Sermon Xxvii.

Sermon Xxvii.

TRIAL AND TRIUMPH OF FAITH.

SERMON XXI.

"Then Jesus answered, and said unto her, O woman, great is thy faith," etc.

THIS is the last passage of the text, containing a commendation of the woman, given to her by Christ in her face. (2.) An answer according to her desire. (3.) The effect of her praying with instancy and pressing importunity of faith: the devil is cast out of her daughter.

Christ acknowledgeth here, that instancy of praying in faith, will overcome God, and Satan, and all the saddest temptations that can befall the child of God. Hence, observe what acts of efficacious power instant and earnest prayer putteth forth upon God, and how the clay-creature doth work upon, and prevail with the great Potter and former of all things.

1. Prayer is a messenger, and a swift and winged post dispatched up to court. David sent away this post early in the morning, with morning wings: "My voice shalt thou hear in the morning." (Psalm 5:3.) The post is himself, for the word is, I will address my person, as in battle array. "Set thyself in order before me, (and) stand up," saith Elihu to Job; or, I will address my words, (Job 33:5). "Now he hath not directed his words against me." (Job 32:14.) The seventy render it parastesomai soi; and David sent himself to heaven, not only as a post, but as the word(Atsappeh) soundeth, 'I wall look up, or, espy;' as one that keepeth watch and ward, waiting for an answer from God, as the word is, (Hab. 2:1, and Psalm 18:6.) "In my distress I called upon the Lord,—and my cry came before him, even into his ears."

2. Prayer putteth a challenge upon God, for his covenant's sake and his promise; that is greater boldness, than to speak to God and wait on; "Our adversaries have trodden down thy sanctuary: We are thine, thou never barest rule over them, they were not called by thy name," (Isa. 63:18,19). "Behold, O Lord, and consider, to whom thou hast done this." (Lam. 2:20.) "O Lord, why hast thou made us to err from thy ways, and hardened our heart from thy fear? Return for thy servants' sake, the tribes of thine inheritance." (Isa. 63:17.) Hence is there a holy chiding with God: "O my God, I cry in the daytime, and thou hearest not, and in the night season, and am not silent." (Psalm 22:2.) "How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord, for ever? How long wilt thou hide thy face from me?" (Psalm 13:1.)

3. It putteth God to great straits and suffering, even to the moving of his soul, (Jer. 31). When God heareth Ephraim bemoaning himself in prayer, it putteth God to a sort of pinch and condolency: "Is Ephraim my dear son? Is he my pleasant child? For since I spake against him, I do earnestly remember him still; therefore my bowels are troubled for him." (verse 20.) Is Isaac, an earthly father, moved, and his heart rent and torn with the weeping and tears of Esau, his son, so as he must confer some blessing upon him; far more must the bowels of our Father, infinite in mercy, be turned within him, at the weeping and tears of a praying and crying Church.

4. When God seemeth to sleep, in regard that his work, and the wheels of his providence are at a stand, prayer awakeneth God, and putteth him on action: "Arise, O Lord, in thine anger, lift up thyself because of the rage of mine enemies; awake for the judgment thou hast commanded," (Psalm 7:6). "Awake, why sleepest thou, O Lord! Arise, cast us not off for ever." (Psalm 44:23.) Both the words (Gnurah and Hakitsa) signify to awake out of sleep: so prayer putteth God on noble acts of omnipotency, as to bow the heavens and come down, (Isa. 64:1,) to shake and put on work all creatures in heaven and earth, for the saving of one poor man, (Psalm 18); as when the sick child crieth for pain, all the sons and servants, yea, the father of the house, and mother, are set on work, and put to business for his health. Hence when David prayed, "The earth shook, the foundations of the hills were moved, for the Lord was wroth; smoke and fiery coals went out of his mouth; he bowed the heavens and came down, he rode upon a cherub, and did fly upon the wings of the wind." (Psalm 18:6,7.) So it did put the Lord to divide the Red sea; to break the prison doors and iron chains, to deliver Peter, Paul, and Silas.

5. It acteth so upon God, that it putteth the crown upon Christ's head, and heighteneth the footstool of his throne; so much doth that prayer, "thy kingdom come," hold forth; and that last prayer of the church, which the Spirit and the Bride uttereth, "Even so, come, Lord Jesus," (Rev. 22,) is a hastening of that glorious marriage-day, when the Bride, the Lamb's wife shall be married on Jesus Christ; and a ripening of the glory of God, and of Christ the King and Head mystical of his body the Church. The glory of infinite justice, and saving grace in the redemption of men, is like a fair rose, but enclosed within its green leaves in this life. But when Christ shall appear, this rose shall be opened and cast out in breadth, its fair and beautiful leaves to be seen and smelled openly by men and angels. In very deed, this prayer, "Even so, come, Lord Jesus," is summons for the last judgment, for the full manifestation of the highest glory of Christ, in the final and consummate illustration of free grace and mercy, in the complete redemption of all the prisoners of hope, only for the declaration of the supreme Judge's glory; who shall then do execution on Satan, his angels, Antichrist, and all slaves of hell: so that though prayer made not the world, yet it may unmake it, and set up a new heaven and a new earth.

6. Prayer is a binding of God, that he cannot depart; and layeth chains on his hands, and buildeth a wall or an hedge of thorns in his way, that he cannot destroy his people: "And there is none that calleth upon thy name, and stirreth up himself to take hold of thee;" (Isa. 64:7;) there is none to lay hands on thee; "And I sought for a man amongst them that should make up the hedge, and stand in the gap, (or in the rupture made by war,) before me for the land, that I should not destroy it, but I found none." (Ezek. 22:30.) If a Moses or a Samuel should intercede by prayer, that the Lord would spare the land, his prayer should be a hedge or a wall to stand in the way of justice, to hinder the Lord to destroy his people.

7. Prayer is a heavenly violence to God expressed in divers powerful expressions; as, (1.) The faithful watchmen pray and cry to God so hard, that they give the Lord no rest, no silence, till he establish Jerusalem. (Isa. 62:6,7.) (2.) Praying is a sort of striving with the Lord: "I beseech you,—strive with me, in prayers to God for me." (Rom. 15:30). (3.) Jacob by prayer wrestled with the Lord; and the Lord, as if he had been straitened, saith, "Send me away, dismiss me. And Jacob said, I will not dismiss thee, till thou bless me:" (Gen. 32.) Which is well expounded by Hosea, chapter 12:4. Jacob had a princely power over the Angel, and prevailed, he wept, and made supplication to him. [He] is a Prince, or as many render it, Rectus fuit cum Deo, or Directus fuit, vel prosperum successum habuit, Which may note either a princedom in prayer over God, which is the true reason of the name Israel; or, as others think, he stood right up, and his prayer did not bow, nor was broken, when a temptation lay on him as heavy as a mill-stone: even when the Lord said he would depart from him, yet he prevailed under that weight. So, (Exod. 32:10,) when Moses was praying for the people, the Lord said to Moses, "Let me alone that I may destroy them." The Chaldee translates it, 'Leave off thy prayer before me.' All which tendeth to this, that prayer is a prince, and a mighty, wresthng, prevailing king, that hath strong bones, and strong arms, to be victorious with God. We know the parable of the widow, (Luke 18,) who by importunity obtained of the unjust judge, that he should avenge her of her adversary. The scope of which parable is, that prayers without fainting, putteth such a labour and a trouble upon God, that he must hear and answer the desires of his children. So doth the Lord resemble himself to a master of a family gone to bed with his children, who yet being wearied by the knocking of his neighbour, cannot choose but rise in the night, and lend him bread, to strangers come to his house.

8. Some also say, that prayer commandeth God, as Isa. 45:11: "Ask of me things to come concerning my sons, and concerning the work of my hand command ye me." Which place, though it may well bear another interpretation, yet is this not beside the scope of the text; for sure it is, that God hath laid a sort of law on himself, in regard of his binding promise, to hear the prayers of his children; and that he cometh down from the throne of his sovereignty, to submit himself to his own promise of hearing prayers, (Psalm 34:15; 65:2; 145:18,19; Matt. 7:7,8; John 14:13,14).

USE 1. If prayer prevail over God and Christ, even to the overcoming of the Devil, then much more will a praying people prevail over hell and malignants. It were wisdom then for malignants, to yield and strike sail to those, who can by prayer set Omnipotency on work, and engage the Strength of Israel against them. Amalek had Omnipotency against them, and a harder party than spears, and bows, and armed men, in that praying Moses was against them. The third Psalm was a strong piece against Absalom and Ahithophel, and all that conspired against David. Christ's prayers for the perfecting of his own body, and gathering in his first-born, include in them a curse upon all those that hinder the gathering in of his flock. Woe to the enemies, then, against whom our Intercessor prayeth curses; the prayers of Christ against his enemies shall blast them and their counsels, and all their War-undertakings.

USE 2. Some are discouraged; they can neither fight for Christ, nor do any thing to promote this cause, as wanting strength of body and means. Nay, but if thou canst pray, thou dost set the whole wheels of Omnipotency on work, for the building of the Lord's house; in which regard, the prayer of a sick and poor man shall do more in war for the cause of God, than twenty thousand men. It was not Ahasuerus, nor the grace that Esther found in the eyes of the king, that saved the whole church of the Jews from destruction, but the prayers of Esther and her maids. It is true, an angel brought Peter out of prison, (Acts 12,) but what stirred that wheel in heaven? Here's the cause, "Prayer was made without ceasing to God for Peter, by the church:" (verse 5). Prayer, prayer can put a reeling and tottering on king and court, pope, prelate, and Babylon: we are to pray the king of the bottomless pit, the man of sin, the graven images of apostate Rome, out of the world. Prayer can yoke all the swords in Europe against the Whore. Every one who hath the spirit of adoption, though poor and rejected of men, by prayer hath powerful influence on all the nations of the earth, on all Europe, on the ends of the earth, on the hearts of the Jews, on Turks and Indians. Prayer can reach as far as Omnipotency, accompanied by the wise decree of our Lord; and the poorest girl or maid that can pray, doth lend a strong lift to heighten the footstool of Christ's royal throne. Children and poor maids, by prayer, may put the crown on Christ's head, and hold up his throne, and may store and increase heaven by praying, "Thy kingdom come," and enlarge hell, and fill the pits with the dead bodies of Christ's enemies; and may, by prayer, bind kings in fetters, chain up and confine devils, subdue kingdoms.

"Great is thy faith." For the clearing of these words, we are to consider three points; (1.) What faith is. (2.) What a great faith is. (3.) Why he saith 'thy faith,' appropriating it to the woman. Now, of faith I shall speak, [1.] A word of preparations for faith; [2.] Of the grounds and necessary motives to faith; [3.] Of the ingredients of faith; [4.] Of the sinner's warrants to believe; [5.] Of divers sorts of false and ill rooted faiths.

There is a preparation going before faith.

1. There be some preparations which go before faith: (1.) Faith is a seed of heaven; it is not sown by the "good husbandman" in unploughed and in fallow ground; Christ soweth not amongst thorns. We are "builded on the faith;" stones are hewn, rubbish removed, before one stone be laid. (2.) Every act of grace in God is an act of Omnipotency, and so requireth not time or succession: God might have set up the frame of the world in all its fullness, with less than one thought, or act of his will put forth by Omnipotency. Yet did our Lord subject the acts of creating the first world to the rule of time, and to a circle of evening and morning, nights and days; so doth the Lord set up a new world of faith, in a soul void of faith, by degrees. There is a time, when there is neither perfect night nor perfect day, but the twilight of the morning; and God, notwithstanding, created the morning, no less than the noon-day sun. There is a half summer, and a half spring, in the close of the spring, which God made. The embryo, or birth, not yet animated, is neither seed only, nor a man-child only; so is a convert in his first framing, neither perfectly untamed corruption, because there is a crack and a throw in the iron-sinew of the neck; nor is he a thorough child of light; but as we say, in the dead-throe, "in the place of breaking forth of children," as Hosea speaketh. A child with his head come forth of the womb, and no more, and so half born only; so is the convert, while he is in the making, not taken off Christ's wheels; half in the borders of hell, and looking afar off at the suburbs of heaven, not far from the kingdom of heaven.

There's no necessary and intrinsical connexion between preparations going before faith & faith.

But, 2. This bridge over the water, between the kingdom of darkness and the state of saving grace, hath no necessary connection with that kingdom of the Son of God's love, but such as it hath from the sole and mere decree of the free election of grace; and therefore, many reprobates may enter the bridge, and never go along to the other bank of the river. God breaketh the bridge, this being the very division and parting of these two unsearchable ways of election and reprobation, yet so as the sin in cutting the bridge, is the guilt of the reprobate man;—as many births die in the breaking forth out of the womb, divers roses in the bud are blasted, and never see harvest, through the fault of the seed, not of the sun.

Affections going before conversion and following after differ specifically.

3. It is true, the new creation and life of God is virtually seminaliter in these preparations, as the seed is a tree in hope, the blossom an apple, the foundation a palace in its beginning: so half a desire in the non-converted, is love-sickness for Christ in the seed; legal humiliation is, in hope, evangelical repentance, and mortification. But, as the seed and the growing tree differ not gradually only, but in nature and specifically; as a thing without life, is not of that same nature and essence, with a creature that hath a vegetative life and growth; so the preparatory good affections of desire, hunger, sorrow, humiliation, going before conversion, differ specifically from those renewed affections which follow after; the former being acts of grace, but not of saving grace, which goeth along with the decree of the election of grace, and of like latitude with it; the latter being the native and con-natural fruits of the Spirit, of which the apostle speaketh, (Gal. 5:22,23). In which regard, no man is morally, and in regard of a divine promise, such as this—Do this, and this, and God shall bestow on you, the grace of conversion—fitter, and in a nearer disposition to conversion than another:

All are alike unfit for conversion.

(1.) Because we read not of any such promise in the gospel; (2.) Because amongst things void of life, all are equally void of life, and here there are no degrees of more or less life, no intention, no remission or slacking of the degrees of life. For even as an ape or a horse are as equally no men, as stones and dead earth are no men; though an ape or a horse have life common to them with men, which stones and earth have not, yet they are equally as destitute of reason and an intellectual life, which is the only life of a man as a man, as stones and earth are; so Saul, only humbled by the terrors of the law, and sick of half-raw desires of Christ, is no less yet a creature void of the life of God, than when he was in the highest pitch of obstinacy, spitting out blood and murders on the face of that Lord Jesus whom he persecuted. And in this regard, conversion is no less pure grace, every way free to Saul humbled, and so, having only half a thirst and desire of Christ, than if he were yet in the fever of his highest blasphemy, thirsting after the blood of the saints.

Some nearer conversion than others are.

