies fretting and eating out the very bowels of them. I do not speak this universally, nor affirm that this is always the cause of these miseries, but it is to be feared that it is very often so.

2. The second season wherein God judges the secret passages of our sins is at the day of judgment. In respect of which our Saviour says, that there is nothing hid but shall be made manifest, Luke xii. 2. A thief or a murderer may carry on his villainy undisclosed for many years, but the day of his trial will discover all: in Daniel vii. 10, it is said, the judgment was set, and the books were opened. By the books is meant the knowledge of God, in which all things are kept as durably and distinctly as if they were registered in a book. Then God will open this book of his knowledge, and read all those hidden passages that are writ in it in the audience of all the world. And this is one reason why he permits so many heinous impieties to be concealed here on earth, because he intends to dignify that day with the revealment of them.

And thus much concerning the first sort of reasons, which prove that it is so, that God knows and observes the secret passages of our lives. I proceed now to the second sort of reasons, that prove whence it is that God thus knows them. Now these proofs are very different: for the first proves, that God knows these things by way of connection, that is, by those acts of God which are always enjoined with knowledge, as his governing, giving laws, and judging: but now these latter reasons prove, that he observes all hidden things from that which is the cause of such observations.

1. And the first reason shall be drawn from God’s omniscience, or his power of knowing all things: from whence it follows, that nothing can be hid from him; and this is that light which no man can keep off, any more than he can in the opening hinder the day from shining upon him; it is a light shining in every dark place: as it has no obscurity itself, so it permits nothing else to lie obscure: and that it is universal and infinite, appears from this, because otherwise it would not bear a full proportion to the rest of God’s perfections. Now in respect of this, it is said in Prov. xv. 3, The eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good: and in 2 Chron. xvi. 9, The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth: and in Job xxviii. 24, it is said of God, that he looketh to the ends of the earth, and seeth under the whole heavens. How vain therefore is the thought of these men that attempt sin upon confidence of privacy, that do, as it were, dig deep to hide their counsel from the Lord. O that such would but read and consider that text in Heb. iv. 13, All things are naked and open before the eyes of him with whom we have to do. Now to behold a thing as naked, implies the greatest evidence and discovery. It is also said, that secret things belong unto the Lord, Deut. xxix. 29; which, as also the forementioned places, are only so many expressions of God’s infinitely comprehensive knowledge: from hence therefore we may clearly deduce what we do intend. If the perfection of God’s nature engages him to know all things, he must also actually know all things; and if he actually discerns all things, he must also discern all secret things; and if he is acquainted with all secrets, he must also behold and observe the secret passages of our lives, which of all other secret things are the most considerable.

2. The second reason may be drawn from God’s intimate presence to the nature and being of all things, from whence is also inferred his knowledge of them: for since there is no real distinction between the being and knowledge of God, but only in the manner of our conceptions, it follows, that where he is present in respect of his being, he must be also present in respect of his knowledge. But now the being of God is diffused through the whole and every part of the universe, as the soul insinuates itself into all the members of the body: not that God is thus present to all the world by way of identity with it, (as some profane philosophers have affirmed, who, in a literal sense, may be said to have known no God but the world;) but he is present with it by way of nearness and inward proximity to it. Without which, the creature could not derive continual influence from him for the upholding of its being, but must of necessity fall back into its first nothing. From this universal presence of God the scripture often proves the universality of his knowledge: in the twenty-third of Jeremiah, ver. 24, God thus argues himself, Can any hide himself in secret places that I should not see him? saith the Lord. Why? whence is it so impossible to avoid God’s sight? That which follows proves it; Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the Lord. God’s filling heaven and earth, that is, his being present everywhere, proves also, that there can be no place hidden from him, but that he like wise sees everywhere. David also, in this hundred and thirty-ninth Psalm, where the text is, proves God’s infinite discernment of all things by the same argument. He had said, that God compassed his paths, and knows all his ways: but what was the reason that convinced him of this? He sets it down in the seventh and eighth verses, Whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. He that always stands by us must needs see and observe what we do: wherefore, if the sinner would act his sin out of God’s knowledge, let him first endeavour to go out of his presence; which he is no more able to do, than to go out of his own being. And thus much concerning the reasons proving the point; I now proceed to application.

If it is thus certain that God takes strict notice of the most secret passages of our lives, both because he overrules them, and prescribes laws to them, and judges them; and also because that his omniscience and omnipotence, then, in the first place, it may afford, [Sic in ed. 1744.]

1. A use of conviction, to convince all presumptuous sinners of the atheism of their hearts. I know the proof of this point, that God sees in secret, may seem to have been superfluous; since the general vogue of the world is ready, not only to meet, but even to prevent us in their acknowledgment of God’s all-seeing eye: but if we look through men’s professions, and trace their lives, we shall find that they do not really believe any such thing. For were we fully convinced that the just God, that declares himself a most certain punisher of sin, did also most certainly know sin, we should not dare to commit it presumptuously before him. Experience, the strong est argument, shews us the contrary in the ordinary passages of our lives. A very child will forbear to offend not only before his father, but before such an one from whom his father may come to know it. The reason is, because all persuasions, if real, do naturally engage a man to actions suitable to those persuasions. As for example, had you a thorough persuasion upon your heart that God saw you when you were attempting any vile sin, the very thought of this would beget such a reverence and a dread upon your spirits, as you could not venture to commit, if to gain a world: for we see such thoughts cast an awe upon us, even in our deportment before men. Hence the fool, that is, the wicked man, is said to say in his heart, that there is no God, because he does act in his life as if he thought there was none. In like manner the presuming sinner may be said to deny that God sees and observes all his actions, be cause he behaves himself so, as if he were really persuaded that God did not observe them: therefore, whosoever thou art that art a presumptuous offender, setting aside all thy spurious words, when thou dost resolve upon any sin, thou dost either believe that God sees thee, or that he does not. To believe he does not, is to deny him to be God: to believe he sees thee, and yet to commit the sin, is to affront him to his face, to bid open defiance to him, and to cast that unwisely contempt upon him, that the most audacious and impudent offender dares not offer to his earthly magistrate: wherefore, if from thy heart thou dost acknowledge God’s all-seeing eye, cease from sin; otherwise, to any reasonable judgment thou dost really deny it, and in spite of all thy fair speeches art truly an atheist. For deeds always over balance words, and downright practice speaks the mind more plainly than the fairest profession.

Second use. It speaks terror to all secret sinners: God sees and observes them in all their secrecies; he spies out all their private haunts and their sly recourses to their beloved sin. Let such men consider how unwilling they would be that men should know of their concealed villainies, of what they act by themselves: surely they would rather forfeit their lives, and all that was near unto them, than their secret sins should be divulged; and then let them know that God sees them, and that it was better that they were known to all the world that they so fear, than to him. For he sees more filth in them, than one of the most discerning and carping judgment can find in the faults of his adversary; and he does more detest them, than the most holy and up right man can do the most grossest and notorious sin. Let them also consider, that the greatest ground of all their sins, which is secrecy, is by God’s all-seeing eye taken away. For assuredly the confidence of concealment is the greatest inducement for an hypocrite to commit the vilest sins. Psalm lxiv. 5, They encourage themselves in an evil matter: they say, Who shall see them? And thus confidence of secrecy gave them confidence in sin. But certainly it is an ill argument, because sinners do not see God, to conclude therefore, that God does not see them; like the foolish bird hiding his head in a hole, thinks himself secure from the view of the fowler, because the fowler is not in his view. O how miserably are such sinners deceived in the vain prop of a false confidence! in Psalm xc. 8, Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance. As God lifts up the light of his countenance upon the godly, to refresh and comfort them, so he does also upon secret sinners, to discover and to amaze them. It is said of the secret adulterers, in Job xxiv. 16, 17, They know not the light: for the morning is to them as the shadow of death. How then will they bear the light of God’s countenance, which will cast the shadow of death in their faces in a much more dreadful manner? In the same verse it is said, If one know them, they are in the terrors of the shadow of death: but the all-seeing God knows them: O the fear, the shame, and confusion that is in the mind of a discovered sinner! And let such an unclean person know, that he had better act his impurity in the sight of his reverend parents, and of a severe magistrate, than under the observing eye of a just and holy God, before whom secret sins are not secret, but open and revealed. Yet such as are secret to men we may rank into two sorts, both of which God perfectly knows.

1. Such as are wholly transacted in the mind, without the service and ministration of the body; and these are the sins of our thoughts and desires, which are locked up from the knowledge of men or angels. No court of human judicature pretends to judge or punish the thoughts and intentions: they are in a peculiar manner reserved for the jurisdiction of the court of Heaven, which alone is able to examine and find them out. Now there is no act of man so quick as his thoughts; which in this resembles the angelical nature, that they are swift and invisible. Let the gross acting sinner act as fast as he can, yet the thinking sinner will have the start and advantage of him, and sin an hundred thoughts before he shall perform one sinful action. O the infinite multitudes of impure thoughts in a polluted mind, like swarms of flies upon a carcass, continually sucking and drawing in corruption. Now God has a more than ordinary respect to men’s thoughts; hence God cries out of his people, Jer. iv. 4, How long shall vain thoughts lodge within thee? The greatest wickedness, and that which is the most odious to God, is the wickedness of the heart; and this consists in pollution of the thoughts and desires. Nay, God does so much hate the sinfulness of these, that sometimes he expresses the whole work of conversion by the renovation and change of the thoughts: in Isaiah Iv. 7, Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him. But was it God’s intention only to restrain these, and in the mean time to give him liberty in his sinful actions? No: but the forsaking of one implies the leaving of the other, as the greater duty includes the less. He that will not so much as indulge himself in an evil thought, will much less venture upon the gross commission of sin. Now God often times judges of the state and condition of a man from the purity or impurity of his thoughts; and that upon these reasons.

SERMON XIV.

ECCLESIASTES vii. 10.

Say not thou. What Is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not inquire wisely concerning this.

IN the days of Solomon, when Jerusalem was the glory of the whole earth; when it flourished as the metropolis, not only of religion, but of the riches of the world; when gold was made as common as silver, and silver as the stones of the street, (so that its in habitants might even tread and trample upon that which so much commanded the hearts of others;) when their exchequer was full, and their fleets at Ophir; when religion was established, and the changing, ambulatory tabernacle fixed into a standing temple, and all crowned with a peace under Solomon after the afflictions and wars of David; when they flowed with plenty, and were governed with wisdom; yet, after all, the text here gives us a clear intimation, that plenty passed into surfeit, fulness into loathing, loathing into discontent, and that (as it always happens) into complaints of the times, viz. that former days were better than these.