4. Yet are the saints thus prepared and humbled, but not converted materially, physically, or as it were, passively nearer Christ; and in relation to God's eternal election of grace, who maketh this a step relative to his eternal love, they are under the reach of Christ's love, and at the elbow of the right arm of the Father, who draweth souls to the Son, (John 6:44). And in the gospel-bounds and fields, or lists of free grace, as the height and rage of a fever is near a cool and a return to health, and yet most contrary to health; and the utmost flowing of the sea, when it is at the remotest score of the coast, is a disposition to an ebbing, though most contrary to a low ebb; so are the humbled souls who have some lame and maimed estimative power of light, to put half a price on Christ, and find apprehended sin, the mouth, throat, and out-entry of hell, in that case most contrary to Christ. A fish within that circle of the water that the net casteth, is no less living in its own element of water, than if it were in the bosom of the ocean, some hundred miles distant from fisher or net; yet is it in a near disposition to be catched.

Three grounds and motives of believing.

For grounds of faith to lead us on to believing, consider, (1.) two words, (Col. 1:27,) spoken of the object of faith. [1.] It is named "The riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles;" [2.] "which is," saith Paul, "Christ in you, the hope of glory."

[1.] Now, faith leadeth us to a mystery that none knoweth, but such as are the intimate friends of Christ, and are put upon all Christ's secret cabinet councils. (2.) Glory is so taking a lover, that it will deprive a natural man of his sleep; but the glory of a kingdom revealed in the gospel, is the flower, marrow, and spirits of all glory imaginable. (3.) What is riches of glory? "That I should preach, the gold mine of the riches of the glory of Christ,"33 (Eph. 3:8,) so deep, that none can find them out, and so large, that when they are found out, men and angels shall not find their bottom. Oh, what foldings, and turnings, and inextricable windings of glory, are lapped up in Christ! Yea, treasures, all treasures are in him, (Col. 2:3,) so it is called, (2 Cor. 4:17,) baros doxes, a weight of glory. But, (2.) A weight eternal, a weight aged, and full of ages of glory. (3.) An exceeding great weight, and not that only; but, (4.) a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.34 Do but weigh how weighty precious Jesus Christ is, how heavy and how massy and ponderous the crown is, and what millions of diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and precious stones do shine, and cast out rays and beams of pure and unmixed glory out of his crown! What smiles and kisses breathing out glory on thy now sinful face, shall come out of Christ. Now the light of faith, even as a lantern, or a day-star in a cloudy dawning, leadeth thee up to this.

[2.] "Christ in you the hope of glory." How in them? By faith, (Eph. 3:17). Christ, the hope of glory, is Christ the glory hoped for, by a figure; that is, faith putteth Christ and heaven in you by hope. So, in the believer, there is Christ the Lamb, the throne, the glorified angels, and sinless and blessed musicians that stand in a circle about the throne, praising Him that liveth for ever. All these are in the believer by faith; and in him is heaven, the tree of life, the higher paradise, the river of water of life; unto all these faith entitleth the soul, and they be all nothing to Christ, the hope of glory. Even the only-begotten son and heir of a king, is called the hope of his house, the only hope of his house; but, in regard the heirs of mortal kings are mortal, the house is weak, and standeth but upon one foot, when he hath but one mortal heir. Now, it is the infinite perfection of God, that he can have but one son who is infinite, and the same eternal and immortal God with the Father, and that he cannot die. So Christ standeth the only hope of the house of heaven, a king by hope, the king of hope; and all hope of the captives and sons of hope, and all the glory of his Father's house hangeth upon him: Christ hath all the heirs upon his shoulder, and faith investeth the believer to all this power and glory.

2. Faith's object the marrow of God's attributes to speak so.

(2.) Faith must be so much the more precious, as that it layeth hold, for its possession, on God, and on the garland, marrow (if any comparison here can stand) and flower of all God's attributes, [1.] the righteousness of Christ. [2.] The free grace of God, the most taking, heart-ravishing attribute in God, and most suitable to our sinful condition. [3.] The high and deep love of God, and love which dwelleth in and with the noble and excellent blood that satisfieth infinite justice. There is no such glory, by any act of obedience tendered to God, by Adam in his innocent condition, or by angels which never sinned.

3. Faith a Catholic Grace required in our actions natural & civil as well as spiritual.

(3.) There is as great a necessity of faith as of life; for the justified man must "live by faith." There is no grace so catholic: it being of necessity interwoven in all our actions, as they fall under moral consideration; not only in supernatural actions, but also in all our natural and civil actions, insofar as they must be spiritualized, in relation to God's honour, (1 Cor. 10:31). So as Joshua, Baruch, Samson, David, did fight battles, kill men, subdue kingdoms by faith, (Heb. 11:32,33,) so must the soldier now fight by that same faith, and so are the saints to eat, drink, sleep, journey, buy, sell by faith. We are not to put on faith as a cloak, or an upper garment, when we go to the streets, fields, or church, and then lay it aside in the house, at table, or in bed; yea, the renewed man is not to eat and sleep, because the light of reason and the law of nature teacheth him so to do, or the convenience of a calling; for then, all those actions shall be resolved in the same principles, and formal reason of moral performance of them, in the believer, as in the carnal man, in whom a natural spirit is steersman; and then we do but, in these actions, "walk in the light of our own fire, and the sparks that we ourselves have kindled," and shall not see to go to bed, "but lie down in sorrow," (Isa. 50:11). But we are to set faith as the plummet and line to regulate these actions, to do them, (1.) Because He who hath bought us with a price, commandeth us by the light of nature. (2.) And the light of faith is to moderate us in eating, drinking, sleeping, according to Christian sobriety, in the measure of the action. (3.) Faith teacheth us not to eat, that we may eat, or for a natural or civil end. Grace heighteneth the natural intention to a supernatural end, and to do all these for God and his service, (1 Cor. 10:31). And "whatsoever we do" (though but civil service, as servants to earthly masters in a civil calling, in trading, in arts), "we are to do all as to the Lord, not unto men," (Col. 3:23).

Then Christ, acting and moving by the light of faith, is the formal reason and principle in which lastly and formally (ultimat�) all our actions are resolved. (2.) Look of how much worth and price thy soul is; of as great necessity is faith, except thou wouldst look for the gospel vengeance, the day, or the ages of eternal vengeance at Christ's appearance, (2 Thess. 1:8; Isa. 61:2; John 3:18-36; 8:24).

Objection. "But if it be so, that faith is required in all that I do, the business of salvation (may some say) is hard and difficult work. Where shall I have faith for every stirring of my foot?"

Answer. I answer, as all our actions, except where imagination is principle of the act, must be deliberate, and so the actions of a rational man, so must they be moral. Now, there is no morality in a man who is a citizen of the church, but the morality of faith; for it is a duty laid upon every one within the visible church, that all his actions moral be watered and lustered with faith. And the truth is, the work of our salvation being compared to sailing, (Heb. 6:19,) and to fighting, (2 Tim. 4:7; 2 Tim. 2:3,4,) it is very like a ship, which requireth many hands, and much attentive carefulness in the owner and sailors. Now the mast is hurt, then somewhat wanting in the deck; now the helm is faulty, then the cords are to be repaired; or the anchor is broken, or she taketh in underwater, or the sail is torn, or the motion slow. There is charge to the owner, and much work to all hands. And how many things are required to a huge body of an army? So many thousand men must be liable to so many thousand wants. Some are sick, some wounded, some a-dying, some hungry, some naked, some fall off the army, and are catched by the enemy; some be faint, some too bold and precipitate; yea, armour, houses, bread, drink, fire, tents, physicians, workmen, mattocks, spades, bridges, ladders, homes, engines of war, art and skill, medicine, counsel, courage, intelligence, and a thousand things of this kind are requisite; and seldom is an army, but there be some one inconvenience or other in this needy and cumbersome huge body. And when is the business of salvation not at a stand one way or other? Is there not either one piece or other, the shield of faith, or the anchor of hope, or the breast-plate of righteousness, or some the like, broken or faulty? Is not our Guide, who hath seven eyes, ten times a-day cumbered with us? Must not Christ solder our broken weapons, sew our torn sails, repair one breach or other in us? In a thousand the like, faith is to improve the free grace, the omnipotence, the unchangeable love of Christ, to promote his own work, and to "work in us to will, and to do, according to his good pleasure," (Phil. 2:13).

Now, for the ingredients of faith: (1.) There be in us, (2 Cor. 10:5,) Logismoi, great forts raised against the light of faith; these natural discourses in the mind, that are great works and heights, strongholds builded against Christ. The prime faculty, reason, the discoursive power (dianoia,) that thinketh she hath wit enough against Christ, and to keep the man out of all danger of eternal salvation, overtoppeth and outgroweth all gospel truths: Christ must overpower carnal, fat, rank and heady soldiers, called thoughts, every thought, and so kill some that will not be taken, and lead captive other thoughts to the obedience of faith. Reason is a predominant bone in itself. The carnal mind neither will, nor can keep rank as an obedient soldier under the law of God, (Rom. 8:7). It is much for fine, silken, and golden reason, to say to Christ, Lord, there is more of a beast in me than of a man, I have not the understanding of a man. (Prov. 30:2.) The learned, the schoolmen seldom believe, except grey-haired wit turn a child, and go to school again, to learn from Christ the new art of believing; for there was never an act of unbelief in any, but it grew out of this proud and rank stalk of a lofty wit. Therefore, Christ breaks out a new window in the soul, and brings in a new sun that flesh and blood never saw, nor heard of before, (Matt. 16:17). (2.) Faith hath low and creeping affections to the creature: but when the affections are big with child of the creature, as, [1.] They are strained and swelled in their acts, faith is no faith, but a delusion. The rich man speaketh with all his heart, and with good-will of his full barns; and it is clear, he had neither faith nor hope towards eternity, (Luke 12:19,20). For every word being (as we say) of the length of a cubit, a foot and a half, he casteth forth words of pulling down, building greater houses, and scraping in all; his goods are, Ta gennemata mou, kai ta agatha mou, "my goods, all my births and bowels, and all my good things;" for he had no other good things, and there is no apostrophe in the words: he speaketh them with a full sound, and we speak with good will these things that we tell to our soul. Faith hath but half words and half affections touching the world; half acts, or broken acts in the affections, closing with the creature, smell of a faith with child of eternity. To make the excellency of the creature a matter of mere opinion; to reckon the world's witchcrafts of lust, gain, glory, but uncertain and topic arguments to conclude a Godhead, and a golden heaven in the creature, is the height of the wisdom of faith. So Paul, "I am crucified with Christ." (Gal. 2:20.) O then (may some say), Paul, you are a dead man. He saith, No. "Nevertheless, I live," but I live the life of faith, "For Christ liveth in me." All his motions toward the creature were half dead, like the vital motions of a crucified man half out of the world, and his acts of faith were lively and vital, and high-tuned, like the highest note in the music-song. Faith cannot break, and violently rend asunder the two sides of the affections, with too violent and intense acts of love, joy, fear, desire, sorrow, as these are terminated upon the creature. It is true, faith clippeth nothing from the utmost and most superlative pitch of the love of God, of desire, fear, sorrow, joy, as they act upon God; but addeth wind to the sails in that flux of the soul's way toward God. But Faithmoderateth and lesseneth all these in relation to the creature; so the faith, which hath its direct aspect toward eternity, and looketh on the shortness of sliding away time, and the transient wheeling away of the poor figure of this world, (1 Cor. 7:29-31,) turneth all these acts into but half a face on the creature, and into leisurely and leaden motions, or half to non-acts, as if made up of heavenly contradictions: "Having wives, having not wives; weeping, not weeping; rejoicing, not rejoicing; buying, not possessing; using the world, not using the world." (verses 29-31.) When the saints throng through the press and crowd of the creatures (for the world is a bushy and rank wood), thorns take hold of their garments, and retard them in their way. Faith looseth their garments, and riddeth them of such thorny friends as are too kind to them in their journey. Who diggeth for iron and tin in the earth with mattocks of gold? What wise man would make a web of cloth of gold, a net to catch fish? Expenses should overgrow gains. There is much of the metal of heaven in the soul. Faith would forbid us to wear out the threads of this immortal spirit; such as are love, joy, fear, sorrow, upon pieces of corruptible clay. Alas, is it faith's light that setteth men a-work to make the soul a golden needle, and the precious powers and perfections thereof, threads of silver, to sew together pieces of sackcloth and old rotten rags? What better, I pray you, is the finest of the web in the whole system of creation? Certainly, the heavens must be a thread of better wool than the clay earth; yet, if you should break your immortal spirit, and bend all the acts to the highest extent of your affections, to conquer thousands of acres of ground in the heavens, and entitle your soul to that inheritance, as to your only patrimony without Christ, faith's day-light should discover to you, that this finest part of that web of creation, with which you desire to clothe your precious soul, is but base wool, and rotten thread, and though beautiful and well dyed to the eye, yet, "The heavens, even all of them, shall wax old like a garment." (Psalm 102:26.) And the wisdom of faith knoweth a shop, where there is a more excellent suit of clothes for the soul, and a more precious piece of the heaven to dwell in; even a house which is from heaven, with which you shall be clothed, when life shall eat up death and mortality. (2 Cor. 5:1,2.)

2. The creatures are below the affections of the believer, and his affections conquer them, as having the vantage of the mount above all the creatures. So Paul maketh an elegant contrariety, (Phil. 3:19,20,) between those whose heart, senses, mind, find neither smell, taste, nor wisdom, but in earthly things, and those who by faith look to heaven, and dwell there. And the temporary's heart is below the world, and the creatures are up in the mount above him. So (Matt. 13:7-22,) the thorns or cares of riches have the fore-start of the earth, add sap above faith, or the good seed: for the seed was cast in the earth, when the thorns had been there before, and had the vantage of the season and the soil both. The first love is often strongest. The martyrs (Heb. 11:35,) had poor and weak thoughts of this life, and would not accept and welcome life and deliverance from death; but had strong acts of faith and love toward a better resurrection. It is a soul's strong faith, that bringeth him to wonder at nothing; never to love much, nor fear much, nor sorrow much, nor joy much, nor weep much, nor laugh much, nor hope much, nor despair much, when the creature is the object of all these acts. There is nothing great, not the world's all things, to him who is possessed with that "righteousness which is of God by faith," (Phil. 3:8,9). Men that talk with good will and all their heart, of their learning, books, of their own acts, good works, wisdom, court, honour, valour in war, flocks, lands, gold, monies, children, friends, travels, are to examine if faith be not a chaste thing, and that acts of whoredom with the creature, and of believing in Christ, are scarce consistent. Let your affections move toward the creature without great sound of feet.