When yet, upon a small reflection backward, we have the calendar of the former times red with the bloody house of Saul, with the slaughter of the priests, and with the rebellions of Sheba and Absalom; nothing but tumults, changes, and vicissitudes; and yet, in the verdict of folly and faction, present enjoyments did so far endear former calamities, as to give them the preeminence in the comparison.

But we see there may be folly even in Israel; and, if they were all of this mind, Solomon may justly seem to have monopolized all the wisdom to himself. We have him here chastising the sottishness of this inquiry: indeed the fittest person to encounter this exception, as being a king, and so able to control; being a preacher, and so able to confute it; furnished with power for the one, and with wisdom for the other.

This is therefore the design of the words, either to satisfy or silence this malecontented inquiry: and supposing it to carry in it its own confutation, he confutes it, not by argument, but reproof; not as a doubtful problem, but as a foolish question: and certainly the case must needs be carried, where the fool makes the question, and the wisest of men gives the answer.

The matter in controversy is the preeminence of the former times above the present; when we must observe, that though the words run in the form of a question, yet they include a positive assertion, and a downright censure.

The inquiry being determined before it was proposed, now the charge of folly here laid upon it may relate to the supposition upon which it is founded in a threefold respect, viz.

I. Of a peremptory negation, as a thing absolutely to be denied, that former times are better than the following.

II. As of a case very disputable, whether they are so or no.

SERMON XV.

A FUNERAL DISCOURSE.

MATTHEW v. 25, 26.

Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him: lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison.

Verily I say unto thee, Thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.

IN these words Christ endeavours to enforce that high and noble duty of an amicable concord and agreement betwixt brethren; the greatest bond of society, and the most becoming ornament of religion: and since it is to be supposed that men’s frailty and passion will sometimes carry them out to a violation and breach of it, and, if not prevented, settle in a fixed and lasting rancour; he prescribes the antidote of a speedy reconcilement, as the only sovereign and certain remedy against the poisonous ferment of so working a distemper. If an injury be once done, Christ will have the repentance almost as early as the provocation; the rupture drawn up as soon as made; the angry word eaten as soon as uttered, and in a manner disowned before it is quite spoke; that so men’s quickness in the one may in some measure answer and compound for their hastiness in the other.

SERMON XVI.

MATTHEW xxiii. 5.

But all their works they do for to be seen of men.

IT is strange to consider the great difference both of the principle and quality of most of those actions that in the world carry the same reputation. Of this we have here a notable instance in a sect of men amongst the Jews called the pharisees; who made as glorious an appearance, and had as high a vogue for piety, as the best. Their righteousness and good works so glistered, that they even dashed the judging faculties of those who judged more by seeing than by weighing: and doubtless they were in shew so exactly good, that no argument from appearance could decide the difference.

And yet, like those trees which are fair and flourishing at the top from the dung that lies at the root, the principle of all these good works was a sinful appetite, an appetite of glory, an ambitious desire; sinful perhaps in itself, but certainly so in its application to such a design. Yet, however sinful it was in the nature of an appetite, we see it was very strong and operative in the nature of a principle; and such an one as wrought men to great heights in the outward and splendid side of religion.

My design at this time is from these words to inquire into the force of this principle in reference to a virtuous and religious life; and to shew how far it is able to engage men in it.

And this I shall do under these four heads.

I. I shall shew that a love of glory is sufficient to produce all those virtuous actions that are visible in the lives of those that profess religion.

II. I shall shew whence this affection comes to have such an influence upon our actions.

III. I shall shew the inability of it to be a sufficient motive to engage mankind in virtuous actions, without the assistance of religion.

IV. I shall shew that even those actions that it does produce are yet of no value at all in the sight of God.

For the first of these, that the love of glory is able to produce all those virtuous actions that are visible in the lives of those that profess religion.

This I prove first from this, that it actually has produced them, and therefore it is able to produce them: for this, let the noblest and most virtuous of the heathens be an instance; whose outward virtues few Christians equal, but none transcend: yet they were acted in all by a thirst of that glory that followed those performances. For into what will you resolve the industry of the philosophers, the chastity of Scipio and Alexander, the liberality of Augustus, the severity of Cato, the integrity of Fabricius, but into a desire of being famous for each of these perfections? See what a round and open profession of this Tully makes in his defence of Archias the poet! We know he had behaved himself with great virtue and resolution in the behalf of his country against Clodius and Catiline; but what induced him? Was it either love of the virtuous action itself, or hopes to gain by it a better place in their Elysium? Nor he nor any of the wiser sort believed any such thing. Juvenal tells you, vix pueri credunt. But what was it then? Why he tells you, that if he had not grown up in persuasion from his youth, that nothing was earnestly to be desired in this life but praise and honour, he would never have exposed himself to those enmities, dangers, and oppositions, that he underwent in the prosecution of his country’s defence.

And after that he had proved that other great men acted upon the same principle; for how came they else to be so fond of poets and historians, the great instruments and propagators of their fame? he then gathers up all into this general conclusion; Nullam virtus aliam mercedem laborum periculorumque desiderat praeter hanc laudis et gloriae: qua quidem detracta, quid est quod in hoc tam exiguo vitae curriculo, et tam brevi, tantis nos in laboribus exerceamus? You see now the springhead from whence streamed all the splendid and renowned moral actions of these persons.

Nay, in persons of a much inferior rank and apprehension, we have the same principle working them to a degree of abstinence equal to the greatest austerities and instances of mortification seen nowadays in persons religious. Those that used to run and wrestle in the public games, what strange abridgments did they suffer both as to the kind and measure of their food! what abstinence from wine and women, and all other luxury, did they constantly tie themselves up to! The apostle Paul gives them this testimony in 1 Cor. ix. 25, Every man that striveth for mastery is temperate in all things: and that with such a strict and rigorous exactness, that many who nowadays profess Christianity, would not deny their appetites half so much to gain a kingdom in this world, or the world to come, as the apostle says those persons did to gain a corruptible crown; that is, some pitiful garland, ready to wither and to be blasted by the breath of those applauses that attended the putting of it on.

But further, that even in those that profess religion, religion is not always the commanding, producing principle of their best actions, the very example of the pharisees will demonstrate. For what almost could be outwardly done, which these men did not do with great advantage, pomp, and solemnity of performance? They were frequent in prayer, they gave alms, they were exact in their tithings even to mint and cummin; they sat in the seat of Moses, and taught sometimes so well, that Christ, in Matt. xxiii. 3, charges his disciples, that whatsoever they bid them, they should observe and do: and for their zeal, they would undertake the expense and toil of compassing sea and land, to gain one proselyte to their religion. In a word, they had gained such a reputation for their piety, that it was a common saying amongst the Jews, “That if but two men in the world should be saved, one of them would be a pharisee.” Now, let any one shew me, where amongst us there is such a face of religion and concernment for it. You will say, perhaps, that the truth and body of it may be among us; but certainly it is a strange thing to see a body without a face, and reality without any shew. There is a difference in deed between the substance and the shadow, yet there is seldom a substance without the shadow. But this by digression.

SERMON XVII.

2 COR. i. 24.

—For by faith ye stand.

THERE can be none here ignorant, that the great evangelical virtue so frequently spoken of, so highly commended, and upon which the whole weight of man’s salvation leans and depends, is faith; a thing more usually discoursed of by divines than explained, and consequently more easily took up by their hearers than understood: there being scarce any who will not with much zeal and vehemence pretend to it, and by all means wear the reputation of the name, though they are wholly strangers to the nature of the thing. For it being the great and glorious badge of the citizens of heaven, the sons of God, and heirs of immortality; it is no wonder if every man has his mouth open to profess and boast of his faith: and those possibly the most loudly of all others, who entertain it only in opposition to good works.

But that I may give some account of the nature of it, I shall observe, that the scripture makes mention of three several sorts of faith.

1. The first is a faith of simple credence, or bare assent; acknowledging and assenting to the historical truth of every thing delivered in God’s word. And such a faith is not here meant; for the devils may have it, who, the apostle St. James tells us, in the 2d chapter, 19th verse, believe and tremble. They own all the word of God for a most certain, undoubted truth; but the devils’ faith is very consistent with the devils’ damnation. He that believes well, may live ill; and a good belief will not save, when a bad life condemns.

2. The second sort is a temporary faith, and (as I may so call it) a faith of conviction. Such an one as by the present convincing force of the word is wrought in the heart, and for a time raises and carries out the soul to some short sallies and attempts in the course of godliness; nevertheless, having no firm fixation in the heart, but being only like the short and sudden issue of a forced ground, it quickly faints and sinks, and comes to nothing, leaving the soul many leagues short of a true and thorough change of its estate.

3. The third and last sort, and which here only is intended, is a saving, effectual faith, wrought in the soul by a sound and real work of conversion. It takes in both the former kinds, and superadds its own peculiar perfection besides. And if it be now asked, what this faith is, I must answer, that it is better declared by its effects and properties, than it can be set forth by any immediate description of the thing itself. However, this seems to be no improper representation of its nature; that it is a durable, fixed disposition of holiness, immediately infused by God into the soul, whereby the soul in all its faculties is changed, renewed, and sanctified, and withal powerfully inclined to exert itself in all the actions of a pious life.

It is not a bare persuasion or conviction resting upon the heart; for persuasion (which is nothing else but the proposal of suitable objects to the mind) is of itself no more able to effect this strange and mighty work, than it is possible to persuade a man that is stark dead to be alive again. No; it is a living, active principle, wonderfully produced and created in the heart by the almighty working of God’s Spirit; and which does as really move and act a man in the course of his spiritual life, as his very soul does in the course of his natural. And this is that faith by which we stand; and if ever we are supported against the terrible assaults of our spiritual adversary, this must be our supporter.

In the words we have these two things considerable.

I. Something supposed; which is, that believers will be encountered and assaulted in their spiritual course.

II. Something expressed; which is, that it is faith alone that in such encounters does or can make them victorious.

I. And first for the first of these, the thing sup posed. The words of the text are a manifest allusion to a person assaulted or combated by an enemy. From which the Spirit of God in scripture frequently borrows metaphors, by which to express to us the condition of a Christian in this world. Sometimes setting it out by wrestling, as in Ephes. vi. 12; We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers. Sometimes by warring, as in 2 Cor. x. 4; The weapons of our warfare are not carnal. And sometimes by striving, as in Heb. xii. 4; Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin. But still it describes a believer’s life in some word or other, importing contest or op position.