3. There must be self-forsaking in believing. (1.) An affirming, and an Ay to grace, is a negation and denial to itself: "I laboured more abundantly than they all; yet not I, but the grace of God, which was with me." (1 Cor. 15:10.) To deny that you are Christ's, or that you have any grace (if Christ have any thing of his in you), is not self-denial, but grace-denial, and God-denial; deny the work of the Spirit, and deny himself. It is a saying of humility, "I am black;" and of faith, "but comely as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon;" (Cant. 1:5;) and, "I slept, but my heart waked." (Cant. 5:1.) It is faith to hold fast your state of adoption: "Lord, I am thine." (2.) When our self maketh a suit to self, and putteth in a bill to the flesh, "O pity thyself; Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth," it is self-renouncing to deny this request to the flesh. And faith only can give an answer to self-declining the cross: "He that denieth me before men, him will I deny before my Father and his holy angels," saith Christ. And another answer faith giveth, (Rom. 8:12). I am not debtor to thee, O flesh; I owe thee nothing. And it is faith's word of answer, "But know thou, that for all these things, God will bring thee unto judgment." (Eccles. 11:9.) (3.) Faith putteth the soul into that condition, that self may be plucked from self without great violence, as an apple full of the tree and of harvest sap is with a small motion plucked off the stalk. "I am ready," Ego etoimos echo, I have myself in readiness, "not only to be bound, but also to die at Jerusalem, for the name of the Lord Jesus." (Acts 21:13.) Certainly, faith saw here more in Jesus of excellency and sweetness, than there could be of bitterness in bonds and death, to self.

4. There is a denial of the creature, and a bill of defiance sent to all the lovers of the world, when Ephraim is brought to this act of believing; "For in thee the fatherless findeth mercy." (Hos. 14:3.) Then it is said, "Ashur shall not save us; we will not ride upon horses." That creature that we trust on, we ride upon it, as Israel did upon the horses of Assyria and Egypt. But, in this regard, faith dismounteth the believer, and abaseth him to walk on foot. All the creatures are ships to the believer without a bottom; they are empty and weak. David forbiddeth us to ride on a prince, (Psalm 146:3,4,) for that horse shall faint, and fall to clay. God alloweth Scotland to help England, but will not have the souls of his children in England to ride upon an army of another nation, and to trust in them for salvation. To make fire, is not so proper to fire,—to give light, not so kindly to the sun,—as salvation is God's only due; and, therefore, let England in this, walk on foot, and trust in the Lord.

5. The fifth ingredient also in faith is, that it is bottomed upon the sense and pain of a lost condition. Poverty is the nearest capacity of believing. This is Faith's method,—Be condemned, and be saved,—be hanged, and be pardoned; be sick, and be healed; (Matt. 9:13; James 4:7,8; Matt. 11:28; Luke 19:10). Faith is a flower of Christ's only planting, yet it groweth out of no soil, but out of the margin and bank of the lake of fire and brimstone, in regard there be none so fit for Christ and heaven, as those who are self-sick, and self-condemned to hell. This is a foundation to Christ, that because the man is broken and has not bread, therefore he must be sold, and Christ must buy him, and take him home to his fireside, and clothe him, and feed him. The chased man, pursued upon death and life, who hath not a way for life, but one nick of a rock; if he miss that, he is a dead man, had he a hundred lives. So is the believer pursued for blood; there is but one city of refuge in heaven, or out of heaven; this is only, only Jesus Christ, the great rock. And it is true, it is in a manner forced faith, and forced love cast upon Christ, upon a great venture; yet we may make necessity here the greatest virtue, or the highest grace, and that is,—to come to Christ. Satan doth but ride upon the weakness of many, proving that they are not worthy of Christ; which is the way of a sophist, to prove an evident truth that cannot be denied. But there is no greater vantage can be had against sin and Satan than this; Because I am unworthy of Christ, and out of measure sinful, and I find it is so, (Satan and conscience teaching me that truth, to bring me on a false conclusion,) therefore ought I,—therefore must I,—come to Christ, unworthy as I am. For free grace is moved from within itself from God's good will, only without any motion or action from sin, to put itself forth upon the sinner, to the end, that sin, being exceeding sinful, grace may be abundantly grace. And no thanks to Satan, for suggesting a true principle—Thou art unworthy of Christ—to suggest a false conclusion, Therefore thou art not to come to Christ; for the contrary arguing is gospel-logic. Satan's reasoning should be good, if there were no way but the law to give life. But because there is a Saviour, a gospel, and a new and living way to heaven, the contrary arguing is the sinner's life and happiness.

6. The sixth ingredient in faith is, that the sinner can lay hold on the promise, (1.) Not simply, but with relation to the precept; for presumptuous souls plunge in their foul souls in fair and precious promises; and this is the faith of Antinomians: for the promise is not holden forth to sinners as sinners, but as to such sinners; for we make faith to be an act of a sinner humbled, wearied, laden, poor, self-condemned. Now, these be not all sinners, but only some kind of sinners. Antinomians make faith an act of a lofty Pharisee, of a vile person, applying with an immediate touch, his hot, boiling, and smoking lusts to Christ's wounds, blood, merits, without any conscience of a precedent commandment, that the person thus believing should be humbled, wearied, laden, grieved for sin. I confess this is hasty hot work, and maketh faith a stride, or one single step; but it is a wanton, fleshly, and a presumptuous immediate work, to lay hold on the promises of mercy and be saved. This is the absolute and loose faith that Papists and Arminians slander our doctrine withal, because we reject all foregoing merits, good works, congruous dispositions, preparations moving God to convert this man, because he hath such preparations, and to reject and to leave another man to his own hardness of heart, because he hath no such payment in hand, by which he may redeem and buy conversion, and the grace of effectual calling especially, they building all upon a Babel of their own brick and clay, that free will in all acts of obedience before or after conversion, is absolutely indifferent; to do, or not do; to obey, or not obey; to choose heaven and life, hell or death, as it pleaseth, as being free and loosed from all predetermination, and foregoing motion, acting or bowing of the will, coming either from God's natural, or his efficacious or supernatural Providence. And so the Papist and Arminian on the one extremity, enthroneth Nature, and extolleth proud merit, and abaseth Christ and free grace. The Familist, libertine, and Antinomian, on a contrary extremity and opposition, turn man into a block, and make him a mere patient in the way to heaven; and, under pretence of exalting Christ and free grace, set up the flesh, liberty, license, looseness on the throne, and make the way to heaven on the other extremity, as broad, as to comply with all presumptuous proud, fleshly men, walking after their lusts, and yet, as they dream, believing in Christ.

2. The soul seeth Christ in all his beauty, excellency, treasures of free grace, lapped up with the curtain of many precious promises. Now, the natural man, knowing the literal meaning and sense of the promises, seeth in them but words of gold, and things afar off; and in truth, taketh heaven to be a beautiful and golden fancy, and the gospel promises, a shower of precious rubies, sapphires, diamonds, fallen out of the clouds only in a night dream; and therefore jeers and scoffs at the day of judgment, and at heaven and hell, (2 Pet. 3:1-3). For, can every capacity smell and taste the unsearchable riches of Christ, the fullness of God in the womb of the promises, by meditating on them, and sending them, in their sweetness and heavenly excellency, down to the affections to embrace them? No, it cannot be, that words, and sounds, and syllables, can so work upon a natural spirit. If you show not to a buyer precious and rare commodities, and bring them not before the sun, he shall never be taken so with things hidden in your coffers, as to be in love with them, and to sell all he hath and buy them. Preachers cannot, nay, it is not in their power to make the natural spirit see the beauty of Christ. Paul preacheth it, but the gospel is hidden from the blinded man, (2 Cor. 4:3). If I cannot communicate light, far less can I infuse love in the soul of a lost man.

3. Literal knowledge of Christ, is not in the power of natural men; but laying down this ground, that a Pharisee lend eyes and ears to Christ and his miracles, the light of the gospel worketh as a natural agent; for, make open windows in a house, whether the indweller will, or he will not, the sun shall dart in day-light upon the house. "Then cried Jesus, in the temple, as he taught, saying, ye both know me, and ye know whence I am." (John 7:28.) And there is a covering upon the spiritual senses and faculties of the soul of natural men, that though eyes, and ears, and mind, and soul be opened, yet it is as impossible for the natural spirit, or the preacher, to remove that covering, as to remove a mountain, it being as heavy as a mountain. And therefore, there be three bad signs in a natural spirit:—

[1.] His light, which is but literal, is a burden to him; it but vexeth him to know Christ; and if a beam of light fall in on the apple of the eye of a natural conscience, it is as a thorn between the bone and the flesh; the man shall not sleep, and yet he is not sick. I doubt if either Ahithophel or Judas, wakened with their light, could sleep.

[2.] Though a promise should dispute and argue Christ in at the door of the natural man's soul, as the gospel, by way of arguing, may do much, (John 7:28; 12:37; Heb. 11:1), the word of the gospel being a rational convincing syllogism, as Christ saith, "But now they have both seen and hated both me and my Father; (John 15:24); yet men may see the principles and the conclusion, and hate and practically suspend the assent from the conclusion.

[3.] Conversion is feared as a great danger by natural men, lest the promises put them on the pain, and the main mill of godliness. For men do flee nothing but that which they apprehend as evil, dangerous, and so the true object of fear. Now, when Felix and Agrippa were both upon the wheels, I cannot say that conversion formally was begun; yet materially it was. The one trembled, and so was afraid, and fled, and did put Paul away till another time; then he saw the danger of grace: (Acts 24:25,26:) the other saith, he was half a Christian, (but it was the poorest half,) and "he arose and went aside," (Acts 26:28,30,31). The natural spirit may be convinced by the promises, and have the pap in his mouth, but dare not milk out the sap and sweetness of the promises: "Their eyes they have closed, lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them." (Matt. 13:15.) So is it, Isa. 6:10, in which words, conversion is feared as an evil, as is clear. So one wretch said, he was once in danger to be catched, when a Puritan preacher, as he said, 'was preaching with divine power, and evidence of the Spirit of God.'

4. The true believer's soul hath influence on the promises to act upon them, to draw comfort out of them: "Unless thy law had been my delight, I should have perished in mine affliction." (Psalm 119:92.) "My soul fainteth for thy salvation: but I hope in thy word." (verse 81.) And there is a reciprocation of actions here; the word acteth upon the soul again: "This is my comfort in my affliction, for thy word hath quickened me." (Psalm 119:50.) A dead faith is like a dead hand; a living hand may lay hold on a dead hand: but there is no reciprocation of actions here, the dead hand cannot lay hold on the living hand. So the living wife may kiss and embrace the dead husband, but there can come no reciprocal act of life from the dead husband to her, nor can he kiss and embrace her. The promise may act upon the natural spirit, to move and affect him; but he can put forth no vital act upon the promise to embrace it, or lay hold upon the promise. But the promise acteth upon the believer to quicken him, and he again putteth forth an act of life to embrace the promise, and putteth forth on it some act of vital heat to adhere and cleave to, and with warmness of heart to love it. And here the case is as when the living hand layeth hold on the living hand; they warm one another mutually, according to that which Paul saith, "But I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus." (Phil. 3:12.) Here be two living things, Christ, and believing Paul, acting mutually one upon another; there is a heart and a life upon each side.

5. Faith under fainting, and great straits, can so improve the promise, as to put an holy and modest challenge upon God. So afflicted David saith, "Remember the word unto thy servant, upon which thou hast caused me to hope;" (Psalm 119:49;) and the Church, "Do not abhor us, for thy name's sake; do not disgrace the throne of thy glory; remember, break not thy covenant with us." (Jer. 14:21.) And the Lord commanded that this challenge be put on him, "Put me in remembrance, let us plead together:" (Isa. 43:26). Then he giveth Faith leave to plead on the contrary with God. Natural spirits faint, and cannot so far own the promise, as to plead with God by their right and just claim to the promise.

Now, the fourth point concerning faith is, What grounds and warrants the sinner hath to believe?

4. It is an ordinary challenge made by Satan, conscience, and the Arminian. Since Christ died not for all and every one of mankind; and all are not chosen to life eternal, but only those on whom the Lord is pleased, according to the free decree of election to confer the grace of believing; what warrant can the unworthy sinner have to believe, and to own the merits of Christ; for he knoweth nothing of the election or reprobation that are hidden in God's eternal mind? For answer,

1. It is no presumption in me to believe in Christ before I know whether I be chosen to salvation or not; for nothing can hinder me in this case to believe, save only presumption, as the adversaries say. But it is not presumption; because presumption is, when the soul is lifted up, and towered like an high building, as the word is, (Hab. 2:4). And therefore, the lifted up man, (Gnophel), is he that hideth himself in a high castle, as every unbelieving presumptuous soul hath his own castle: the unbeliever hath either one Ophel, or high tower, or other; either the king, friends, riches, or his own wisdom, for his God on which he resteth, beside the God that the Scripture recommendeth to us, as our only rock and soul-confidence. All men on earth live, and do all moral actions, even when they go on in a wicked life, as slaves of hell, to work all uncleanness with greediness, upon some ground of faith, though a most false and counterfeit faith, that they shall prosper by evil doing, and that sin shall make them happy. So, "The wicked man praiseth the wicked man;" (Psalm 10:3); then he must believe that wickedness maketh men praiseworthy; and this belief is but presumptuous confiding, and resting on a tower of his own building. Now, to believe in Christ, though the decree of election be not revealed to me, is no presumption; for I am not obliged, before I believe, to know that I am elected to glory; it being one of God's secrets not revealed in the word, but made manifest to me, after I believe, and am sealed unto the day of redemption. And, therefore, in a humble resting on Christ, though the soul know not his election, which is not revealed in the word, in that condition there can be no pride nor presumption; for he is self-wise and presumptuous, who intrudeth "into those things that he hath not seen," (Colos. 2:18,) knoweth not that which God hath revealed, and so which he ought to know. Now the believer ought not to know that he is elected to glory, he being yet an unbeliever; so his knowledge cannot deviate from a rule which doth not oblige to conformity therewith, as with a rule. The portrait of C�sar doth not err from the sampler, because it is not like a bull or a horse, because neither a bull nor a horse is the due sampler.

2. To warrant an unworthy humble sinner to believe, there is no need of a positive warrant, or of a voice to say, Thou art elected to glory, therefore believe. The word is near thee in thy mouth; yea, there is a commandment laid upon the humbled sinner: Come, O weary and laden sinner, to Christ, and be eased. Now, when the wind bloweth sweetly and fair upon an humbled sinner who is elected to glory, there goeth the spirit of the gospel along with this commandment: and the word of commandment, and the spirit united in one, acteth and worketh so upon the soul, that the humbled sinner cannot be deluded and led on a rock of presumption; for this spirit joineth and closeth with his spirit, and he, as one of Christ's sheep, knoweth this to be the voice of Christ. I grant, when the same command of faith cometh to the ears of a reprobate, he may, upon a false ground, believe, or rather presume; he neither being rightly humbled and fitted for Christ; nor can the reprobate know and discern the wind of the Spirit, breathing with the command, and acting upon his spirit, because that wind neither can, nor doth breathe upon any reprobate. And there is no need of any positive warrant, to ascertain a child of God to believe, beside the commandment of faith, enlivened and quickened with the Spirit going along with it; for that command, so quickened, doth put such a real stamp of an evident testimony that he hath claim to Christ, on whom the Spirit and the command doth so act, that he seeketh no more any other evidence to prove his claim to Christ, than the lamb needeth any evidence to prove, that of ten hundred sheep, this only that offereth to it her paps and milk, must be its dam or mother, and none of the rest of the flock.

Objection. But how do I know, that it is the Spirit that goeth along with the commandment of believing? It may be a delusion.

Answer. (1.) Beside that a deluding spirit, for the most part, doth not go every way along with the word, if this spirit keep God's order, to work upon the humbled and self-despairing sinner, who is willing to receive Christ upon his own condition, it is not like to a deluding spirit; for if the word of commandment to believe, and the spirit agree in one, it cannot be a delusion; fancy leadeth no man to faith. (2.) When objects of life work upon life, they cannot deceive, especially all the senses, hearing, seeing, tasting, feeling, smelling. The excellency and sweetness of Christ going along with the word, cannot be delusion: a man may imagine that he seeth and heareth, and yet his senses may be deceived; but that all the senses, especially all the spiritual senses, and that a man imagineth that he liveth a natural life, and is dead, is rare.

3. Faith can stand upon one foot, even on a general word; hence, this is a gospel word in the Prophets, which requireth faith, Turn to the Lord for he is merciful, (Jer. 3:12; Joel 2:13; John 4:2). And because a general promise received with heart-adherence and confidence giveth glory to God; and if it be holden forth to a humbled soul, who is now within the lists and bounds of grace, and, for any thing that the person thus laden with sin knoweth on the contrary, (for the secrets of election and reprobation belong to the Lord) Christ mindeth and intendeth to him salvation, therefore he is to believe.

4. This would be considered, that unbelief breaketh with Christ first, before Christ break with the unbeliever; and the elect of God findeth no more, nor any higher favour in the kind of external means to open the Lamb's book of life, which is sealed and closed with God's own hand, than the commandment of believing. Now, when our Lord maketh offer of the kingdom of sons, to slaves, and casteth his jewel of Christ offered in the gospel, in the lap and bosom of a bastard, whatever be the Lord's secret decree and purpose in so doing, the bastard is to take God at his word, and to catch the opportunity of God's love in so far; and if he do it not, the gospel offer to the reprobate being a treaty of peace, then the treaty breaketh off first upon his side; for Christ cometh within a mile of mercy, to meet the sinner, and the sinner cometh not the fourth part of a mile, yea, not half a step of love and thankful obedience, to meet Christ; and so, Christ killeth the unbeliever with the sweetness of the preventing courtesy of offered mercy.

5. But if the sinner be wearied and laden, and seeth, though through a cloud only, Christ only must help and save, if not, he is utterly and eternally lost, What is there upon Christ's part to hinder thee to believe, O guilty wretch?Oh, (saith he,) I fear Christ only offereth himself to me, but he mindeth no salvation to me.—Answer. Is not this to raise an evil report and slander on the holy One of Israel? For Christ's offer is really an offer, and in so far, it is real love, though it cannot infer the love of election to glory, yet the total denial of this offer openeth up the black seal of reprobation to heathens without the church. And therefore it is love to thee, if thou be humbled for sin; (2.) And have half an eye to the unsearchable riches of gospel mercy; (3.) And be self-condemned; (4.) And have half a desire of Christ: thou mayest expound love by love, and lay hold on the promise, and be saved. An error of humble love to Christ, is no error.

That which is next, is a word of the essential principle of true faith, and that is a proportionable measure of grace, required in faith. (Phil. 1:29.) Men naturally imagine, that faith is a work of nature; hence (1.) that speech of a multitude of atheists, "I believe all my days, I believe night and day;" but they never believe at all, who think and say, they believe always. The Jews asserted, that they believed Moses always, and so oppose themselves to the man altogether born in sin, (John 9:28,29, compared with verse 34). But Christ told them, they neither believed the Messiah nor Moses, (John 5:35-37.) Nature worketh always alike, and without intermission or freedom. The floods always move, the fountain always casts out streams, the fire always burneth, the lamb always fleeth from the wolf; but the wind of the Spirit doth not always enact the soul to believe. They are not in an ill case, who wrestle with unbelief, and find the heart and take it, in the ways of doubting and terrors, as feeling that believing is a motion up the mount, and somewhat violent. Facile and con-natural acts cannot be supernatural acts of faith. It is no bad sign, to complain of a low ebb sea, and of neither moonlight nor starlight. (2.) It is impossible they can submit to give the glory of believing to God, in whose heart there is a rotten principle destructive of faith, and that is, an ambitious humour of seeking glory from men, (John 5:44). Little faith there is in kings' courts; faith dwelleth not in a high spirit. (3.) Such as take religion by the hand upon false and bastard motives, as the summer of the gospel, and fame, ease, gain, honour, cannot believe. A thorny faith is no faith, (Matt. 13:22). A carnal man's faith must be true to its own principles, and must lie level with externals; so as court, ease, the world, and its sweet adjuncts, are a measuring line to a rotten-rooted faith neither longer nor broader than time, it goeth not one span length within the lists of eternity. (4.) Fancy cannot be faith. Such as have not gospel knowledge of Christ, cannot believe; but must do as the traveler, who unawares setteth his foot on a serpent in the way, and suddenly starteth backward six steps for one, (John 6:66). So do they that fancy all the gospel to be a carnal or a moral discourse. (5.) Those cannot have faith, in whose heart the gospel lieth above ground, devils and sin having made the heart hard like the summer streets, with daily treading and walking on them. (Matt. 13:19.) A stony faith, or a faith that groweth out of a stone, cannot be a saving faith. There is a heart that is a daily walk, in which the devil (as it were) aireth himself. (6.) If Christ have given the last knock at the door, and all in-passages be closed up, and heart inspirations gone, there can be no more any sort of faith there, (Eph. 4:19; 2 Tim. 4:2). The heart is like a dried-up arm in some; all the oil in the bones is spent. (7.) Loose walking with greediness, argues, that hell hath taken fire on the outworks of the soul. Hell in the hands and tongue, as in the out-wheels, must argue hell and unbelief in the heart and the in-wheels. [1.] Loose believers go to heaven by miracles; I dare go to hell for a man, if such a one go to heaven, who liveth profanely, and saith, he hath a good heart within. [2.] The going in ways of blood, extortion, covetousness, idolatry, belieth the decree of election to glory. Grace leadeth no man to the east, with his face and motion close to the west. [3.] This way of working by contraries is not God's way: God can work by contraries; but he will not have us to work by contraries. There is some heaven of holiness in the court-gate to the heaven of happiness. (8.) Faith overlooketh time, (Heb. 11:10). Abraham looked for another city. Faith in Moses was great with child of heaven; (verse 25,) he had an eye to the recompence of reward. Eternity of glory is the birth of faith. Oh! we look not to the declining of our sun; it is high afternoon of our piece of day; eleven hours are gone, and the twelfth hour is on the wheels, and I see not my own grey-hairs. It is upon the margin and borders of night, and I know not where to lodge. We are like the man swimming through broad waters, and he knoweth not what is before him; he swimmeth through deeper and deeper parts of the river, and at length, a cramp and a stitch cometh on arms and legs, and he sinketh to the bottom, and drowns. We swim through days, weeks, months, years, winters, and are daily deeper in time; till at length death bereave us of strength of legs and arms, and we sink over head and ears in eternity. Oh! who, like the sleepy man, is loosing his clothes, and putting off the garments of darkness, and would gladly sleep with Christ? Men are close-buttoned, and like day-men, when it is dark night. It is fearful to lie down with our day-clothes, (Job 20:11). Sin is a sad winding-sheet. Oh! what believer saith, I would have a suit of clothes for the high court and throne, to be an assay, to see how a suit of glory would become me?—This much for faith. 

TRIAL AND TRIUMPH OF FAITH.

SERMON XXII.

NOW, a word of a strong and great faith, and withal, of a weak and fainting faith. For the most, I go not from the text, to find out the ingredients of a great faith.

1. A strong praying and a crying faith, is a great faith. So must Christ's faith have been, who prayed with strong cries and tears. Strong faith maketh sore sides in praying, as this woman prayed with good will: there is an efficacious desire to be rid of a sinful temptation, as Paul prayed thrice to be freed of the prick in the flesh. Their faith is weak, who (1.) dare not pray against some idol sins; or, (2.) If they pray, it is but gently, with a wish not to be heard.

2. The woman's crying,—her instant pleading in faith, yea, 1, above the disciples' care for her; yea, above Christ's seeming glooms, who denied her to be his, who reproached her as a dog, argueth great grace, great humility, with strong adherence; and so, great faith.

2. For faith saileth sometimes with a strong tide and a fair wind; according as the moon hath an aspect on the sun, so is it full or not full. When the wheels are set right to the sun, the clock moveth and goeth right. The fairer and more clear sight that faith hath of Christ, the stronger are the acts of faith. It cannot be denied, that faith hath a good and an ill day: because grace is various, it is no strong proof that it is not grace.

3. To put faith in all its parts in light, in staying on Christ, in affiance, in adherence, in self-diffidence, in submissive assenting, forth in all its acts, and to lift the soul all off the earth, requireth Christ's high spring-tide: it is not easy to put all the powers that do act in faith afloat, especially because a strong faith is a great vessel; and therefore, more of Christ's tide is required for weighing anchor and launching forth. The wings of a sparrow should not raise an eagle off the earth; the limbs of a pismire could not suit with a horse or an elephant: there is need of a strong winged soul to believe, especially against hope.

4. To believe Christ, when midnight speaketh blackness of wrath, requireth eyes and light of miracles; yea, it is a greater work than the very miracles of Christ, (John 14:12). But especially when Christ is absent, it is with the soul, as with a clock, in which the wheels are broken, the passes or weights are fallen down.

Objection 1. But I aim and endeavour to believe, but can do nothing, and, without His grace, my violence to heaven is without fruit.

Answer. It is true the Semipelagians' halving of the work of believing, and the glory of it, between co-operating grace and [free-]will, as if nature could divide the spoil with the grace of Christ, is damnable pride; but it is God's way to halve the work between Christ within, in regard of the habit of grace, and Christ without, in regard of the assisting grace of God: "While he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him." (Luke 15:20.) Christ rewardeth not nature's aims with grace, nor doth he make gifts the work, and grace the hire, or nature's labour the race, and grace the garland. But he rewardeth grace with grace, and that of mere grace, (John 15:3). He hath in his decree and promise marshaled such and such acts of grace to stand beside others, and that by covenant: and therefore believe, that you may believe; pray, that you may pray.

Objection 2. But who can act saving grace, without the blowing of saving grace? I can no more do it, than I can command the west wind to blow when I list.

Answer. I grant all, nor do I speak this to insinuate, that free-will sitteth at the helm, or that grace sleepeth, and will waketh; the contrary is an evident truth. Yet give me leave to say, there is odds between blowing of the wind, and making ready the sails. Though seamen cannot make wind, nor is it their fault to want wind, yet can they prepare the sails, and hoist them up to welcome the wind. We cannot create the breathings of the Spirit; yet are we to miss these breathings? and this is a fitting of the sails, and we are to join with the Spirit's breathings. Christ bindeth up the winds in his garment, so as, if one look of faith, or half a spiritual groan, should ransom me from hell, I have it not in stock; therefore hath God ordered such a dispensation, that in all stirrings of grace, the first spring, Principium motus, the fountain-rise of calling Jesus Lord, shall be up in heaven at the right hand of the Father; and the far end of any gracious thought, is as far above me, as the heart of Christ, who is in the heaven of heavens, is above the earth, though ye think nothing of it. And better Christ be my steward, and that the gospel be at the end of all acts of grace, as that Christ be freewill's debtor.—More reason that Christ be creditor, than debtor to his redeemed ones. (2.) I know the child of God may be so far forth lazy, as that it is his fault that the wind bloweth not, if we speak of a moral cause. (3.) It is his part to join with the working of assisting grace: "Whereunto I also labour, striving according to his working, which worketh in me mightily." (Col. 1:29.) The Lord hath, by free promise, laid holy bands on himself, to give predeterminating grace to his own children to persevere to the end, and to prevent apostacy and heinous sins inconsistent with saving faith; (1 Cor. 1:8; Jude 24, Jer. 32:39-41; Is. 54:10; 59:21,22; Luke 22:32; 1 John 2:1,2,) yet so as he hath reserved a liberty to himself, to co-operate with them in particular acts, as it shall be their sin, not his withdrawing of grace that maketh them guilty, to the end we know we are in graces debt, in all good and supernatural acts. So (2 Chron. 32:31,) Hezekiah was tried of God in the business of the king of Babylon's ambassadors, that the king might see, that he could not walk to heaven on clay legs, or by his own strength. And the reason is clear: (1.) God cannot make a promise of contributing this bowing and predeterminating grace, but in a way suitable to free grace; for God cannot change grace unto natural debt, it remaining grace, for so it should be grace, and no grace, which is a contradiction. (2.) The Lord hath reserved liberty to himself in this promise, that in this or that particular act (the omission whereof may consist with perseverance in grace), he may contribute his influence of grace, or not contribute it. So David hath not actual grace at his will and nod, to eschew adultery and murder as he pleaseth; nor Peter to decline an evil hour, when he shall be tempted to forswear his Saviour Christ; nor hath Heman in his hand, (Psalm 88,) nor the deserted church power, (Psalm 77,) to pray, and believe, and rejoice in the salvation of God, at the disposition of free-will: but the key is up in the hands of the kingly Intercessor, at the right hand of the Father, that must open the heart. It is far to fetch, as far as the heaven of heavens, to make wind and sailing to Christ-ward; therefore, (3.) Seasons of acts of grace to believe, to walk in any warmness of love to Christ and his members, are fruits of royal liberty and free grace. Who hath the key of the house of wine, to stay the soul with the flagons and apples of love? Certainly, it is the king himself, that taketh the spouse into his banqueting house, (Cant. 2:4). And yet, so as the omission of all supernatural duties, yea, our laziness in the manner of doing, our failings and sins, are imputed to ourselves, and not to the not blowing of the wind of the Holy Spirit, nor to the want, of the efficacious motion of the Spirit, as Libertines teach, with Arminians; for we so sin through the want of the motions of efficacious grace, as through the want of a physical, not of a moral cause; and so, as we are most willing to want that influence, and so are guilty before the Lord.