Now in every such contest or combat, there are three things to be considered.

1. The persons engaged in it.

2. The thing contended for by it.

3. And lastly, the means and ways, by which it is managed, and carried on.

Of each of which in their order; and,

1. For the persons engaged in this conflict; they are such, whose hatred of one another is almost as old as the world itself, as being founded in that primitive enmity sown by God himself between the seed of the woman, and the seed of the serpent, in Gen. iii. 15. The Devil’s hatred of us bears date with our very being, and his opposition is as early as his hatred; for it is of too active a virulence to lie still and dormant, without putting forth itself in all the actings of a mischievous hostility. The Devil hates us enough as men, but much more as believers; he maligns us for the privileges of our creation, but much more for the mercies of our redemption: and as soon as ever we list ourselves in the service of the great captain of our salvation, lie bids present defiance to us, and proclaims perpetual war against us; which he will never be wanting to carry on with all the force, art, and industry, that malice, bounded within the limits of created power, can reach unto.

None, that gives up his name to Christianity, must think that he enters upon a state of ease, softness, and fruition. For though it is called indeed the way of peace, yet it is of peace only in another world, or of peace with God and our own consciences, but of incessant war with the Devil, who will always have power enough to trouble and discompose even those whom he cannot destroy; and to bruise our heel, though he gets a broken head for his pains.

We see, then, who the persons are, concerned in this spiritual combat; namely, believers on the one side; that is, persons truly sanctified and justified, and consequently in a state of grace and favour with God; and, on the other side, the great enemy of mankind, the tempter, with all his hellish retinue, all the powers of darkness (as it were) drawn out into battalia, and headed by him, to defy the armies of the living God. It follows now, that we see what is the thing designed and contended for by him, in the assault he makes upon believers, which is the second thing here to be considered. And it is, in short, to cast them down from that state of happiness in which he finds them; which happiness consisting partly in God’s image, which is holiness, and partly in an interest in God’s favour, which indeed is but a consequence of the former, the loss of one naturally drawing after it the loss of the other; therefore the Devil does the utmost he is able, wholly to divest the soul of both.

1. And first, he designs to cast believers down from that purity and sanctity of life, that the Spirit of regeneration has wrought them up to: for the Devil, having lost all holiness himself, perfectly ab hors it in all others. A pious person is an eyesore to him; and to be holy is to begin his hell here upon earth, and to torment him before his time.

As he was the first and grand apostate from God, so he is restless and indefatigable to propagate that apostasy and rebellion amongst mankind, and to draw them into a confederacy against their Maker. He is said to have been a liar and a murderer from the beginning; and chiefly does he attempt the murder of souls, by making them like himself. And so intent is he upon his cursed game, that he will compass sea and land, tempt and entice night and day, use both force and art to debauch and deface God’s image in the soul, to rob it of its innocence; and, in a word, to plunge it into all kind of filth, folly, and impurity. It is his business, for the labour he employs about it; and his recreation, for the pleasure he takes in it: for every upright and virtuous person is a reproach to him, and upbraids him with the loss of that, which he was so much concerned to have preserved entire. Holiness carries its beauty with it; and there are none that malign and envy the beautiful so much as those that are deformed: but sin has left upon the Devil a spiritual deformity, greater and more offensive than any bodily deformity whatsoever.

2. The Devil designs to cast believers down from their interest in the divine favour. After the angels were fallen from heaven, the door was presently, without either delay or pity, shut upon them: nor was there any reserve of mercy, to recover them to their lost estate. Whereupon their envy and malice were inflamed against the sons of men, whom God treated upon gentler terms, not taking them upon the first advantage; but allowing them means of pardon and restitution, and so cancelling the handwriting that stood against them, by reason of the law. He spread open the arms of an evangelical and better covenant to receive them.

SERMON XVIII.

PSALM cxlv. 9.

The Lord is good to all: and his tender mercies are over all his works.

HE that undertakes to discourse of any of God’s attributes, must profess that he undertakes to discourse of that which he does not thoroughly under stand, if so be that he understands himself. For how can a finite comprehend an infinite? or how can any one express what he cannot comprehend? But of all God’s perfections, his mercy especially is a theme so great, that none but an infinite person can worthily enlarge upon it. However, since God is pleased to call us to the study and contemplation of himself, we may, I conceive, without any presumption or injury to his greatness, frame to ourselves the best apprehensions and discourses, that the condition of our nature can afford us of a thing, of which we have no explicit knowledge.

Now mercy, as it is ascribed to God, may be considered and taken two ways.

I. For the principle itself; which is nothing else but the simple, undivided nature of God, as it does manifest and cast abroad itself, in such and such acts of grace and favour to the creature. Which very same essence or nature, according to different respects, is called wisdom, justice, power, mercy, and the like.

SERMON XIX.

JAMES i. 14.

But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust., and enticed.

IT is natural for men, in the commission of sin, to design to themselves as much of the pleasure, and as little of the guilt of sin, as possibly they can: and therefore, since the guilt of sin unavoidably remains upon the cause and author of sin, it is their great business to find out some other cause, upon which to charge it, beside themselves. Accordingly the apostle here directs these words and the foregoing, as an anticipation of, and an answer to a secret objection that might possibly arise in some minds against God himself, as if he were the great impeller and inducer of men to sin; in which answer he clears God, by stating sin upon its true cause and original.

In the prosecution of the words, I shall only premise the explication of these two terms, and so descend to their further discussion.

1. What the apostle here means by being tempted.

2. What is intended by lust.

1. For the first of these: it is as certain, that the scripture affirms some men to have been tempted by God, and particularly Abraham, as that it is positively affirmed in the verse before the text, that God tempts no man; and therefore this word must needs be of various signification. In the sense that it is ascribed to God, it signifies no more than a bare trial; as when, by some notable providence, he designs to draw forth and discover what is latent in the heart of man. In the sense that it is denied of God, it signifies an endeavour, by solicitations and other means, to draw a man to the commission of sin: and this the most holy God can by no means own; for it would be to take the Devil’s work out of his hands. But neither does this sense reach the measure of the word in this place; which imports not only an endeavour to engage a man in a sinful action, but an actual and effectual engaging him with full success and prevalence, as to the last issue of the commission. And thus a man can be only tempted by his own lust; which is the

Second thing to be explained. By lust the apostle here means, not that particular inordination or vice that relates to the uncleanness of the flesh; but that general stock of corruption that possesses the whole soul through all its respective faculties. But principally is it here to be understood of the prime and commanding faculty of all, the will, as it is possessed and principled with sinful habits and depraved inclinations. And this is the grand tempter, that tempts and seduces, so as actually to engage and determine a man to the choice of sin.

Now, though the apostle seems, by stating the cause of sin upon this, directly and principally to have it in his design only to clear and discharge God from this imputation; yet the nature of the proposition is of a wider compass, and carries it to the exclusion of all other external causes whatsoever. And therefore, in compliance with this, the business of the ensuing discourse shall be to demonstrate, that the corrupted will of man is the sole, adequate, and entire cause of all his sinful prevaricatings, and deviations from the law of God.

The prosecution of which shall lie in these three particulars.

I. To shew those false causes upon which men are apt to charge their sins.

II. To shew positively, that lust is the true and proper cause of them.

III. To shew the way by which it causes them; and that, the text tells us, is by seducing and enticing. Every man is tempted, when he its drawn away of his own lust, and enticed.

I. And for the first of these, the mistaken causes of sin; in the number of which we may reckon these that follow.

1. The decree of God concerning things to come to pass, is not a proper cause for any man to charge his sins upon; though perhaps there is nothing in the world that is more abused by weak and vulgar minds in this particular. I shall not concern myself to dispute how God decrees the event of sins: but this I shall affirm in general, that be the divine decree never so absolute, yet it has no causal influence upon sinful actions; no, nor indeed upon any actions else: forasmuch as the bare decree or purpose of a thing produces or puts nothing in being at all. It is, as the schools call it, an immanent act; that is, such an one as rests wholly within God, and effects nothing without him. A decree, as such, is not operative or effective of the thing decreed.

Besides, whensoever God decrees that a thing shall come to pass, he decrees the manner of its production also, and that suitably to the way of working proper to that cause by which it is effected: as if he decrees that a man shall do such or such a thing, he decrees that he shall do it freely, and agreeably to that liberty of will that his nature invests him with.

But it will be replied, Does not every thing decreed by God certainly and necessarily come to pass? And then, how can we prevent it? And if so, is there not a force upon us from Heaven to do the thing that is thus decreed?

I answer, No; for there is a great deal of difference between a mere illative necessity, which consists only in the logical consequence of one thing upon another, and between a causal necessity, which efficiently and antecedently determines and puts the faculty upon working. But so does not the divine decree: it exerts no force or impulse upon man’s will, but leaves it to its own natural liberty. How ever, it is certain, that, by the former kind of merely illative necessity, the thing decreed will assuredly have its event. But this is no greater a necessity, than God’s foreknowledge puts upon the event of the thing foreknown: for it is impossible that God should not foreknow all things that shall come to pass; and it is equally impossible, if God foreknows a thing shall come to pass, that that thing should not come to pass. And yet, I suppose, that none will say, that God’s foreknowledge of a man’s actions does, by any active influence, necessitate that man to do those actions: albeit, that this consequence stands unshakeable, that whatsoever God foreknows a man will do, that shall certainly and infallibly be done. Otherwise, where is God’s omniscience and his infallibility? He knows the last point to which the will will incline its choice; he is beforehand with all futurities, and so takes them into his view with the same certainty, as if they were present or actually past.

Now let any one compare these two, God’s decree and his foreknowledge, and he will find, that, as to the event, the same necessity passes both upon the thing decreed and the thing foreknown. And therefore, if men will confess that God’s foreknowledge does not force or push a man upon the doing of any thing, it will follow also, that neither does his decree. But if, in the scanning of either, there occurs any difficulty, to our apprehensions not resolvable, it is because God is infinite; and because an infinite mind, both in its knowledge and purposes, proceeds not according to the methods and measures of a finite understanding. And upon this account, all the arguments, that, with so much noise and confidence, are urged against God’s decrees, will be found but popular and fallacious, and grounded upon the application of men’s ways of acting and apprehending to God; and consequently tend to disprove God’s infinity, as much or more than any thing else.