(4.) God hath reasons strong and convincing why he worketh thus; [1.] It suiteth not Grace to work by engagement; the spirit of the living creatures is within every wheel of Christ, that it must move from an inward principle: the motion of saving grace, is Christ's heart wheeled about by itself, and by no foreign cause without itself: love worketh as love without boon or bribe from men or angels. Grace is both wages and work, the race and the gold to itself. [2.] God delights to have men and angels his debtors. Grace holdeth an open and a free inn, with all the dainties that Christ can make, to all comers and goers, for nothing but thanks, and heartily welcome. Grace maketh no gain of my work. The sweating of angels, and of the thousand thousands that sing up the glory of Christ before the high throne, is no income to Christ's rent. Grace would not be grace, if it could traffic, or buy, or sell with a creature. Angels and men stand in the books of free grace for millions of borrowed sums. Christ's blood and deep love may be praised, but never recompensed. Christ's love hath filled this world, and the new paradise with debtors; and angels can neither read, nor sum, nor cast up the accounts of free grace. [3.] That we cannot be masters of one good act, without His preventing grace, evidenceth what nature is, and maketh grace both my staff and my convoy in at heaven's gates; nature and free-will must stoop and do homage to Christ. There is a glory active, and a glory passive, as there is also grace active and passive; free-will is active under grace, and passive also; and therefore, grace and mercy is to the saints and upon the saints: nature emptieth its lamp upon the golden pipe, the rich grace of the Mediator, and free-will moveth and runneth, but not but as moved, driven, and breathed upon by free grace. But as concerning glory, it hath a more eminent and noble relation: glory shall be on the saints as a garment, as a crown, for they shall be glorified. But no glory to the saints, but only to the Lamb, to the flower of the glory of glory, Jesus, the celebrated, eminent, most high and adored Prince of the kings of the earth. And, therefore, there is room and place left for sin and shame to free-will in the business of predeterminating grace, that nature can but sigh and sin, and grace sing, and be spotless and innocent. Christ so draweth, as we sin in not being drawn; Christ so taketh and allureth, that it is our guilt that we are not taken and overcome with the smell of the King's ointments. So is sin the field out of which springeth the rose, the flower of free and unhired grace. Sin must go with us as near to heaven, as to the threshold of the gates, that the sinner may halt and crook, when he moveth his foot on the threshold-stone of glory; that so, pardoning grace may enter the new city with us. [4.] The Lord will have us take to heaven with us, a book of the psalms and praises of grace, that in that land we may extol and advance free grace, and may hold the book in our hand all the way, and sigh, and weep, and sing, and adore the Saviour of free grace, and may take grace's bill in our hand into heaven with us. Oh, how sweet to be grace's drowned and over-burdened debtor! It is good here to borrow much, and profess inability, for eternity, to pay, that heaven may be a house full of broken men, who have borrowed millions from Christ, but can never repay more, than to read and sing the praises of grace's free bill, and say, Glory, glory, to the Lamb that sitteth upon the throne for evermore: praising for ever in heaven, must be in lieu of paying debt. {1.} God is not behind, nor wanting to the gracious soul, for there is a promise of grace here. {2.} There is an intercession at hand, and that more mighty now, than at Christ's first ascension, and shall be more mighty when all Israel shall be converted. {3.} There is a stirring required in a gracious spirit, but with sense of nature's weakness, so as he is "to arise, and be doing, and the Lord shall be with him;" and he is so to blow upon the coals, as if he could do his alone, though not without the faith of dependence upon an immediate acting from heaven.

Objection 3. Adam, yet sinless, was to believe weakness and sin in himself, before he sinned.

Answer. Not so, but he was to have that which, by analogy, answereth to sense of sin, that is, a sinless consciousness and solicitude, that if God should withdraw his stirring and predeterminating influence of corroborating him to will and to do (you may call it grace), he should fall; and that legs in paradise, without actual assistance, could not bear the bulk and weight of Adam's con-natural and constant walking with God, that Adam might know, before he was a debtor to justice, that he had need of mercy, or the free goodness of a surety, such as Jesus Christ, to prevent debt, no less than to pay debt; even as angels are debtors to Christ their head, for redemption from all possible sins, no less than we are (though the degrees of altitude of grace varieth much), the obliged underlings of such a bountiful landlord, for redemption from actual misery.

3. That is a great faith, that is not broken with a temptation, but (1.) Taketh strength from a temptation; as some run more swiftly after a fall, that they may recompense their loss of time; and that is great faith, that argueth from a temptation, as this woman doth. (2.) That is Job's great faith, (chap. 2:3). "That he still holdeth fast his integrity;" the word (Hazak) is, to hold with strength and power: he keepeth fast, and with violence, his innocency, and faith maketh him stronger than he was. The word is used, (Psalm 147:13), for making stronger the bars of ports. And it is Job's praise, (chap. 1:22,) "In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God with folly." (3.) It is a strong faith in this woman, that, in a manner, conquers Omnipotency by believing. Yea, Satan, winds, fire from heaven, wife, Sabeans, yea, apprehended wrath, cannot prevail with Job to subdue his faith: in all he standeth by this, "Though the Lord should slay me, I will trust in him." (Job 15:13.) It is great faith to be at holding and drawing with God; and yet believe and pray, (Hosea 12:3; Gen. 32:26,) and not let the Lord alone, nor give him any rest, (Isa. 62:6,7,) till he answer. As suppose thy prayers were never heard, and the acts of believing were but darts thrown at heaven and the throne without any effect; yet because prayer and believing are acts of honouring God, though they never benefit thee, it argueth strong grace, and so great faith, that it can be said, there be ten years, twenty years of reiterated acts of faith, and prayers of such a man lying up before the throne, yea, in Christ the High Priest's bosom. Let God make of my faith what he will, yet am I to believe: continued believing is Christ's due, though it should never be to me gain of comfort or success. That is a weak man who is thrown down on his back with a blast of wind, or made to stagger with the cast of a straw, or a feather. The temporary faith is in this seen to be soft, that it is broken with persecution: "When the sun riseth anon, he is offended, and withereth quickly." (Matt 13:21.) Some spirit of soft clay for a scratch with a pin on his credit, casteth away all his confidence, despaireth, and hangeth himself as Ahithophel. Such a temptation would not once draw blood of a strong believer. Straws, and feathers, and flax do quickly take fire, and are made ashes in a moment; but not so gold: there is bones and metal in strong faith; so the martyr's faith, that could not be broken with torments, is proved to be a great Faith, Heb. 11:35, Etympanisthesan, Their bodies were racked out as a drum, and beaten to death after racking, and they would not accept a deliverance. Why? Faith looked to a better resurrection. He who sweateth, panteth up the brow of the mount after Christ, and carrieth death on his back, must have this strong faith, that Christ is worthy of tortures. A strong faith can bear hell on its shoulders, the grave and the sorrows of death, and not crack, nor be broken, (Psalm 18:4-6; 116:3,4).

4. That faith is argued to be strong, that hath no light of comfort, but walketh in darkness upon the margin and borders of a hundred deaths, and yet stays upon the Lord, (Isa. 50:11). So this woman had no comfort, nor ground of sense of comfort from Christ, except rough answers and reproaches; yet she believeth, and so, must be strong in the faith, (Psalm 3:6). David's faith standeth straight without a crook, when ten thousand deaths are round about him; (and Psalm 23:4,) he feareth no ill, when he walks in the cold and dark valley of the shadow of black death. Heman, (Psalm 88:7,) "Thy wrath lieth hard on me, thou hast afflicted me with all thy waves:" then, in his sense, God could do no more to drown him; not waves, but all waves, all God's waves were on him, and above him; yet (verse 9,) "Lord, I have called daily upon thee." Then he believed daily. Hezekiah's comforts are at a hard pinch, (Isa. 39:14,) "Mine eyes fail with looking upward, O Lord, I am oppressed;" yet praying, argueth, believing, "Lord, undertake for me." We must think Christ's sense of comforts was ebb and low when he wept, cried, (Heb. 5:7,) and was forsaken of God; yet then his faith is doubled, as the cable of an anchor is doubled, when the storm is more than ordinary,—"My God, my God." David chideth his cast-down soul when there is no glimpse of comfort, with strong faith, "Hope thou in God, for I shall yet praise him." (Psalm 42:11.) In swimming well, the less natural helps to hold up the chin and head, the greater wave, if the swimmer be carried strongly through, as it were in despite of the stream, there is the more art. Art may counterbalance strength, and sometimes wisdom is better than strength. The less comfort, if yet you believe at midnight, when the spirit is overwhelmed, the more is the art of believing. When an inward principle is weak, we help it with externals. That the child must be allured with rewards, as with apples, a penny, or the like, it is because his sight and desire of the beauty and excellency of learning and arts, is but weak or nothing at all. Sense and comforts are external subsidies and helps to faith, and those that cannot believe but upon feelings, and sense of the sweetness of comforts, are hence argued to have weak and broken inclinations and principles of faith. The more freeness and ingenuity of spirit that is in believing, the more strength of faith; for that is most connatural, that hath least need of hire. You need not give hire, reward, or bribes to the mother's affection, to work upon her, and cause her to love her child: love can hardly be hired; nature is stronger than rewards or any externals. Comforts are but the hire of serving of God, and the results of believing in a sad condition.

There be some cautions here that are considerable. (1.) God leadeth some strong ones to heaven, whose affections are soft as David's were, (Psalms 35:13; 119:25,28; 136:53; 6:6). And yet faith is strong, (Psalm 22:1). God possibly immediately working upon the assenting, or believing faculty, leaving the affections to their own native disposition. (2.) God useth some privileged dispensations, so as a strong believer shall doubt upon no good ground, (Psalm 116:11), God so disposing, that grace may appear to be grace, and the man but flesh. (3.) Softness of affection, and light of comfort, may by accident concur with strong acts of believing; for, with these, in many, there is little light, much faith, and they should, without those apples given to children, strongly believe; and God, to confirm his own, of mere indulgence sweeteneth affections.

But if God give comforts, ordinarily it is a sort of indulgence of grace, or the grace of grace. It is true, rejoicing falleth under a gospel commandment, (Phil. 4:4,) yet so, as God hath not tied the sweet of the comfort of believing to believing, that you may know its strength of faith, that is, the principle of strong faith, as intense and strong habits make strong acts. God keepeth some in a sad condition all their life, who are experienced believers, and they never feel the comfort of faith till the splendour of glory glance on their eyes; as one experienced believer, kept under sadness and fear for eighteen years, at length came to this 'I enjoy and rejoice, with joy unspeakable and glorious;' but he lived not long after. Another living in sadness all his life, died with comforts admirable. And (3.) Let this be put as a case of conscience, why divers believing, and joying much in God's salvation all their life, yet die in great conflicts, and, to beholders, with little expression of comfort and feeling; as divers of the saints die. Certainly, God, [1.] walketh in liberty here. [2.] He would not have us to limit the breathings of the Holy Ghost to jump with our hour of dying. [3.] We may make an idol of a begun heaven, as if it were more excellent than Christ. To conclude, little evidence, much adherence, speaketh a strong faith. 

TRIAL AND TRIUMPH OF FAITH.

SERMON XXIII.

5. THE woman had no apparent evidences of believing; yet did she hang by one single thread of the word of the mercies of the Son of David. The more that the word of promise hath influence in believing, and the less of convincing reason and appearances, the greater faith. Abraham had a promise of a son in whom the nations of the world should be blessed. (Rom. 4.) But, (1.) There was no appearance of this in nature; Abraham and Sarah, at this time, were, between them, two hundred years old, lacking ten, and so, no natural hope of a child. (2.) He had but one promise for his faith; we have twenty, an hundred; yet, "He, against hope, believed in hope." (Rom. 4:18.) It is an elegant figure, having the form of a contradiction, there was no hope, yet he had hope. "Not being weak in the faith:" (verse 19.) Then, "he was strong in the faith," and gave glory to God, as it is, verse 20. (3.) He staggered not through unbelief. Then it is an argument of a weak faith, to dispute according to the principles of natural logic with God: to go on upon God’s naked word, without reasoning, is a strong faith, especially when the course of Providence saith the contrary. The word of promise is the mother and seed of faith, (1 Pet. 1:23): the more of the seed, the more of the birth. Wine that is separated from the mother, doth sooner corrupt; that is strongest faith, that hath most, of its seed and mother, that is, of the word of promise in it. Abraham had nothing on earth to sustain his faith in killing his son, but only a naked commandment of God; all other things were contrary to the fact: yet is faith strongest when it standeth on its own basis and legs, and that is, the word of Omnipotency—the word of promise. Other pillars of faith are rotten and sandy foundations; inspirations beside and without the word, are the natural faith’s unwritten traditions. Every thing is strongest on its own pillars that God and nature hath appointed for it. The earth hangeth by God and nature’s statute in the midst of the air. If the earth were up in the orb or sphere of the moon, it should not be so sure as it is now; and if the sea, fountains, and floods were up in the clouds, they would not be so free from perishing, as they now are. Faith is seated most firmly on a word of Him who is able to perform what he hath said. Wicked men are seeking good in blood, in wars, in the destruction of the church, of the reformation and covenant of God; yet their actions are not seated on a word of promise, but on a threatening that destruction shall come on them as a whirlwind. Therefore is not the wicked man’s bread sure, when the child of God hath bread, sleep, peace, immunity from the sword, (insofar as the sword is a curse), and that by the covenant of promise. This woman had one gospel word, mercy from the Messiah, David’s son.

6. That is a strong faith, which can forego much for Christ, and the hope of heaven. Moses was strong in the faith in this, who refused the treasures of Egypt, the honour of a princedom, and to be called "The son of Pharaoh’s daughter." (Heb. 11:26.) For he had an eye, an eagle’s look, and eye to heaven, to the recompence of reward. Abraham foregoeth country and inheritances for God; "By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles." (Heb. 11:9.) (1.) He sojourned. (2.) He played the pilgrim. (3.) He dwelt not in castles and cities, though the land was his by promise, and his grandson, Jacob, disposed of it in his testament, (Gen. 49:10,) "For he looked for a city which hath foundations," (to the strong faith, all cities are bottomless except heaven,) "whose maker and builder is God." Now, this woman’s faith is great in this;—she looked for a temporary deliverance from Satan’s power to her daughter, under the notion of one of the sure mercies of David, and that by faith, which inheriteth all the promises. Not to see beyond time and death, nor to see the gold at the race’s end, fainteth the traveler: a sight of the fair city, is as a draught of wine to the fainting traveler; it addeth legs and strength to him. Heaven is down-ground when faith seeth it; it is, when sight faileth us, toilsome, and up the mount. When Stephen in a near distance heard the music of heaven, his countenance did shine; he did leap to be at it: "I see heaven open, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God."

7. It is great faith to pray, and persevere, and watch unto praying, as this woman did, when Christ seemeth to forbid to pray; as he both reproached this woman in her praying, as if it had been but the crying of a dog, and said, he was not sent for her. When the promise and Christ seem to look away from you, and to refuse you, yea, to forbid you to believe; then to believe is great faith: actions in nature going on in strength, when contrary actions do countermand them, must be carried with prevailing strength. It is strength of nature that the palm tree groweth under great weights; it is prevalency of nature, that mighty rivers, when they swell over banks, do break over all oppositions. Satan hath a commission to burn and slay; a strong faith quencheth all his fiery darts, (Eph. 6:16). "Let me alone," saith the Lord to Jacob, (Gen. 32:25,26); pray no more. Jacob’s strong faith doth meet with this commandment thus, "I will not let thee alone, I must pray on till thou bless me." Strong faith beateth down misapprehensions of promises, or of Christ, and layeth hold on Christ under his mask of wrath, and covered with a cloud. (Lam. 3:9.)

8. Great boldness in the faith, argueth great faith. There be three things in faith, in this notion: (1.) An agony and a wresthng of faith, (Col. 1:29,) which is a heavenly violence in believing: (2.) To be carried with a great measure of persuasion and conviction, with full and hoisted-up sails in believing, (Col. 2:2). There is a rich assurance of faith. Not that only, but in the abstract, there is the riches of assurance. There is all riches of assurance; all riches of the full assurance of faith. So strong prevailing light, produceth a strong faith: alas! it is but twilight of evidence that we have. (3.) To be bold, and to put on a heavenly stoutness and daring, in venturing with familiarity unto the throne of grace, is a strong faith, (Heb. 10:22; 4:16). We are to come with liberty, and holy boldness to the throne, as children to their father: so the church, with heavenly familiarity, and the daring of grace and faith, prayeth, "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth." (Cant. 1:2.) John’s leaning on Christ’s bosom, is not familiarity of love only, but of faith also: "In whom we have boldness and access, with confidence, by faith," (Eph. 3:12). Faith dare go unto the throne; and to the Holy of Holies: (Heb. 10:19). Faith blusheth not.

9. That which leadeth a man, with Paul and Silas, to sing psalms in the stocks, in prison, and in scourges, that is a strong faith. Job is hence known to be strong in the faith, because, being made a most miserable man in regard of heavy afflictions, he could bless God. A strong faith prophesieth glad tidings out of the fire, out at the window of the prison, and rejoiceth in bonds, (Mic. 7:8,9; Isa. 52:1,2; 54:1-4). "To glory in tribulation," is an argument of one justified by faith, (Rom. 5:1-3); and the greater glorification of Christ’s chains and cross, is a stronger reason to conclude a strong faith.

10. To wait in patience for God all the day long, is an argument of great faith: "He that believeth shall not make haste; (Isa. 28:16); he shall not be confounded with shame, (so the Seventy translate it, and Paul after them, Rom. 9:33); as those that flee from the enemy out of hastiness, procured by base fear, which is a shame. It proveth believing, and a valorous keeping the field without flying, and so, continued waiting on God, to be of kin to believing; and the longer the thread of hope be, though it were seventy years long, (as Hab. 2:1,2,) or though it were as long as a cable going between the earth and the heaven, "up within the veil," (Heb. 6:19,) the stronger the faith must be. Unbelief not being chained to Christ, leapeth overboard at first, as the wicked king said in the haste of unbelief, "What should I wait any longer on the Lord?" (2 Kings 6:33.) Faith is a grace for winter, to give God leisure to bring summer in his own season. The reasons of our weakness be two: (1.) We see Israel and their dough on their shoulders wearied and tired, lately come out of the brick furnace, wandering without one foot of heritage, forty years in the wilderness, and four hundred years in Egypt; (Acts 7:6;) this looketh like poverty: to believe the other mystery in the other side or page of providence, the glory of dividing the Red sea, and of giving seven mighty nations to his people, and their buildings, lands, vineyards, gardens; is a strong faith. (2.) The furnace is a thing void of reason and art, and so knoweth little that by it the goldsmith maketh an excellent and comely vessel of gold. It is great faith to believe, that God, by crooked instruments, and fire and sword, shall refine a church and erect a glorious building, and these malignant instruments are as ignorant of the art of divine providence, as coals and fuel are of the art and intention of the goldsmith, (Mic. 4:12; Isa. 10:5-7). The axe and saw know nothing of art, nor the sword any thing of justice. Prelates, papists, malignants in the three kingdoms, understand nothing of God’s deep counsel upon themselves, in that God, by a fire of their kindling, is burning themselves, and taking away the tin and brass, and reprobate metal, and refining the Spouse of Christ; they serve a great service, but know not the master of the work.

11. An humble faith, such as was in this woman, is a great faith. The more sins that are pardoned, as it inferreth the more love to Christ, (Luke 7:47,) so the unworthier a soul is in itself to believe pardon in Christ, argueth the greater faith. It must be a greater faith, to believe the pardon of ten thousand talents, than to believe the forgiveness of five hundred pence. Christ esteemeth it the greatest faith in Israel, that the centurion abaseth himself, as one unworthy to come under one roof with him; and that he exalteth Christ in his omnipotency, to believe that he can command all diseases at his nod, (Matt. 8:8-10).

12. A strong desire of a communion with Christ, is an argument of a strong faith. "Surely, I come quickly;" (Rev. 22:20). Faith answereth with a hearty desire, "Amen, even so, come, Lord Jesus," and, 2 Pet. 3:12.35 Faith desireth an union with Christ, and a marriage union. The reason is, strong faith cometh from strong love; and strong coals of desiring to be dissolved, and to be with Christ, (Phil. 1:23,) burneth in at heaven’s door; love-sickness for glory goeth as high, as the lowest step of the throne that the Lamb Christ sitteth on; and it is faith and love together, that desireth Christ to mend his pace, and saith, "Make haste, my beloved, and be as a roe or young hart upon the mountains of spices." (Cant. 8:14). The fervour of love challengeth time, and the slow-moving wheels of years and months, and reckoneth an hour for a day, and a day for a year, "Oh, when wilt thou come to me?" (Psalm 101:2). So, hope deferred is a child-birth pain, and a sickness of the soul, (Prov. 13:12). Faith with love cannot endure a morrow [cannot endure to wait until tomorrow]; faith putteth Christ to posting, and "leaping over mountains, and skipping over hills," (Cant. 2:8;) and addeth wings to him, to flee more quickly. Yet is there a caution here most considerable: Faith both walketh leisurely, and with leaden feet, and moveth swiftly with eagle’s wings. Faith, in regard of love, and desire of union with God, is swift, and hath strong motions for a union; yea, a love-sickness to be at the top of the mount, to be satiated with a feast of Christ’s enjoyed face; but, in regard of a wise assurance, that God’s time is fittest, it maketh no haste. So, to wait on, and to haste, may stand together, (2 Pet. 3:10).

13. Faith effectual by, or with child of love and good works, is a strong faith: "Remembering your work of faith;" (1 Thess. 1:3;) faith effectual. (Philem. 6.) There be bones in a strong faith; yea, sap and life. How many thousands of apples be there virtually in a tree that beareth fruit for thirty or forty years together? So, it is said of Stephen, that he was "full of faith and power," (Acts 6:8;) and Barnabas, "full of the Holy Ghost, and of faith." (Acts 11:24.) What is then a small faith, or a weak faith, is easily known. (1.) A faith void of all doubting, is not a weak faith, nor yet the strong faith. Antinomians err many ways in this point: [1.] ‘After the revelation of the Spirit, neither devil nor sin can make the soul to doubt,’ say they. Yea, but the spirit of revelation was in Jeremiah, who doubted when he complained to God of God; (Jer. 15:18). Wilt thou be to me altogether as a liar, and as waters that fail? (Jer. 20:7-9, 14-16.) Job doubted, when he said, "Wherefore hidest thou thy face, and holdest me for thine enemy?" (Job 13:14.) And Asaph, (Psalm 73:13), Heman, (Psalm 88:13-15), and the Church, (Psalm 77). Yet all these were "sealed by the Spirit unto the day of redemption." [2.] This is like the foul error of the Arminians, who, with the Socinians, hold, that as there be three degrees of believers, {1.} Some babes; {2.} Some aged; so there is a third sort of truly perfect ones, who do not sin from the root of concupiscence, ‘the combat between the flesh and the spirit now ceasing, only they sin through inadvertency or some error, or overclouding of their light,’ as Adam and the angels sinned, there being no inward principle of corruption in them. Hence some libertines say, those that are in Christ can no more sin, and not walk with God, than the sun can leave off to give light, or fire to cast heat, or a fountain to send out streams, in regard that the Spirit actuateth them to walk with God by such a necessary impulsion that destroyeth all freedom of will; and if they sin, they are not to be blamed, because the Spirit moveth them not to abstinence from sin, and to holy walking. But Paul, "a chosen vessel," and a strong believer, complaineth of the indwelling of sin, of his carnality, and the flesh lusting against the spirit, and of his captivity under sin, (Rom. 7:14-17,) which must argue his imperfect faith, liable to the distemper of sinful doubtings. It is also a great error to say, That to call in question, whether God be my Father after, or upon the commission of some heinous sins, as murder, incest, etc., doth prove a man to be in the covenant of works. [Rise, Reign, and ruine. Er.20, p. 4.]

Now there be sundry sorts of doubtings opposed to faith in the renewed, there is, [1.] A natural doubting; and, as all popery is natural and carnal, so this strangeness of affection by which men are unkind to Christ, and never persuaded of God’s favour in Jesus Christ, argueth the party to be under the law, and not in Christ. This doubting may, and doth in carnal men consist with presumption, and a moral false persuasion, that natural men have all of them, till their conscience be wakened, that they shall be saved. ‘Why? I am not a murderer, a sorcerer, etc. Why? Or, how can God throw me into hell?’ So it is made up of real lies and contradictions; yet they have no divine certainty of salvation. For, ask a natural man, Have you a full assurance of salvation, as you say, that you always believe and doubt not? He shall be there at a stand, and answer, Who can have a full assurance? But I hope well, I believe well, night and day. And so doubt Papists also, and they have a lie in their right hand; ‘it cannot stand with God’s mercy or justice, since I am not this, and this, to throw me into hell,’ So is unbelief a lie: "And of whom hast thou been afraid and feared, that thou hast lied and hast not remembered me?" (Isa. 57:11.) [2.] There is an occasional doubting that riseth by starts upon wicked men, out of an evil conscience of sin, but it vanisheth as a cloud; as in Pharaoh’s confession, "I and my people have sinned." This argueth a law-spirit, rising and falling asleep again. [3.] There is a final doubting of despair, like the doom passed on the condemned malefactor; as in Cain, (Gen. 4:13,14;) in Saul, (1 Sam. 28:15,16). All these conclude men under the law, and the curse of it. But there is, [4.] A doubting in the believers, which, though a sin, yet (if I might have leave to borrow the expression) is a godly sin; not because it is not a sin indeed, and so, opposite to grace and godliness, but a gracious sin, in regard of the person and adjuncts, it being a neighbour to saving grace; and no reprobate can be capable of this sin, no more than Pagans, or flagitious and extremely wicked men can be capable of the sin against the Holy Ghost. So beggars are remotest from high and personal treason, because they have never that honour to come near the king’s person. So David’s bones, not Saul’s bones, were broken, humbled bones. (Psalm 51:10.) For a humbled heart is called (Nidcheh) broken, and bruised with a fear of God’s wrath for sin; and the converted soul’s moisture is turned to the drought of summer; and his bones waxen old with roaring all the day, God withholding the joy of his salvation. (Psalm 32:3,4.) This doubting befalleth never any reprobate under the law or covenant of works; and so, though it be an ill thing, yet it is a good sign, as out-breaking of boils in the body are in themselves diseases, infirmities, distempers, and contrary to perfect health; yet they are often good signs and arguments of strength of life, and much vital heat and healthiness of constitution. That affections of the child of God, under incest, murder, or other heinous sins be stirred, that sorrow be wakened and rise, when our Father is offended, and when our Lord frowneth and standeth behind the wall, and goeth away, is lawful; yea, it speaketh tenderness of love, softness of heart. But that they be so far wakened, as to doubt, and fear that the Lord be changed, that he hath forgotten to be merciful, that is sinful doubting; but doth noways conclude, that the person is under the covenant of works, but the contrary rather, that grace sitteth and bordereth with this doubting; and so, that the person is under grace, not under the law. Even where faith is strong, it is not ever in the same temper. Health most vigorous will vary in its degrees, and decrease at times of distemper, and yet be strong, and have much of life in it. Take the strong and experienced Christian’s life in its whole continued frame, and for the most part, he hath the better of all temptations; but, take him in a certain stage, or nick of providence, when he is not himself, and he is below his ordinary strength, even in that wherein he excelleth. If a gracious temper of meekness like Christ, was not the predominant element of grace in Moses, yet it was in a great measure in him, he bearing the name with Him, who best knoweth names, and things, of the meekest man in the earth. Yet in that which was his flower, he proved weaker than himself, and spake unadvisedly with his lips. Our highest graces may meet with an ill hour. Job, by the testimony of the Holy Ghost, is patient; "ye have heard of the patience of Job." And, (chap. 3,) we have heard of the cursing passion of Job, also. Believing is like sailing, which is not always equal; often strength of wind will blow the ship twenty miles backward. (2.) The smallest measure of Faith. The minimum quod sic, is sincere adherence to Christ. Not that negative adherence simply, by which some may say, I dare not for a world quit my part in Christ, or give up with him. Natural spirits may have a natural tenderness, by which they dare not quit Christ, and give up with him; yet there is no saving faith in natural spirits: but there is in the believer some positive adherence under, or with the negative, by which there is a power of love and kindness, making the soul to cleave to Christ. There may be great weakness with this, and great failings, and yet faith unfeigned. We have need of much charity to those that are weak in faith. A reed, a broken reed may grow; and Christ will not break it. A buried believer is a believer. If Christ have a near relation of blood to a piece of blue clay, and the dead corpse of a believer, seeing in his flesh there is the seed and hope of a resurrection, as the seed and hope of harvest is, in rotting and dying grains of wheat sown in the cold earth, as is clear, (Psalm 16:9; 1 Cor. 15:42,44), much more the relation of mercy remaineth in Christ, toward the wresthng, deserted, and self-dead believer.