Let no bold or ignorant sinner, therefore, think to take sanctuary here; or to allege God’s decree as an excuse for those villainies, which, with full purpose and choice of will, he committed. If God, by the unsearchable counsel of his will, designs, fore sees, and orders, what yet the sinner does most freely, what is that to him? That alters not the nature of his action, any more than if I had a design to kill my enemy, and another, without any knowledge of such a design of mine, should of his own accord kill him. Would this free him from bearing the guilt of his own action, and undergoing the deserved punishment of a murderer? None so apt to babble about predestination and God’s decrees, as the illiterate vulgar; and from hence to take reasons for what they are to do. But what can warrant them to insist upon mysteries, when they are called to duty? And to pore and break their brains upon the hidden senses of a decree, when they have the plain and intelligible voice of a precept? God hath shewed thee, O man, what is good and what is evil. He has placed life and death before thee. This is the rule by which thou must stand or fall: and no man will find, that his fulfilling God’s secret will, will bear him out in the breach of his revealed.

2. The influences of the heavens and of the stars imprint nothing upon men that can impel or engage them to do evil; and yet some are so sottish, as to father their vices and villainies upon these: they were born (forsooth) under such a planet, and therefore they cannot choose but be thieves, or whoremasters, or rebels, all their life after. But it is strange, that heaven should prepare men for hell, and imprint those qualities upon them, that should hinder them from ever coming to heaven. This would be highly injurious to the great artificer and maker of those bodies, that he should provide such storehouses of mischief, such irresistible conveyers of the seeds of sin into men’s minds. To be born under any planet would in this case be worse than not to be born at all. And to what purpose should God allow men the means to save them, if he places them under such an influence as must certainly damn them?

But these are mere fopperies; the fables and follies of old women and astrologers, who are seldom able to give an account of that which is under the immediate impressions of the heavens, that is, of the air and the elements; and upon the stock of all their acquaintance with these celestial bodies, to secure us but one fair day a month or two hence. It is all but confident conjecture, and cheating reduced to an art grounded upon the ignorance and credulity of the vulgar, who are always willing to be deceived, if any one will but take the pains to deceive them.

But admitting that the heavens have an influence and operation upon inferior bodies, and that those glorious lights were not made only to be gazed upon, but to control as well as to direct the lesser world; yet still all communication between agent and patient must be in things that hold some proportion and likeness in their natures; so that one thing can pass no impression upon another, of a nature absolutely and in every respect diverse from it, provided it be also superior to it; and such a thing is a spirit in respect of body.

Upon which grounds, what intercourse can there be between the stars and a soul? How can the sun or moon, or any planet, move or incline the will this way or that way? and carry the freedom of its choice to one thing rather than another? This is absurd and unimaginable, and contrary to all the principles of philosophy as well as religion. And therefore let no man think himself under a necessity of sinning from any such superior influence; it is not that which he sees over his head, but that which he feels within his heart, that he is to look to. The will scorns the control of any creature, either in heaven or earth; next under God it is its own master. Every man is indeed to look upon God as his Saviour; but it is himself only that can be his destroyer.

3. Neither can any man charge his sins upon the constitution and temper of his body, as the proper cause of them. The body was made to serve, and not to command. All that it can do, is only to be troublesome; but it cannot be imperious. If the soul will but maintain its right, and resolve to keep the throne, it may easily make the fleshly part, not only its subject, but its instrument; not only quiet, but useful. They are not the humours of the body, but the humours of the mind, to which men owe the irregularities of their behaviour.

The sensitive appetites having their situation in the body, do indeed follow the peculiar complexion and temper of it: but reason is a thing that is placed solely and entirely in the soul, and so depends not upon those inferior faculties; but though it is some times solicited by them, yet it is in its power, whether or no it will be prevailed upon. And for all the noise, and hurry, and tumult, that is often raised amongst them; yet reason, like the upper most region of the air, is not at all subject to the disturbances that are below. And so long as the soul listens to reason, the inferior appetites may bawl indeed, but they cannot persuade. Let a beg gar be never so impudently craving and importunate, yet the door may be shut against him, and then he must be either quiet, or only troublesome to himself.

In vain therefore does any man for his excuse allege the solicitations of his appetites, against the dictates of his reason: it is, as if in a rebellion a man should act by the summons of a constable, against the command and proclamation of his prince. No man is made an adulterer, a drunkard, or an idle person by his body; his body indeed may in cline him to be so, but it is his will only that makes him so. And be the clamours and requests of appetite never so earnest, reason has still a negative voice upon them; and if it shall be pleased but to advise upon the matter, they cease and are extinct, and can never pass into action.

If indeed reason shall give way to these sensual motions, and take the bit into its mouth, and suffer itself to be rid; there is no doubt, but it may be made a servant of servants, a slave and a drudge to all the tyrannies of a domineering sensuality. But this will be no apology before God, who endued it with a perfect sovereignty, and put the government of the whole soul into its hands.

And besides, there have been some in the world, who by the conduct of their reason have made their way to virtue, through all the disadvantages of their natural constitution. Philosophy has done it in many, and religion may do it in all. Let no man therefore charge his sins upon that part of himself, that cannot possibly sin without the consent of his will.

4. And lastly, to proceed yet higher: no man can justly charge his sins upon the Devil, as the cause of them; for God has not put it into the power of our mortal enemy to ruin us without ourselves; which yet he had done, had it been in the Devil’s power to force us to sin. The Devil can only tempt and allure, but compel he cannot; he may inveigle, but he cannot command our choice; and no man yet ever suffered death, who did not choose death: the fisher may propose, and play the bait before the fish, but he cannot force it to swallow it. And so whatsoever the Devil does, he does by insinuation, and not by compulsion.

The Spirit of God assures us, that he may be resisted, and that upon a vigorous resistance he will fly. He never conquers any, but those that yield; a spiritual fort is never taken by force, but by sur render. And when a man is as willing to be ruined, as he is to ruin him, it is that, that makes the Devil triumphant and victorious. How slily and creepingly did he address himself to our first parents! which surely his pride would never have let him do, could he have effected their downfall by force, with out temptation.

It is confessed indeed, that the guilt of those sins that the Devil tempts us to will rest upon him; but not so as to discharge us. He that persuades a man to rob a house, is guilty of the sin he persuades him to, but not in the same manner that he is who committed the robbery; for it was in his power, after all the other’s persuasions, to have for borne the fact, and to have maintained his innocence: for no man is a thief or a villain against his will.

In vain therefore do men shift off their sins upon the Devil, whose greatest arts they may frustrate, whose strongest solicitations they may make ineffectual: for it is in their power (as I may so say) in some respect to make the Devil himself innocent. But still the load of all must lie upon him; and it is not he that commits, but he that tempts to sin, that must be the sinner. It seems to be with the Devil, in respect of the disorders of the soul, as it is with the spleen in respect of the distempers of the body; whatsoever is amiss, or indisposed, the charge is sure to lie there.

But howsoever men may mock themselves with such evasions, yet God will not be mocked, who knows that he left the soul in its own keeping, and made the will free, and not to be forced: and therefore these figleaves will fall off, when he shall come to scrutiny and examination. Every man shall bear his own burden, and the Devil himself shall have but what is his due.

And thus I have done with the first particular proposed, namely, to shew and remove the mistaken causes upon which men are apt to charge their sins; concerning which, before I proceed any further, I shall remark this by way of caution: that though I deny any of these to be the proper causes of sin, yet it is not to be denied, but that they are often very great promoters of sin, where they meet with a corrupt heart and a depraved will. And it is not to be questioned, but that many thousands now in hell might have gone thither in a calmer and a more cleanly way at least, had they not been hurried and pushed on by impetuous temptations, by an ill constitution, and by such opportunities and circumstances of life, as mightily suited their corruption, and so drew it forth to a pitch of acting higher and more outrageous than ordinary.

For there is no doubt, but an ill mind in an ill-disposed body will carry a man forth to those sins, that otherwise it would not, if lodged in a body of a better and more benign temperament. As a sword covered with rust will wound much more dangerously, where it does wound, than it could do if it were bright and clean. And it is also as certain, that were it not for the Devil’s suggestions, the bare corruption of man’s nature would not engage him in many of those enormities, that frequently rage in the lives of some persons. Nor is it to be denied, but that the circumstances and ways of life, that Providence sometimes casts men under, unavoidably expose them to those occasions of sin, that entangle them in those actions, that they would never have been guilty of, had they lived free from those occasions.

All this is very true; and therefore, besides those internal impressions of grace, by which God sanctifies the heart, and effectually changes the will, many are accountable to his mercy for those external and inferior assistances of grace. As, that he restrains the fury of the tempter; that he sends them into the world with a well-tempered and rightly-disposed body; and lastly, that he casts the course of their life out of most of the snares and occasions of sin: so that they can with much more ease be virtuous than other men; and if they sin, they sin merely upon the stock of an internal, overflowing malice; which is instead of a tempter, a devil, and all sinful occasions to itself.

But on the other side, where God denies a man these advantages, and casts him under all the forementioned disadvantages of virtue, and decoys to sin; it is yet most certain that they lay upon him no necessity of sinning. The will is still entire, and may break through all these impediments: it may be virtuous, though indeed at the price of a greater trouble, and a more afflicting endeavour.

SERMON XX.

ISAIAH xxvii. 11.

For it is a people of no understanding: therefore lie that made them will not have mercy on them, and he that formed them will shew them no favour.

THIS chapter is one of the eloquent strains of the most oratorical of the prophets, describing a severe judgment to be inflicted on the Jews, in the deplorable destruction of Jerusalem, the demolishing their stately buildings, and the wasting their pleasant and delightful habitations. All this is set down in the 10th and 11th verses; the defenced city shall be desolate: no defence or munition can keep out a judgment, when commissioned by God to enter. And the habitation forsaken: when God forsakes a place, the inhabitants do not stay long behind. And there shall the calf feed, there shall he lie down: when men forget their Maker, and degenerate into brutish affections, it is but just with him, that they, who have changed affections with beasts, should change dwellings with them too. When the boughs thereof are withered, &c. For the exposition of these words, we must note, that they admit of a double construction.

1. They may be either understood literally, and so they set forth the destruction of Jerusalem, in the devastation of the pleasant gardens and vineyards; which shall be left so desolate, that the vines and trees shall wither, and poor women shall come and gather them into bundles, for the making of fires and heating ovens. Thus we see the vintage of sin, and the clusters of Sodom; they destroy the vines, and fire the vineyard.