Now, this smallest measure of faith may consist, [1.] With much ignorance of God, as it was with the believing disciples, who continued with Christ in his temptations, confessed him, believed and adhered to him, when many went back, and departed from him, (Luke 22:28,29; Matt. 16:16,17; John 6:66-69;) and yet were ignorant of great points of faith, as of his death, (Matt. 16:21,22,) and of his resurrection, (John 20:9). [2.] So there be great faintings and doubtings, when a storm ariseth, and the soul is a-sinking, (Matt. 8:25-27; Matt. 14.30). Yet a little faith is faith. As touching a fainting faith, it is not always a weak faith that fainteth; strong and healthy bodies may have fevers and deliquiums. For the causes of fainting are, {1.} The want of the influence of mercy, and of stirring or exciting grace, causeth fainting. "As we are mercied we faint not;" we degenerate not. (2 Cor. 4:1.)36 It is in the bosom of Christ, and lieth about the bowels of our merciful High Priest, that keepeth from fainting. If our Intercessor pray not, we faint: "I have prayed that thy faith may not be eclipsed."37 (Luke 22:32.) The moon is in a certain death, and soon in an eclipse; so is faith under fainting. {2.} Fear of wrath may cause distraction, and hanging of mind, and uncertainty, where there is strong faith; (Psalm 88:14,15, compared with verses 8,9). As apprehensions report of God, so are we affected in believing; yet may it be collected from Matt. 10:19, "In that hour it shall be given you," that Christ holdeth the head of a fainting believer. {3.} The dependence of faith will faint, when Christ withdraweth love, though he inflict no anger. The ingenuity of grace gathereth fear from a cloud, though there be no storm. [3.] A soul dead in himself, and that cannot put out faith in acts, for want of light and comfort, is a weak faith. A tree in winter is a living tree. There may be life, where there is little stirring or motion. [4.] That faith that seemed smallest to the man himself, is sometimes in itself, greatest. {1.} In sad desertions there is most of faith, and least of sense of faith, (Psalm 22:1). {2.} A suffering faith, may be small to the sufferer. Many of the martyrs, in their own sense, were in a dead and unbelieving condition. Yet Christ is more commended for a suffering faith than any, in that he did run, endure the cross, for the glory that was before him. (Heb. 12:1-3.) He saw heaven; and his faith went through hell to be at heaven. There is a high commendation put on the suffering faith of those who were tried with bonds, imprisonment, sawn asunder, mocked, slain with the sword, of whom the world was not worthy. (Heb. 11:37,38.) This is not put upon the active and doing faith, which is put upon the passive faith; nor is so much said of these, who, by faith, pulled down the walls of Jericho; of Gideon, Baruch, Samson, and such as by faith subdued kingdoms. The reason is, suffering is a loss of being and well-being. Those who, by doing, give away their evil-being for Christ, and crucify their lusts for him, are dear to him; but such as die for Christ, they give away both being and well-being. Moses and Paul, who, in a manner, were content to go to hell, with believing that God’s glory in saving the people of God, was to be preferred to their eternal being and well-being, behoved to have great faith. {3.} The faith that is weak, in regard of intention of degrees, may be a great faith, in regard of extension. The children of God, whose life is the walk of faith, (2 Cor. 5:7,) may have but a small measure of faith: Yet it is a constant and well breathed faith, good at the long race, that carrieth a soul through; in, |1.| His natural capacity to believe God will feed him: And, |2.| In his civil relations, as a father, son, servant, magistrate. |3.| In his spiritual condition, in the duties of the first table; in all which capacities we are to walk by faith, yea, to eat, drink, sleep; to laugh, to weep, as concerning the ordering of all these heavenward by faith. All the saints that go to heaven believing and ordering all these conditions by faith, have not always a faith as great as Abraham, as Moses. Weak legs carry some through the earth many thousand miles. A sorry and small vessel, in comparison of others, may sail about the globe of the whole earth. The wings of a sparrow or a dove, can carry these little birds through as much sea and land, as the wings of an eagle doth carry the eagle.

But ere I go from this point, I crave leave to add somewhat, (1.) Of the least and smallest measure of faith: (2.) Of the condition of the child of God under it.

Touching the former, I only say, there is a degree of fire, and a coal so small, that less cannot be, the thing remaining fire, having the nature, essence, and properties of fire. And when any is in a deliquium or swoon, the man hath life, but it is kept in narrow bounds; there is breathing only; some vital heat; some internal motion in the heart, and vital, and animal spirits, but no more to prove life almost, than the man is a dead corpse. Yet somewhat there is to distinguish him from dead clay, for friends will not bury a swooning man wilfully and knowingly. So at the lowest condition of the weakest faith that the believer is in, some fire and coal of love and faith there is, and some smoking, though little fire, and possibly we cannot give it a name. Yet if the just live by faith, there must be some measure of faith; some smoking of love to Christ; some discerning of an ill condition. No man on earth, in a sleep, hath a reflex act to know that he sleepeth; no dead corpse knoweth itself to be dead. Never sleeping man could say, nay, not Adam in his first sleep, when God formed the woman out of a rib of his side, ‘Now, I am sleeping.’ No man naturally dead, can say, ‘Now am I dead, and I lie among the worms and corruption.’ Death maketh no report of death. But the believer can say, at his lowest condition, "I sleep, but my heart waketh;" (Cant. 5:1,) and he who saith, "Lord, quicken me," (Psalm 119,) must say, "Lord, I am dead:" yet to say, "Lord, quicken me," and to feel and know deadness, are acts of the life of grace. A saint in this condition, may love Christ through half a dream, and half-sleeping half-waking retain honourable thoughts of Christ, (Job 13:15; and 19:25-27). Some have said, in hell they should love Christ. This truth is in it, that in such a pain and sad condition of suffering as the damned are in, (sin, despair, or God’s hating of them excepted,) saints can believe and love Christ, (Psalm 22:1,) at least, desire to have leave to love Christ; for the evil of sin may, the evil of punishment cannot quench the love of Christ, which is stronger than death—than hell, (Cant. 8:6,7). The soul, at the lowest condition, is like the man who hath engaged his lands for so great a sum, as may be a just price to buy the land; and so, in effect, he hath sold the land, but with a reversion; he keepeth the reversion, and so by law, within such a time, he may redeem his mortgaged inheritance. The weakest of believers, at his lowest ebb, keepeth the reversion of Christ. He may, by some grievous sin, be under such a terrible desertion, as to put the inheritance of heaven to a too great hazard of being lost, and in appearance, and in his own sense, and in the sense of many, all is gone; yet then, to say nothing of the invisible chain of God’s unchangeable decree of election, which the strongest arms of devils and hell cannot break, there is fire under the embers,—sap and life in the root of the oak tree. God saith of the bud of this vine tree, though the man neither see nor hear it, "Destroy it not, for there is a blessing in it."

As touching the Second, the question may be, What remaineth for him in this condition, to know his condition, or what can he do? I answer, (1.) When Christ hath left his bed, and is gone, he is to keep warm the seat that Christ was in. I do not say that the Church was at the lowest ebb, yet a desertion there was, and a sad one. (Cant. 5:6.) But in this condition [1.] she openeth her heart to Christ: "I rose up to open to my Beloved." [2.] There be some "Droppings of myrrh from her hands," some sense of Christ. (verse 5.) [3.] "I called him, but he answered me not;" there remaineth a faculty of praying. [4.] A love-sickness. Hence it is evident, in the lowest and ebbest condition of a fainting faith, there is something answerable to this; and this is, to love the smell of Christ that he hath left behind him, when he himself is gone; it is to desire to behold, with love and longing, the print of his feet, the chair of love that he sat in.

Hence, though you feel no work of sanctification, his seat is kept by some spiritual meditations, as to consider, what kind of love it is that Christ hath bestowed on sinners, for that he loved his own before he died for them, his love being the cause why he died for them; and still, after the purchased redemption, he loveth them, and intercedeth for them up at the right hand of God. And this is as much as to say, Christ hath loved you, and repenteth not of his love; love made him die for you, and if it were to do again, he would die over again for you, (Rom. 8:33,34; 1 Tim. 3:16). And suppose we that there were need that Christ should die twice, or four times, or an hundred, or millions of times, and that he had ten thousand millions of lives, and that our sins should have required that he should first die for one believer, and then die again the second time for another, and then the third time for another;—and so that he must, for every several elect person, have died a several death; love, love should have put him upon all these deaths willingly. And, therefore, if the believer had ten loves, as many loves in one as there be elected men and angels, all had been too little for Christ; and when the believer hath been serving and praising up in the highest temple, as many millions of ages of years, (or a track of eternity answerable to that duration of ages,) as the number of the sand on all the coasts in earth, of all the stars in heaven, of all the flowers, herbs, plants, leaves of trees, that have been, or shall be from the creation of God, to the taking down of the workmanship of heaven and earth; yet shall he be as much in Christ’s debt for this infinite love, when that time is ended, as when he first opened his mouth in the first breathing out of praises in the state of glory. (2.) He may turn over in his mind all the promises; and the literal revolution of them in the mind, though it be but a deed or act of the understanding and memory, may cast fire on the affections, in which there resideth a habit of grace: though there be no fire in the bellows, yet blowing with the bellows may waken up, and kindle fire in the hearth where there is little. The habit of grace is often as sparks of fire on the hearth, under the ashes, and may be kindled up, and made a fire. (3.) When faith is weakest, and the soul under a winter and a dead eclipse, it is fit to keep the heart in a passive frame of receiving of him again; as to sorrow for sin, and to put to the door un-repented sins; as when the king goeth abroad, to sweep the chamber for his return. Missing of Christ, longing for his return, inquisition for him, "Watchmen, saw ye him?" love-sickness for him, putteth the soul in a sweet passive capacity to receive him again, (Cant. 3:1-5). (4.) When the Church is in bed sleeping, yet she is charged to open, (Cant. 5:2). To weep at the noise of Christ’s knock, when you cannot rise, is somewhat; a prisoner may stir his legs, and cause the iron fetters tinkle, though he cannot get out; there is some strength when we are bidden, "Lift up the hands that hang down, and the feeble knees." (Heb. 12:12.) Motion will make fire. (5.) Especially Christ sleepeth least, when his child is in a high fever; love watcheth then most at the bed-side. 

TRIAL AND TRIUMPH OF FAITH.

SERMON XXIV.

"THY faith." Faith is so Christ’s, as the fountain and the cause, that it is ours, as agents moved and acted by Christ. Hence it is a foul error to say, ‘That there is no inherent righteousness in the saints, and no graces in the souls of believers, but in Christ only.’ There is water, even "the Spirit poured on the dry ground," (Isa. 44:3); "God’s Spirit put within us," (Ezek. 36:26,27); "the Spirit of grace and of supplication poured on the house of David," (Zech. 12:10); "a well within the saints, springing up to life everlasting," (John 4:14). The Father and the Son, through the operation of grace, take up house in them, (John 14:23). Such a new stock and plant of heaven set in them, as they have the "anointing dwelling in them," (1 John 2:27), "The seed of God abiding in them," (1 John 3:9). "Unfeigned faith dwelling in Timothy," (2 Tim. 1:5). Grace in them, as fire under ashes, (2 Tim. 1:6). And a new "divine nature," (2 Pet. 1:4). "An inward man," (2 Cor. 4:16). "Christ in you the hope of glory." (Col. 1:27.) Nor are the faculties of the soul, and the workings thereof in our conversion destroyed, as some say, as if the Holy Ghost should come instead of these; for Christ taketh down old work, and maketh a new building for himself, but the stones are ours, the soul remaining in its powers and operations; the understanding and will remain, but opened, (Luke 24:45; John 21:18; Eph. 1:17,18; Eph. 4:23,24). Christ removeth the rubbish and the frowardness, and overgildeth our stones; it is our matter, and his workmanship. Hence we are agents. Grace teacheth no man to be lazy; for, because all the moral actions of the renewed are commanded of God, if we by grace were no agents in these, but mere patients, and Christ and the Holy Ghost the only immediate agents,—in the omitting of believing, praying, praising, hearing; in not doing all our natural and civil actions for God, and in a spiritual way; yea, and in our forbearing to murder, whore, blaspheme, etc., (for, by the grace of Christ the saints abstain from sin), we should not sin;—all these wicked acts were to be imputed to the grace of Christ, and the Holy Ghost, which is blasphemy, and a flat turning of the grace of God into wantonness. Now we are, by grace, to be agents, to purge ourselves, (1 John 3:3,) to run with enlarged hearts in God’s way, (Psalm 119:32,) to stir up, and blow upon grace under ashes, (2 Tim. 1:6;) "To walk in Christ as we have received him," (Col. 2:6;) "To keep ourselves in the love of God," (Jude 21).

USE.—We are to be careful of the stock, not to hurt or waste the stock of grace. He who is spending his stock, before it be long shall have nothing. Cast not water upon your own coal, to quench the Spirit, or to grieve it. See what grows out of your stock; what income and crop of the fruits of the Spirit shall return to Christ. The Lord demandeth of every child of God, what, and where is the stock, and where is the rent of heaven? It is the virtue of the merchant to increase the stock; and, in all losses to strive to keep it whole. There is a wasting of the habit of grace, which is a dangerous thing, (Eph. 4:30). There is a sadding of the Spirit, and a rubbing off of some letters or characters of the broad seal of the Spirit, which is forbidden; even as break some spokes or axletree of the wheels of a great work, and the mill or horologe [chronometer, clock-work] is at a stand, and can work nothing. Beware, that no wards of the conscience be broken, for fear that the key of David that openeth the heart, fit them not, or suit not with the lock. David brake a ward, and a sprent of the new heart, by his adultery and bloodshed, and therefore, no artificer but one only in heaven, could put the lock in frame again, (Psalm 51:10). The new creation is like a curious horologe, made of crystal glass; it must be warily and tenderly handled: the frame of the workmanship of "the Holy Ghost dwelling in us," (2 Tim. 1:14,) must be kept from the least craze or throw in all the wheels and turnings thereof; yea, the least mote must not rest on it.

Question.—What must be done to keep in good temper the new creation?

Answer. (1.) Beware to go to bed and sleep with a bone broken or disjointed in the inner man. It is good to be disquieted in spirit, as if there were an aching in the bones, after some great sin not repented nor bewailed. When Peter, by denying his Lord, had rotted a bone, or a joint of the new man in himself, he rested not well that night; "He went out, and wept bitterly," (Matt. 26:57). Jeremiah made a rash and passionate vow, to speak no more in the name of the Lord; but he could not sleep with that coal of fire in his bones, (Jer. 20:9). (2.) Put the keeping of the new creature off your hand;—make it a pawn committed to Christ’s keeping, (2 Tim. 1:12,)—let him answer for it,—be not you under the burden of it yourself. The habit of grace, and the man put under lock and key to Christ, is in sure keeping; consider what cometh of him, (Jude 24). This is a broken world, there be many loose-handed devils going abroad through the earth; there be robbers lying await in the way to heaven, to take the crown from us, (Rev. 3:11). The believer, who hath a stock of grace, must be at holding and drawing with men and devils. "Commit the keeping of your souls to the faithful Creator;" but be not you idle, do it in "well-doing," (1 Pet. 4:19). (3.) Deal kindly with Christ, when you have him; break not with Christ, if you would keep the habit of grace safe; do nothing against your state. Grieving of the Holy Ghost, is unworthy of the condition of a redeemed one; your place cannot consist with walking after the flesh. The camp you are in cannot well bear compliance with the flesh; "You have put on the Lord Jesus," (Rom. 13:14). You cannot lay in for, nor victual such a castle as the flesh; for some exercise a providence, and lay in provision for the flesh. (4.) To be doing good, keepeth the habit of grace in exercise, and in life also; for grace is of the nature of life, and life is preserved by motion, and the frequent operations of life; yea, with this difference, the natural life may be worn out, and consumed away, with too frequent and violent labour and toil. This life is increased by assiduous walking with God; for "Every branch that beareth fruit in Christ, my Father (saith he) purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit." (John 15:2.)