2. Another sense of these words is figurative and metaphorical: and so this expression, When the boughs thereof are withered, they shall be broken off, signifies thus much: when the inhabitants have filled up the measure of their sins, when they are spiritually withered and dead, and fruitful to no good work, then they shall be broken off, and ruined with the heaviest destruction. And to aggravate this judgment, to put an edge upon this misery, it is added in the next words, that women shall come and set them on fire: that is, a womanish and effeminate generation of men (for such were the Babylonians) shall triumph over them. A hint of their luxury we have in the seventh chapter of Joshua; it was a Babylonish garment that enamoured Achan. We know how Lucian brings in Menippus, speaking of Sardanapalus, one of the womanish kings of Babylon. Ἐπίτρεψον μὴ ὦ Ἑρμῆ τὴν Σαρδανάπαλον πατάξαι κατὰ κόῤῥης. Now a generous spirit, that has the least spark of honour and virility, does not feel so much smart in the punishment, as in the unworthiness of the hand that does inflict it. And this was the emphasis of Samson’s disgrace, to be held in captivity by a woman. And it is the height and aggravation of this judgment, for men to be fired and destroyed by women; the valiant to be made a prey to the luxurious.

And thus having described the judgment, he does in the next words assign a reason of it; for it is a people of no understanding. One would have thought that ignorance should have excused the sin: he that sins out of ignorance is rather to be pitied than punished. Is any father so cruel, so hardhearted, as to disown and cast off his son, be cause he is a fool? No; an innocent ignorance excuses from sin, both before God and man: and God himself will own that maxim of equity, Ignorantia excusat peccatum. But then there is another sort of ignorance, which is not an ignorance of an empty understanding, but of a depraved heart; such an ignorance as does not only consist in a bare privation, but in a corrupt disposition; where the under standing is like that sort of blind serpents, whose blindness is attended with much venom and malignity. This was such a blindness as struck the Sodomites; there was darkness in their eyes, and withal, villainy in their hearts. There is an ignorance that could not be remedied, the schools call it an invincible ignorance, and this excuses from sin, and that deservedly; for this is a man’s unhappiness, not his fault. But there is also an affected ignorance, such an one as is contracted by a wilful neglect of the means; and this is not excusing, but condemning. Such a want of understanding it was, that is here charged upon the Jews, as the sad occasion of this woful punishment: for they had large and enriching means of grace; the mysteries of God, the arcana coeli, were intrusted with them, and explained to them; the fountains of this great deep of knowledge were broken up before them. And in this case to be ignorant; in the midst of light to be in darkness; for an Israel to have an Egypt in a Goshen; this is highly provoking, and may justly cause God to lay hold on vengeance. Where by the way we observe, that some want of understanding, some ignorance, is so far from excusing sin, that it is its highest aggravation: It is a people of no under standing: therefore he that made them, &c.

Here we ought also to note, in what strange terms God expresses his anger. It is not said, the Lord, the just God will punish them; this was not so wonderful: little to be expected from God’s justice but a sinner’s misery. No; God assumes the most endearing titles, and under them gives the severest judgments: he joins the creator and the destroyer, such expressions as almost confute one another: he clothes himself in the robes of mercy, and in these pronounces the sentence of death upon the sinner.

From the words thus explained, we may naturally deduce these two observations.

I. The relation of a Creator strongly engages God to put forth acts of love and favour towards his creature.

This is clear from the strength of the antithesis in the words, he that made them will not save them: where, for the advantage of the expression, it is redoubled; he that formed them will shew them no favour. As if he should say, It may seem strange to you that your Creator, which very name speaks nothing but bowels of love and tenderness, should break and ruin, utterly confound and destroy you. Yet thus it must be; though the relation make it strange, yet your sins will make it true.

II. Sin does totally disengage God from all those acts of love and goodness to the creature, that the relation of a Creator can engage him to.

Or more clearly thus:

SERMON XXI.

MATTHEW xix. 22.

When the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions.

IT is a truth of general acknowledgment, because of universal experience, that there is no misery comparable to that which follows after a near access to happiness; nor any sorrow so quick and pungent, as that which succeeds a preconceived, but disappointed joy. Such a sorrow we have here; for certainly it must be no small matter, that can make a man sorrowful in the midst of great possessions.

We have this young heir driving a bargain with Christ, and that for no less a thing than eternal life; and driving it so near a close, that only one thing was lacking; a thing, though perhaps in itself great, yet, compared to the purchase, small and inconsiderable: in the fourteenth verse, Go, sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; here was as vast a disproportion between the price and the purchase, as there is distance between earth and heaven.

Neither was the proposal unreasonable, because usually practised, even by the most worldly; it being frequent with men to sell an estate in one place, to buy another in a more convenient. So that he was not so much commanded to leave, as to change his possessions. And therefore, the rejection of this offer was, upon the best terms of reason, inexcusable; both because the purchase was so advantageous, and the person, to whom it was offered, so rich.

Now the words here importing the young man’s sorrow, upon something enjoined him by Christ; the natural method of proceeding will require that we reflect upon the command, that was the occasion of this sorrow: and we shall find that it branched itself into these three parts or degrees.

1. The first was this; Go, sell that thou hast. This was not the duty itself, but the preparative and introduction to it. For barely to sell his estate, was only to alter, not to diminish it, and, as we usually say, to turn a long estate into a broad.

2. The second branch was, Give to the poor. It was not to throw it away, like the morose philosopher: for the duty here urged, was not to impoverish himself, but to benefit others; not so much to cast it from him, as to secure it to him in other hands.

3. The third and last article of the command was, Come and follow me; without which, the other two were utterly insignificant: like two propositions that conclude nothing; or like preparing for a journey, without setting forth. It is the taking up of the cross, that makes our following of Christ feasible; but it is our following of Christ, that makes our taking up of the cross acceptable.

We have here seen the command; and we may be sure that Christ, whose precepts never outweigh their motives, would second it with an argument no less ponderous. And therefore, here he enforces it with a reason as commanding as the precept; even the delight and aim of all created beings, perfection. If thou wilt be perfect, go sell that thou hast, &c. Which words, being much abused by the papists, may worthily challenge a further explication.

They, to establish their works of supererogation, have invented a distinction between precepts and counsels. A precept they define a command, so obliging to duty, that the omission of it obliges to punishment. But a counsel not so much commands, as recommends some perfection, beyond what is enjoined in the law; for the omission of which, a man shall not incur punishment; and for the performance of which, he shall have a more eminent reward: and therefore it is called a counsel of evangelical perfection.

That popery undermines the law, and perverts the gospel, we are not now to learn: but in this it is hard to judge which is greater, the arrogance or the absurdity. The first, in that they pretend to surpass the limits of all legal perfection: the second, in that they assert, that there may be some perfection that is not contained in the law, which is the unalterable rule and standard of all created holiness.

Let them strive, and strain, and stretch the very sinews of their souls to the highest pin of austerity and alms; yet, unless they can prove that this is to love God more than with all their heart, with all their soul, and with all their strength, (which the very letter of the law exacts,) all their evangelical perfection is already drank up and forestalled in the vast comprehensive verge and latitude of the precept. And therefore, this distinction of precepts and counsels is illogical and ridiculous, one member of the distinction grasping within itself the other.

SERMON XXII.

1 PETER ii. 23.

Who, being reviled, reviled not again.

IF we run over the whole train and catalogue of duties that are incumbent upon a Christian, we shall find that they are fully comprised under these two heads; his active and his passive obedience. Concerning which, it may be doubted whether of the two, as to the worth and value of the thing itself, ought to have the preeminence. For though all duties expressly enjoined, are by virtue of such injunction equally necessary, yet it follows not that they are in themselves equally excellent. If we here measure the greatness of the virtue by the difficulty of its exercise, passive obedience will certainly gain the precedency: for that this is the most difficult appears undeniably from this reason, that there is much in human nature that inclines a man to action, so that without it there would be no enjoyment; but, on the contrary, there is no proneness or inclination in nature to suffer, but a great abhorrence and aversion from it. So that every instance of voluntary passive obedience must commence entirely upon a dereliction of our own will, and a compliance with a superior.

The Spirit of God in this portion of scripture reads us a lecture of patience from the living command of Christ’s example; who, by enduring the wrath of his Father, and the affronts and contumelies of men, made it evident to the world, that he was able, not only to do, but also to suffer miracles. He that never provoked God’s justice, could yet submit himself to the stroke of his anger: and he that never dispensed any thing but blessings amongst men, could yet endure cursings and revilings from them.

Before I enter upon the words, it may be questioned, whether or no this particular instance of Christ’s patience may be a sufficient ground for our general imitation. For as in matters of argument we cannot from a particular infer an universal conclusion; so there seems to be the same reason in matters of action, that the particular example of one should not oblige the practice of all.

But to this it may be answered, that divines usually reduce all Christ’s actions to these three sorts.

1. His miraculous actions, such as issued from his divine nature. As, his raising the dead, stilling the sea and the winds with a word, and feeding thousands with a few loaves. In all these it is our duty to admire, not to imitate him; for by these he shews us not what we were to do after him, but only what we were to believe concerning him.

2. The second sort were his mediatorial actions; such as concerned his offices, to which he was advanced as mediator. As, his governing and disposing of all the world for the good of his church: his dispensing of the gifts and graces of the Spirit, which are acts of his kingly office: his satisfying for sin, and his continual intercession, which are acts of his priestly function. And lastly, his teaching of the saints outwardly by his word, and inwardly by his Spirit; which he did as the great prophet, sanctified, and sent into the world for that purpose. In all these, it is no more our duty to do as Christ did, than to be what Christ was.

3. The third and last sort were his moral actions, which he both did himself, and also commanded others to do. Such were his praying, his giving alms, and his gentle behaviour to all men: and to these we are all equally engaged. And the reason is, because Christ performed all these duties, under that relation in which we all stand obliged, as well as Christ.

He performed them as a man, as a rational creature subject to the law of his Creator; and so we are all. Now under this rank comes his patient endurance of the injurious behaviour of men. And in this respect every Christian should be not only a disciple to his doctrine, but a representative of his person: he should transcribe him in his practice, and make his life a comment and illustration upon his master s.

Having thus answered this query, let us now enter upon the words themselves; the scope and design of which is to recommend to us one excellent branch of the great evangelical virtue of patience: the entire exercise of which adequately lies in these two things.

First, In our behaviour towards God.

Secondly, In our converse with men.

And this is that which is now to be discoursed of: that composedness of mind, that temper of spirit, that displays itself in a quiet, undisturbed endurance of scoffs, slanders, and all the lashes of contumelious tongues. For though the words speak negatively, yet this is a known rule in divinity, that there is no command that runs in the strain of negatives, but couches under it a positive duty.

Having thus shewn the design and purport of the words, I shall endeavour to give a full account of it, in the ensuing discussion of these three particulars.

I. I shall shew what is implied in the extent of this duty, of not reviling again.

II. I shall shew how the observation of this duty comes to be so exceeding difficult.

III. I shall shew by what means a man may work himself to such a composure and temper of spirit, as to be able to observe this so difficult a duty. Of each of which in their order. And,

I. For the first of these; what is implied in the duty here expressed to us by not reviling again. We must here observe, that as every outward, sinful action is but the consummation of a sin long before conceived in the thoughts, fashioned in the desires, and then ripened in the affections; from whence it comes to birth, by issuing forth in actual commission: so there is no way to secure the soul from the danger of the commission, but by dashing it in the places of its conception and antecedent preparation; and so to keep it from seeing the world, by stifling it in the womb.

Accordingly this command implies two things.

(1.) The not entertaining the impression of injuries with acrimony of thought and internal resentment.

SERMON XXIII.

PSALM xc. 11.

Who knoweth the power of thine anger? even according to thy fear, so is thy wrath.

THIS description of God’s anger, set forth by such a pathetical exclamation, seems to come from a person that spoke not only his thoughts, but his experience; even from Moses, who had felt the sad effects of his own anger, and therefore might well be sensible of the weight of God s. When God shewed himself as a legislator, it was with all the pomps of terror, and the circumstances of dread; but here we have him in the grimmer dress of a revenging judge. Then the mountain smoked, but now it flames. And Moses seems so possessed with an awful reflection upon the amazing terrors of the divine anger, that he can scarce look up; but with fear and distance, as it were, avoids the sight, and seems to have recourse to his veil, and to hide his face, not from being seen by men, but from seeing God.

Before we proceed upon the words, it will concern us to see how anger can be ascribed to God: for an infinite and divine nature cannot be degraded to those affections and weaknesses that attend ours. Anger is a passion, but God is impassible. Anger is always with some change in the person that has it, but God is unchangeable.

Crellius, in his treatise of God’s attributes, asserts the affections of anger, love, hope, and the like, to be really and properly in God. Thus they in a preposterous manner deny Christ to be God, and yet make God to be a man. For they make him subject to those passions which the Stoics will not allow in him who is perfectly wise, and a philosopher; but assert them to be weaknesses dwelling in vulgar breasts, that have not yet lopped off the excrescencies of the sensitive appetite, nor subdued their passions to the lure and dictates of right reason.

Certainly, therefore, anger, and the like affections, can by no means be ascribed to the infinitely perfect God in the proper and usual acceptation of the words, but only by an anthropopathy; attributing that to God, which bears some analogy and proportion to what we find in men. Thus God is said to be angry, when he does some things that bear a similitude to those effects that anger produces in men.

It is therefore in God, not as a perfection inherent in his nature, but only as an effect of his will. In deed it is not in him at all, but is only an extrinsical denomination from a work wrought without him; from the miseries and calamities which he inflicts upon a guilty creature.

I cannot see any thing else of difficulty in the words. The prosecution of them I shall manage in these following particulars.

I. I shall lay down some preparatory considerations concerning God’s anger.

II. I shall shew those instances in which it does exercise and exert itself.

III. I shall consider those properties and qualifications, that declare and set forth the extraordinary greatness of it.

IV. I shall make some use and improvement of the whole.

I. For the first of these, I shall lay down these two preparatory, cautional observations.

1 . That every harsh and severe dispensation is not an effect of God’s anger. The same effect, as to the matter of it, may proceed from very different causes. Love is sometimes put upon the rigour of those courses, which at the first aspect seem to carry in them the inscriptions of enmity and hostility.

God may sweep away a man’s estate, snatch away a friend, stain his reputation; and yet the design of all this not be revenge, but remedy; not destruction, but discipline.

He sees perhaps something evil in us to be cured, and something worse to be prevented; some luxuriancies to be abated, and some malignant humours to be evacuated; all which cannot be effected, but by sharp and displeasing applications. And in all the hard passages of Providence, when God strips a man of all his externals, God’s intent may be, not to make him miserable, but to make him humble; not to ruin, but to reduce him.

If you look only upon the outside of an affliction, you cannot distinguish from what principle it may proceed; Gehazi’s leprosy and Lazarus’s sores may seem to be inflicted by the same displeasure; and yet one was a curse for hypocrisy, and the other a trial of humility.

David’s and Saul’s afflictions were dispensed with a very different hand: Saul could not pursue him so fast, but mercy followed him as close. St. Stephen was stoned as well as Achan; but certainly God did not with the same arm fling the stone at one, with which he did at the other.

Consider the saints in Heb. xi. 37, afflicted, tormented, nuked, destitute, sawn asunder. And what could anger itself do more against them? And yet the God who did all this was not angry. That very love which makes God to be our friend, makes him sometimes to appear our enemy: to chastise our confidence, to raise our vigilance, and to give us safety instead of security.

Persons who are truly holy, and tender how they offend God, are yet very apt to look upon God’s dealings on the wrong side, and to make hard conclusions concerning their own state and condition. David is much an example of this, who, through the transports, sometimes of diffidence, sometimes of impatience, is high in his expostulations with God. Psalm lxxvii. 9, Hath God forgotten to be gracious? hath he in anger shut up his tender mercies? And in Psalm lxxiv. 1, Why hast thou cast us off for ever? why doth thine anger smoke against the sheep of thy pasture?

Now all this, perhaps, was commenced upon the sense of some outward affliction, not considering (as he does elsewhere) that when God deals with his chosen ones, with the sheep of his pasture, his rod is still attended with his staff; and as with one he strikes, so with the other he supports.

And as persons holy are, upon the sharp passages of Providence, very prone to conclude God’s anger against themselves; so. on the other side, men of a morose, uncharitable, conscience-pretending temper, from such instances of outward miseries, are as ready to denounce God’s anger against others. If such dogs meet with a Lazarus, instead of licking his sores, they will bite his person, bark at his name, and worry his reputation.

Nothing can befall any man, besides themselves, but presently it is a judgment; and they have cried out judgments! judgments! so long, that they are even become judgments themselves: indeed the greatest and sorest that a nation can groan under.

Wherefore, let us rest assured of this, that the roughest of God’s proceedings do not always issue from an angry intention: it is very possible, because very usual, that they may proceed from the clean contrary. The same clouds which God made use of heretofore to drown the earth, he employs now to refresh it. He may use the same means to correct and to better some, that he does to plague and to punish others. The same hand and hatchet that cuts some trees for the fire, may cut others into growth, verdure, and fertility. This is the first thing to be observed.

2. We must observe, that there is a great difference between God’s anger and his hatred; as great as there is between the transient, expiring heat of a spark, and the lasting, continual fires which supply a furnace. The nature of hatred is to pursue its object to death, to a total extinction of its very being. And as it is said of God’s love, so, I think, it may be also said of his hatred, that whom he hates, he hates to the end.

I do not desire to wade into the depths of God’s decrees; for our notions about these are very uncertain, and therefore our determinations must needs be dangerous.

But surely we are exceeding ignorant of the actuality, simplicity, and immutability of the divine nature, if we think that God can alter his counsels, or revoke his purposes.

But we shall not meddle with God’s hatred as it is bound up in his purpose, but as it lies open and visible in the execution: and so, it is the pursuance of a standing enmity against a sinner, a gradual accomplishing of his final destruction, a disposal of all passages, all contingencies and circumstances of his life, to the ruin of his soul, and the fatal issues of damnation.

But God’s anger is not of so malign and destructive an influence; the choicest of his saints have shared in some of the severest instances of it. God was angry with Moses, angry with David, angry with Hezekiah, and with his peculiar people; but we do not read that he hated them. The effects of his anger differ as much from the effects of his hatred, as the smart of a present pain from the corrosions of an abiding poison. It must indeed be confessed, that the heats of it are fierce and dreadful: but it is such a fire, as though it burns, yet it does not consume the bush; it may affright, but it will not destroy a Moses. Nevertheless, though it does not bring God’s elect under the power, it may bring them into the shadow of death, into the suburbs of hell; and give them a glimpse of those horrors, a taste of those vials of wrath, that are poured out in full measure only upon the sons of perdition.

SERMON XXIV.

MATTHEW x. 28.

Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.

CHRIST, who came into the world to engage in a spiritual war against the ways of the world, is here, like a provident commander, despatching a regiment, a little regiment of twelve apostles, for this evangelical expedition. And in the first verse of this chapter we have him reading to them their commission, which runs very full and large; extending to the cure of all maladies and distempers, and the subjugation of the powers of darkness. From the second verse to the fourth, we have him taking a list or muster of their names: and then, from the fifth verse almost to the end of the chapter, we have a more full and determinate explication of their commission, as to its just latitude and extent. And that,

1. In respect of the place where they were to administer it; and that was within the precincts and bounds of Judea, in the fifth and sixth verses. They were not to visit the Samaritans: the children were to be served before the servants.

2. In respect of the doctrine they were to preach; and this was a preparatory to the gospel, afterwards to be preached by Christ himself, ver. 7; The kingdom of heaven is at hand.

SERMON XXV.

HEBREWS ii. 16.

For verily he took not on him the nature of angels; but ht took on him the seed of Abraham.

IF we reflect upon the state of the world before the coming of Christ, we shall find, that a long and a dark night of ignorance had overspread almost the whole universe for about the space of four thousand years before God was pleased to permit this great Sun of righteousness to arise upon it. The improvements of their reason were but mean, but their religion scandalous: the most advanced results of both amounting to no more but this; that they did, or at least might, by the force of natural reason, know that there was a God; and knowing him to be God, they could not but know him also to be infinitely wise, powerful, just, holy, and the like. Upon the knowledge of this, (as it is easy to glance from one contrary to the other,) they could not but consequentially know themselves to be impure, unjust, and unholy. And being so, whether, upon the stock of nature or tradition, they could proceed to collect further, that this holy God would be concerned to punish them for not being so too; and in case he should, whether yet he would not accept of some other thing as vicarious, to bear the blow of divine justice due to themselves; I say, whether they gathered this from the conclusions of reason or the reports of tradition, certain it is, that this persuasion put the world upon sacrifices, as the great propitiations of a Deity, and arts of recompence to an offended justice.

This was then the sum of their religion, for them to sin, and the poor beast to die; for the man to do like a beast, and the beast to suffer for the man. Nay, it improved even to homicide; and to offer up the fruit of the body for the sin of the soul was a sublime satisfaction. To expiate impiety by inhumanity; to kill the innocent (as it were) to get his innocence; to let others blood for our distempers; this was all the religion of a world acted by the dictates of ignorance and the overruling fallacy of a brutish, inveterate custom.

It was now time for God to commiserate the ab surd and soul-ruining devotions of a besotted world, and for Christ to step forth and declare, that such sacrifice and burnt-offerings God would not, and therefore that a body was to be prepared for himself.

Hereupon, to rescue the deluded sons of men from their sins, and, what was much more sinful, from their religion; as the reserve of Providence, as the inheritance of the last ages; as it were to credit the concluding scene and last going off of the world, in the fulness of time, Christ was born, and sent by his Father, to be the great mediator and instructor of mankind; both to discourage and to expiate sin, and to teach the world the worship of their Maker.

And all this he was to effect by the strongest methods and most miraculous condescensions to our likeness, by being God manifested, or rather hidden, in the flesh; clothing his divine nature with all the frailties of the human, suppressing his glories, and, in a word, by taking upon him the seed of Abraham.

As for the words that I have here pitched upon, it must be confessed that the translation represents them very different from what they are in the original, which runs thus; Οὐ γὰρ δήπου ἐπιλαμβάνεται τοὺς ἀγγέλος. Where we find that what we render by the preter tense, he took, the original has by the present, he takes: and what we render the nature of angels, the original has only τοὺς ἀγγέλος, angelos. Neither is it clear, that to take on him, or to assume, is the genuine signification of ἐπιλαμβάνεται. This text in deed is generally used by divines, ancient and modern, to prove Christ’s incarnation, or assuming the human nature, notwithstanding that this word ἐπιλαμβάνεται (as Camero well observes) is nowhere else in scripture taken in this sense. St. Paul uses it in 1 Tim. vi. 19, but with him there it signifies, to apprehend, to attain, or compass a thing. But its chief signification, and which seems most suitable to this place, is, to rescue and deliver; it being taken from the usual manner of rescuing a thing; namely, by catching hold of it, and so forcibly wringing it from the adversary. As David, when he rescued the lamb from the bear and the lion’s mouth, might be properly said ἐπιλαμβάνεται. And Grotius observes, that the proper sense of this word is, vindicare seu asserere in libertatem manu injecta. Though, if he will needs have that to be the signification of the word in this place, it may be feared that he does it out of too much favour to a bad hypothesis.

Before we proceed any further therefore, it will, I think, be of moment to settle the right interpretation of the word, and to see whether ἐπιλαμβάνεται may be more properly rendered, he takes hold of, or delivers, or, he takes on him, or assumes. That the word will bear both, is certain; and it is also as certain, that if the text be considered in itself, abstracted from what follows, it will properly enough bear the former sense, of delivering or taking hold of: according to which, it will run thus; Christ verily does not deliver or redeem angels, but he delivers and redeems the seed of Abraham. Which interpretation surely does not offer any violence to the sense of the text.

Those who will not allow Christ to have had any existence antecedent to his conception, nor a divine nature, which did afterwards assume the human, are earnest for this interpretation, utterly excluding and rejecting the other. I have already granted, that the words thus rendered contain in them a truth; but then we must remember, that every true proposition drawn out of a text is not therefore the true interpretation of it. The fathers generally take ἐπιλαμβάνεται in the sense in which it is here translated; namely, he assumed, or took on him the seed of Abraham. And besides the influence that antiquity and general consent ought deservedly to have upon us in expounding scripture, I conceive, that there are not wanting also solid arguments to evince, that this is the proper sense of the word, as it is here used, and not the other.

For the proving of which, I shall premise this one note, (which indeed is clear of itself from the very illative particle therefore,) that this and the following verse are so joined together, as to make up one argument; of which argument this verse is the antecedent, and the other the consequent, or inference drawn from it.

Upon this consideration, I thus argue:

1. If in this verse is not signified Christ’s taking on him our nature, how comes it to pass, that, in the next verse, which has an illative dependence upon this, the seed of Abraham are called his brethren? for his being their deliverer only would not make them his brethren; but his taking of our nature properly does. According to which, the argument proceeds fully thus; That since Christ was pleased, by assuming our nature, to be our brother, it became him to be like his brethren in all the circumstances of that nature.

2. In the following verse, which is argumentatively inferred from this, the thing designed to be proved is Christ’s priesthood; but his being barely a deliverer is not a proper, specific medium to infer that; whereas his assuming of our nature is: forasmuch as a priest is to have a cognation or conjunction of nature with those for whom he is to offer sacrifices. For none but a man can be a priest to offer for men.

3. In the fourteenth verse of this chapter, the apostle had already expressed the very same thing here contended for, in these words: Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself took part of the same. So that it is probable, that the apostle is here still pursuing the same subject, namely, Christ’s incarnation, or investing of himself with the human nature. And therefore I cannot see what advantage it could be to any, to rend away this interpretation from the seventeenth verse, when the same sense is so clear and resplendent in the former verse, that it sets it above the attempts of any, either to pervert the meaning, or to evade the force of it.

Having thus given an exposition of the words, I shall cast the prosecution of them into these particulars.

I. To shew what is naturally inferred from Christ’s taking on him the seed of Abraham.

II. To shew why Christ took on him this, rather than the nature of angels.

I. For the first of these, there are four things that follow, and are inferred upon it.

I. As, first, the divine nature of Christ is unavoidably consequent from hence. There are those who assert Christ to be a mere creature, and not at all to have existed before his conception in the womb of the Blessed Virgin: to cut asunder which blasphemous assertion, I need use no other argument than this; If Christ took upon him the seed of Abraham, or the human nature, then he had a being antecedent to the taking upon him this nature. The consequence is proved thus: Every action proceeds from some being or nature that does exist; but to assume the human nature is an action, and that not the action of the nature assumed; therefore it must be the action of some nature that did exist before. That this act of assumption could not be the action of the human nature is evident; because in transient actions the same thing cannot be the agent and the object, in reference to the same action. And therefore since the act of assuming did terminate in the human nature, as the thing assumed, it could not issue from the same human nature as the agent assuming.

This argumentation is clear and undeniable, that Christ’s taking upon him the human nature infers, that he did it by virtue of a nature preexistent to that, which, since it was not the nature of angels, (as is here expressly denied,) it follows, that it was a divine nature.

And truly, those who confess Christ the Saviour of the world, but allow him not this, make him a Saviour without a power to save. This is a work to be carried on against enemies and oppositions insuperable by any thing under a deity. Nothing can conquer and break asunder the bars of sin and death but the arms of omnipotence: the Devil could not be his captive, had he not been his creature.

No conquest to be had over the strong man, but by a stronger; and nothing stronger than the angelic nature, but the divine. The strength of sin is the law; and no strength can master the law, but that strength which made it. He must command the gates of heaven who lets sinners into it; otherwise the seed of Abraham may be like the stars indeed for number, but not for place.

2. Upon the same ground is inferred the reality of Christ’s human nature. This certainly is so evident, that one would think it uncapable of being denied: but, between the contrariety of error and the clashings of heretics, Christ shall be allowed to be neither God nor man. Incredibly strange and ridiculous, and even monstrous, are the several opinions of heretics concerning this matter. The Marcionites and the Valentinians affirmed that Christ had no real, but an imaginary, aerial, celestial body; and that he appeared only under the external form and shape of a man, but was never really united to man’s nature. But this fancy is irrefragably refuted by this, that Christ is said so to have took upon him the nature of men, as not of angels; but that Christ, under the Old Testament, frequently appeared to the patriarchs as an angel, has been always held by the church. From whence it follows, that he took upon him the human nature, in a way much beyond a bare appearance under it; forasmuch as thus he might be said to have took upon him the nature of angels, under which, heretofore, he appeared so often.

The same Valentinians also, together with the Apollinarians, affirmed that Christ received not his body from the Blessed Virgin, but brought it with him from heaven. But how then could he have been said to have took upon him the seed of Abraham, since he could not do it any otherwise, but by descending from Abraham, according to the flesh; nor could he pretend to any such descent from him, but as he was the natural son of Mary?

Others, as the Arians and the Eunomians, admit ting that Christ took on him a real human body, yet denied that he took on him an human soul; asserting that his divine nature supplied the functions of that. But upon this supposition, with what shew of reason can it be affirmed that he took upon him our nature, since the human nature is adequately compounded and made up of body and soul, as its two essential, constituent parts: so that a body is no more a man’s nature, without the concomitance of a rational soul, than a carcass is a man; or that two units can make up a perfect number of four.

Others, as the heretics of Armenia, affirmed that the body Christ had from his mother Mary was absolutely impassible; uncapable of suffering, or being injured by any external impression. Which, as it is a bold and absurd falsity, confuted by the whole history of Christ’s life, which was nothing else but a series of sufferings; so it is particularly dashed in Heb. iv. 15, where it is said, that he was tempted like unto us in all things, sin only excepted. And in the seventeenth and eighteenth verses of this second to the Hebrews it is eminently affirmed, that he was made like unto his brethren, for this very cause, that he might suffer, and by his sufferings become a merciful high-priest.

He took not only the privileges, the excellencies, and perfections of the human nature upon him, though these had been degradations enough to him, who was the express image of his Father’s brightness; but he clothed himself with all its weaknesses and infirmities, bowed down his glories to the limited meanness of our faculties, to the poorness and affliction of our appetites: he hungered and thirsted, and was weary; lay open to all the stings of grief, and the invasions of pain. So that whatsoever the boldness or ignorance of heresy may affirm of him, by all the instances of a sad experience he found himself to be really a man.

3. The third thing deducible from the same ground, is the truth of his office and the divinity of his mission. For by thus being of the seed of Abraham, he gave one grand evidence that he was the promised Messiah: forasmuch as from the loins of Abraham was to issue this universal blessing, the desire of the nations, and the centre of all the promises and prophecies, uniting all the remote and scattered predictions in himself.

Now, as the thing that fulfils the prophecy proves the truth of it, so the prophecy mutually confirms and proves the truth of the thing that fulfils it. And therefore, as the old prophecies, finding an exact completion in Christ, yield an invincible argument against all atheists, (Machiavel himself confessing an utter impotence to resolve the problem of prophecies, without allowing a Deity;) so Christ’s giving an event to them, undeniably proves, that he was intended by them against the Jews. Of whom, in this controversy, we have this vast advantage, that we profess not to prove Jesus Christ to be the Messiah, but by those records and arguments which they have in their own custody; nor to evince the truth of our New Testament, but by mediums drawn from their Old.

For is it imaginable, that all those various prophecies, commenced in such different periods of time, could meet so exactly in Christ by mere accident? and be drawn down through so many generations to a concurrence in his person, only by a lucky hit? Can chance, be so uniform, and casualty so certain? This is against the notions of reason, the course of nature, and the voice of experience; and consequently, to any considering mind, incredible, be cause in itself morally impossible.

4. The fourth and last inference that we shall gather from hence, shall be to discover to us Christ’s voluntary choice and design, to assume a condition here upon earth, low and contemptible. One would have thought, that if he had resolved to be a man, and to choose an alliance to dust and ashes; yet that he would at least have been framed out of the best clay, and cast into the noblest mould: but, that he might humble himself to the nethermost state of contempt, he chose to descend from the seed of Abraham; who, if we set aside their religious privileges, (which yet they enjoyed only, but neither improved nor deserved,) were certainly, both upon a moral and political account, the most sordid and degenerate race of men upon the earth.

For, first, to rate them by the reports made of them by the penmen of holy writ, who, being Jews themselves, cannot be supposed to have been partial in transmitting the infamy of their countrymen to posterity; yet, how ugly do they appear, even in their own story! their whole narrative containing nothing but a continued vicissitude of their idolatry, impurity, and rebellion. Who would have thought that men, with the remembrance of such prodigious miracles, and immediate discoveries of the divine power and favour to them in Egypt, new and fresh in their minds, could, as soon as ever Moses had turned his back, deify a golden calf, and debase their reason to such a low and ridiculous instance of idolatry? How were they always murmuring after mercies, and doubting after experience! No sooner had God done one miracle before them, but they doubted whether he could do another. How unworthily did they treat Moses and Aaron, and most of their deliverers! particularly Gideon; after his death deserting threescore of his lawful issue, and giving the kingdom to his base son! How causelessly did they relinquish David, and revolt to Absalom! and then, how ridiculously and meanly did they cringe to him, to resume the kingdom! It were infinite to pursue all their baseness. There was scarce a prophet or messenger of God sent to them, but they murdered him: and at length, to consummate and heighten their villainy to the utmost, they imbrued their hands in the blood of their long expected, but at length mistaken Messias. And, which yet advances their sottishness, whereas they rejected Christ, not withstanding that he had done those miracles, that were never done by any before him; yet when several impostors and false messias’s rose up after him, who shewed them neither sign nor wonder, except of madness and impudence; yet (as appears out of their own Josephus) they were still acknowledged by a considerable number of followers.

And, to add the judgment of men to matters of fact, (of which those that have been mentioned are but very few,) there is no nation in the world, al most, but hates and contemns them. As early as the time of Jacob, we read, that they were an abomination to the Egyptians, Gen. xliii. 32. And since, they have been successively loathed by all the great and civilized nations, as the Chaldeans, the Persians, the Grecians. And as for the Romans, no Latin writer ever mentions them, but it is with scorn and contempt: Cicero, Suetonius, Tacitus, Pliny, Lucius Florus, Martial, Juvenal, all have left them branded with a mark of ignominy. And at this very day, how much are they disgusted in all those kingdoms and dominions where they are dispersed! They are like dung upon the face of the earth; and that not so much for their being scattered, as for being so offensive.

Now certainly this may be rationally collected, that it could not be, that all nations, in all ages, should thus conspire in a detestation of them; but that there was some peculiar vileness essentially fixed in the genius of this people, contrary to those natural and generous principles of morality and converse, which universally possess and act the behaviour of the rest of mankind. Nothing could be more full and expressive than St. Paul’s testimony of them, 1 Thess. ii. 15, They please not God, and are contrary to all men. This is properly the Jewish temper and disposition.

I conclude, therefore, that it is one great instance of Christ’s humiliation, that he derived his nativity from this race: so that the prophet Isaiah might justly say, that he should spring up as a plant out of a dry ground. As one that had drained all the worth and goodness of that nation into himself; which made those who lived both before and after him to have so little of it. He appeared amongst them, like a single star in a dark night; or, indeed, as a sun: and that not so much shining upon, as rather shining out of a dunghill.

II. I come now to the other general thing proposed for the handling of the words; namely, to shew why Christ took upon him the nature of man, and not of angels.

In things that are the immediate results of the divine will, it is a bold venture to search into the causes of them; and when we speak either of God or of the king, to assign an antecedent reason of their actions, and to be peremptory in alleging why they should do this or this.

The divine will is absolute; it is its own reason: it is both the producer and the ground of all its acts. It moves not by the external impulse or inclination of objects, but determines itself by an absolute autocracy.

And therefore as to the present inquiry, why Christ rather assumed the nature of men than that of angels; it is a full, abundant, and satisfactory answer, that so it seemed fit to the good pleasure of the all-wise God. Yet, since God is sometimes pleased, in his transacting with man, to descend some steps from the throne of his majesty, and to bring down his great counsels to the level of our apprehension, so as to submit his actions to be canvassed and cleared, even at the bar of reason itself; it will be found, that there are not wanting arguments to evince the reasonableness and equity of this his proceeding.

The reasons, therefore, why Christ took upon him the nature and the mediatorship of men, and not of angels, may be these two.

1. The transcendent greatness and malignity of the sin of the angels above that of men. What that particular sin was, for which the angels were thrown down from their station, is hard, and perhaps impossible, to be determined; yet men inquire after it as freely, as if it might: and some pitch it upon pride; though, in their confident asserting of that which is no where delivered, they seem to discover no small pride and arrogance themselves. But whatsoever that sin was, (which to determine is not here material,) certain it is, that it did much exceed the guilt and provoking qualities of the sin of man; and that in these two respects:

(1.) As being committed against a much greater light, which is to be the proper guide and ruler of the will in all its choices. The light of man’s understanding, while innocent, was clear indeed, but small and diminutive, subject to the clouds of fallacy and inadvertency. But the angelical intellect was strong and intuitive, above the reach of those mists and clouds, that the lower region of the human faculties was subject to. Now, proportionable to the means of avoiding sin, is the guilt of falling into it. Man stumbled, and fell under the light and direction of a star; but the angels fell headlong under the light and guidance of a sun: so that no plea, no rational extenuation of their offence could be alleged. Whereas the different nature of man’s transgression might afford such grounds to the ratiocinations of divine mercy, as though they did not excuse man’s sin, yet might excite God’s compassion.

(2.) The sin of the angels commenced upon a greater liberty of will and freedom of choice. There was no devil to tempt them to become devils; no seducer, of a stronger reason, to impose upon theirs. They moved entirely upon the motives of an intrinsic malice. But man was circumvented with fallacy, and tempted with importunity: and so great a share of the guilt may be devolved upon the temptation, that it is very possible, that if he had not been tempted, he had not fell. I confess, there is that inseparable prerogative of absoluteness in the will of every man, that it defies coaction, and cannot be forced by any external impression: for, indeed, if it might, so far it could not be said to sin, no action being sin that is not voluntary.

But then, the vehemence of persuasion, the restlessness of importunity, are great invasions upon this freedom and indifference of the will: and though they cannot wound or impair the faculty itself, yet they much hinder and perplex the actual use and exercise of it; and consequently, though they are not sufficient to acquit the sinner in an ill choice, yet they afford many grains of allowance, make great abatements, and alter the measures of his guilt. Strong and importunate persuasions have not the nature and formality of force; but they have oftentimes the effect of it: and he that solicits earnestly, sometimes determines as certainly as if he did force. The will of man, brought to sin by the tempter, is like a bowl running down an hill: its own weight and figure is, indeed, one cause of the motion; but the hand that threw it, is another.

2. The next, and perhaps the grand cause, that induced Christ to take upon him the nature and mediation of men, and not of angels, might be this; that, without such a Redeemer, the whole race and species of mankind had perished, as being all involved in the sin of their representative: whereas though many of the angels sinned, yet as many, if not more, persisted in their innocence; so that the whole kind was not cashiered by an universal ruin, nor made unserviceable to their Creator, in the nobler instances of active obedience.

Which mankind was, and had so continued, as in that estate; having no other motives to act them, but an horrid despair, and expectation of future torment: the material issue of which could have been nothing but a confirmed malice against God, exerting itself in the lives of men, to the overflowing of the world with an uncontrolled torrent of the highest villainies and enormities.

But now, was it not a proportionable object for the designs of divine mercy to rescue so great and noble a part of the creation from a total perdition? Was it not pity, that so fair a writing should be all dashed, and for ever defaced by one blot? that sin should be able to do so much mischief, and, as it were, to counterwork the divine power and goodness, by lopping off one of the masterpieces of his work at a blow!

This had been more destructive than a deluge; it had been an universal ruin, without the mitigation of any exception. But this is not the genius and way of God’s working, who designs particular mercies in the midst of general judgments. Still he has a reserve of favour; and the flood that drowns the world bears up the ark.

Christ saw us ruined in the loins of our first parents; and it moved his compassion to behold our death, earlier than our nativity. Even amongst men, if a woman with child be condemned, there is yet mercy for the unborn infant; and it extends so far as to reprieve the guilty parent. No wonder then, if the divine mercy was not inferior in the methods of salvation, and if the mercies of a judge did not exceed the compassions of a saviour.

And now, what can the result and upshot of this whole transaction be, but to quicken, or rather transport us in our returns of gratitude; to advance gratitude into admiration, and admiration into astonishment? Why should the Son of God disrobe himself of his eternal excellencies, to come and wrap himself in dust and ashes, to converse with carcasses, with weakness and mortality, with vile creatures and viler sinners? and all this to rescue and pluck some wretched, smarting firebrands out of the eternal flame, where otherwise they must have lain consuming, but not consumed, for ever.

With what face or heart can any one, having this thought fresh upon him, resolve to sin? Has Christ passed over the fallen angels without any commiseration; so that, for want of a redeemer, they are passed into the state of devils? And shall we, by having and abusing a redeemer, make ourselves worse?

Still let us remember, that Christ so redeems us from wrath, that he will first redeem us from our vain conversation: and that, by this stupendous in carnation of the divine nature, he made himself the Son of man, that, by the change of our nature, we might become the sons of God.