"Be it unto thee as thou wilt."—Christ cannot long dissemble (to speak so), and keep up his love; he tried this woman hardly, now he praiseth her in her face,—"Great is thy faith,"—and granteth her desire to the full. If there was such a brotherly and natural compassion in Joseph, (Gen. 43:30,) Joseph’s bowels yearned, they were hot, and, "Joseph could not refrain himself." Vatablus noteth, that the Hebrew word is, ‘He could not do violence to himself.’ (Gen. 45:1); his love was like a hot furnace and it was like to make a captive of him, and to overcome him: now, the man Christ, hath the same heart and bowels of a man; and I conceive, as Christ was a man void of sin, so the acts of natural virtues, as to pity the afflicted, were stronger in him than in us. Sin blunteth natural faculties, especially such as incline to acts laudable and good—such as are love, compassion to the miserable; and sin boweth, or rather breaketh natural acts that are indifferent in their nature, and farther removed from morality, and maketh them intense above nature, sin being a violent thing. So, in natural men, there is little power in carnal reason over acts of generation, hunger, thirst, sleep, and such as have their rise from the sensitive soul. Christ having strength of sinless reason natural, far above Adam, was strong in the acts of the former kind, and moderate in the other; especially, being a High Priest that matcheth us in natural passions, (Heb. 4:15). Even, in a sympathy, and having these same passions that we have, he wept over Jerusalem, (Luke 19). When they were crying Hosanna to Him, and occasion of joy furnished to him, yet he wept over the city, and spake words of compassion, but broken and imprisoned with sighing and sorrow, "Oh, if thou knew, even thou," (verses 41,42). Now, what compassion must be in him, when his compassion had such an edge? Joseph is nothing to him, he having taken a man’s heart to go along with the saints to heaven, sighing, weeping, mourning, "tempted in all these, as we are, but without sin," (Heb. 4:15). Now, though there be no passions, as there are no infirmities in God, yet the flower, the blossom, the excellency of all these are infinitely in God: he striketh, and trieth, and yet pitieth: Israel cry to the Lord in their bondage, he giveth them a hard answer, "Go to the gods," (saith he,) "that ye have chosen, and let them deliver you." They still are in bondage, and weep upon him; "The Lord’s soul was grieved," (Judg. 10:16), (Hebrew, "Cut short for the miseries of Israel"). So Jer. 31: Two evils befall Ephraim, one is, God’s correcting hand; another is, bemoaning and sorrow for sin; both are trials. But how doth God express himself toward Ephraim? "Is Ephraim my dear son? Is he a son of consolation?" (verse 20.) So the Hebrew, "Is he my dainty child? For since I spoke against him I do earnestly remember him still, therefore my bowels are troubled for him." Observe the income of God’s consolations, after sad and heavy trials: "O, thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted, behold, I will lay thy stones with fair colours, and thy foundations with sapphires." (Isa. 54:11.) "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith our God. Speak to the heart of Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is accomplished." (Isaiah 40:1,2.) There is a violence of heavenly passion in Christ’s love; it will come out at length: tempted ones, wait on, you shall see Christ as Christ, in the end of the day: Christ is well worthy a day’s weeping, and a day’s waiting on. Compassion strangled and inclosed in Christ, must break out; it easeth Christ’s mind, that his bowels of mercy find a vent. Pity kept within God’s bowels (to speak so) paineth him? it must come out: "Mine heart is turned within me, my repentings are kindled together." (Hos. 11:8.) Oh, how rude and inhuman hath sin made our nature! His love who died for us, brake heaven, and rent the two sides of the firmament, as it were, asunder: our Lord descended, and was made a man in all things like us, except sin. But, oh, the first, nay, the doubled summons of Christ’s love is not obeyed. Love crieth—we are deaf; Christ’s love hunteth no other prey but our heart, and he cannot have it. After Christ hath tempted a soul, he must put it in his heart; it is an ease and comfort to Christ, to ease and comfort the tempted. He is now trying Britain, and giving his bride a cup of blood and tears to drink; but who knows what bowels, what turnings of heart, what motions of compassion are in the man Christ now in heaven! Those who shall live to see the Lord take his bride in his arms, and embrace her after these many temptations that now your eyes see, shall subscribe to the truth of this; and those who find Christ’s love-embracements, after desertions, know this. Should we suppose that there were in Christ but this one attribute of tender compassion toward his own tempted ones, it should make him altogether lovely to us. For the motion of tender mercy in Christ, upon the supposition of free love that he died for his own, is natural, he having taken a man’s heart to heaven with him, and borrowed nature from us: as our compassionate High Priest, he cannot but pity; mercy acteth as a natural agent in him. Now, suppose we that the mother were eternal, and her child eternal, but eternally weak; compassion should eternally flow from the mother to the child. Suppose a fair rose to grow eternally, and the summer sun to shine near it eternally, and life and sap to keep it vigorous eternally; it should cast out a sweet smell, and offer its beauty to the eyes and senses eternally. In Jesus Christ, the heart and tender bowels of the sweetest, mildest, and most compassionate nature of man that God can possibly form, have met with eternal and infinite mercy in God-Christ; and to say nothing, that mercy in Christ-man hath been putting forth the sweet-smelling acts of love, without tiring, summer and winter, night and day, these sixteen hundred years; and that, even now, while you read this, he is casting out acts of love and mercy—an eternal High Priest could do no other thing for ever, but compassionate his own redeemed flesh. Mercy chooseth a lover freely, Jacob, not Esau; this man, not that man; the fool, not the wise man; the beggar, not the prince; the servant, not the master; but, having once made choice, it worketh necessarily and eternally. Christ’s love hath no vacation, no cessation; but when he tempteth, smiteth, afflicteth, & trieth, love and tender mercy work in the dark. Joseph’s bowels were upon action, and busy, when his brethren saw no such thing, even when he was accusing them as spies, and dealing roughly with them. When the sword of the Lord, drunken, swelled, and fatted with blood, is now raging in the three kingdoms, mercy is in our High Priest, and his bowels are rolled within him, though we cannot see Christ’s inner side. It is likely, the place, (Heb. 4:15,) is but an allusive exposition of the rolled and moved "bowels of God," (Jer. 31:20). Christ is, as it were, in heaven burning, and flaming in a passion of compassion toward his weak ones. He is not only touched, but pained "with our infirmities," so the word doth bear. We shall not do well, to make the tempted condition that either the church or a soul is in, the rule of God’s love: God’s fiery dispensation in Zion, or in a soul, in the burning bush, speaketh not always wrath. Make not false commentaries on Christ’s tempting dispensation. Hell is accidental to the love of Christ, and cannot change it. Suppose Christ’s tender mercy were in the midst of the flames of hell, yet there mercy should be mercy, and work as mercy, and not belie itself.

Never a rod of God upon any elect child of God (save upon Christ only) did speak satisfactory vengeance for sin.Question.—Why? Is not Christ now red in his apparel, and his garments dyed and dipped in blood; and hath he not put on vengeance as a garment, in the three kingdoms? Answer.—Yes, and for the provocations of England, their unrepented idolatry, superstition, vanity, pride, security, unthankfulness to God, who hath broken the rod of the oppressor, and delivered them from pressures of conscience under Episcopacy, a mass service, and burdensome ceremonies; and for the sins of the king, queen, court, prelates and prophets; the persecuting and killing the witnesses of Christ in Queen Mary’s days, and in the late prelates’ time; and the present injustice, careless and remiss minding religion; and their labouring to spoil the kingdom of Christ of that power that Christ hath given to his people of church discipline, and translating it to their parliament to make church discipline parliament discipline, confounding so the two kingdoms; their tolerating blasphemous sects, some denying the godhead of Christ, some his kingly office to sanctify and govern his people, some his priestly, some his prophetical office; and many other sins of prophets and people, not repented of; and most of these sins, and many others, and especially the breach of the covenant in Scotland;—these two kingdoms are to fear heavy judgments, and that their calamity is not yet at an end; but rather, "one woe is passed, but another cometh," except these lands be humbled, and lie in the dust before the Lord. Yet, in all this, the dispensation of God, though bloody, is but the Lord saying, as of old, so now to Britain, "And I will turn my hand upon thee, and purely purge away thy dross, and take away all thy tin. And I will restore thy judges as at the first, and thy counsellors as at the beginning; afterward thou shalt be called the city of righteousness, the faithful city. Zion shall be redeemed with judgment, and her converts with righteousness." (Isa. 1:25-27.)

2. A rough dispensation of Christ, cannot abide long rough to the saints, he must answer, and ease the pain of the woman’s broken spirit. It is a night’s pain to Christ, to cause the tears run down the cheeks of his church all the night,—he cannot but bring a day-light of joy, before the sun’s ordinary time to rise, (Psalm 30:5.) Christ smiteth, and weepeth for compassion, both at once. Tender mercy in Christ moveth as much, if not more, within than without. The mother’s bowels are as much on work within, when the child is but upon her breasts, and he is not capable to know a mother as a mother; and love as love, as ever. When the deserted is but new and hot come out of the second womb, and a babe born over again, yet, in a spiritual fever, he is as much as ever in the bowels of Christ, though he be not in that case capable of the sense and actual apprehension of Christ, as Christ, and of the sense of Christ’s love, as his love: "Since the time that I sufficiently talked with him in correcting him, or since the time of my sufficiency of speaking against him, in remembering him, I do remember him." (Jer. 31:20.) I spake much in mine anger against him, and half against my will; I did chide him, and scourge him; but my moved bowels, the stirrings of a compassionating heart, did contradict (in a manner) my rough correcting: my heart came out of me, with every rough word and stroke. The sun and nature work long, and many years under earth, in the generation of gold and silver, ere we see gold and silver. God, and his servant Nature, did us a pleasure and a great favour in that kind, in secret, down in the bowels of the earth, to make unseen and concealed provision for our purses: this secret love to us acted down in the dark, is no love to us, till we find it, and see it; yet is nature in a mystery under a veil, sweating under earth to bring forth for us metals, trees, herbs, flowers, corn for our service, but we see no harvest at that time. Christ’s bowels are sweating, and as much labouring in childbirth, pain of compassion, and love, and tender mercy towards us, when we are in an ague, and a fit of desertion, as at any time; but we are loved of Christ and pitied, and we know no such thing. All Christ’s answers and words to this woman, till now, were but interpretations and proclamations of wrath, and rejecting of her, as not one of the lost sheep of the house of Israel; a dog under the table, not a child of the house. Love came never above ground till now; yet did Christ’s affection and love yearn upon her all the time.

Out of all this we collect, Christ may love persons, and yet his dispensation may be so rough, as that to their sense, there is no ground of being assured that Christ loveth them, till he shall be pleased to manifest it. Hence we may gather these propositions, to be considered for the times:

Free Love goeth before our Redemption.

PROPOSITION 1. God’s free and unhired love, is the cause of our redemption, vocation, sanctification, and eternal salvation: he loved us in our blood, and while we were polluted in our blood. (Ezek. 16:6,8.) When we were the lost world, (John 3:16,) ungodly, (Rom. 5:6,) enemies, (verse 10,) he quickened us, called us, when dead in sins, (Eph. 2:1,) without works, (2 Tim. 1:9). The bill of grace is Christ’s welcome, and pay nothing.

God Loveth the Persons of the Elect, but Hateth their Sins.

PROPOSITION 2. Our divines say, God loveth the persons of the elect, but hateth their sins. Mr. Denne is offended at this, and so are the Arminians for the same reason; "If God hate the works of iniquity, he cannot but hate the persons and workers of iniquity also." It is true, the Lord hateth so the persons of the elect for their sins, as he taketh vengeance of their sins on their surety, Christ; but this consisteth with the Lord’s loving of their persons to eternal salvation. The truth is, God’s affection ad intra of hatred and displeasure, never so passeth on the persons of the elect, as on the persons of the reprobate: he had thoughts of love and peace, in secret, from eternity, to his own elect; he did frame a heaven, a Saviour for them, before all time.

A Twofold Love of God, one of Good-will to the Person, another of Complacency to his own Image in the Person.

PROPOSITION 3. Our divines do rightly teach, that there is a twofold love in God; Amor benevolenti�, a love of well-willing, which he did bear to them before the world was, and it is called the love of election. Of this love, Paul speaketh. "I have loved Jacob, and hated Esau." (Rom. 9:13.) This is fountain-love, the well-head of all our salvation. There is another love called Amor complacenti�, a love of complacency, a love of justification (so Mr. Denne termeth it,) which presupposeth faith, ‘without which it is impossible to please God,’ (Heb. 11:6). Of this Christ speaketh, "He that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him." (John 14:21.) "If a man love me he will keep my words, and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him," (verse 23.) So Christ, the wisdom of God, saith, "I love them that love me," (Prov. 8:17). And so Christ speaketh of his love to his redeemed and sanctified spouse, "Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck." (Cant. 4:9.) Holiness and the image of God is the object of this love, not the cause nor any hire. It is not so properly love as the other. God rather loveth persons, desiring well and good to them, than things. Mr. Denne is not content with this distinction; and why? ‘The love of election and the love of justification,’ saith he, ‘are not divers loves or divers degrees of love, but divers manifestations of one and the same infinite love: as when a father hath conveyed an inheritance to his son; here is no new love from the father to the son, but a new manifestation of that love wherewith the father loved the son before.’ Answer. Men should not take on them to refute they know not what: not any protestant divines ever taught, that there is a new love in God, or any new degree of love in God, that was not in him before. Arminians, indeed, tell us of new love, new desires, and of ebbing and flowing; love and hatred succeeding one to another in God’s mind:—these Vorstian blasphemies we disclaim. It is, indeed, one and the same simple and holy will of God, by which he loved Peter and John from eternity, and chose them to salvation, and by which he so loveth them in time, as of free grace he bestoweth on them faith, holiness, pardon in Christ, and followeth these with his love: and the former is called his love of good will to their person, ere they do good or ill;—the latter his love of complacency to their state, and the Lord’s new workmanship in them; as with the same love the husband chooseth such a one for his wife, and loveth her, being now his married spouse.

Objection. 2. Men like those whom they love, and so doth God.

Answer. We grant all; these terms of God’s good loving, and good liking, are chosen of divines to express the thing. God loveth and liketh Jacob, not Esau, from eternity, ere he believe or do good; but he doth not so love and like Jacob from eternity, to bestow faith and the image of the second Adam on him, till in time he hear the word, and be humbled for sin. And the truth is, the love of complacency is not a new act of God’s will, that ariseth in God in time, but the declaration of God’s love of good will in this effect, that God is pleased to bestow faith and his beauty of holiness, which maketh the soul lovely to God; and it is rather the effect of eternal love, than love. And God hath a love of complacency toward the persons of the elect, and love of good will (though not of choosing good will toward them) for their holiness. (Cant. 4:9.)

Objection. 3. It is absurd that God should love the elect with infinite love to choose them to salvation, as touching their persons, and withal to hate them with an infinite hatred, as workers of iniquity. Answer. It were absurd, I grant, if God’s hatred to the elect as sinners, were any immanent affection in God opposite to his love, by which he should be averse to their persons. But God’s hatred to the elect, because they are sinners, is nothing but his displeasure against sin, (not against the person,) so as he is to inflict satisfactory punishment on the surety, Christ, for their sin. A father may so love his prodigal son, as to retain a purpose to make him inheritor of a kingdom (if he had a crown for himself) and to pay his debts, and yet both hate and punish his profuse and lavish wasting of his goods.

Mr. Denne would teach us how love and hatred towards sinners doth consist. "The law (saith he) and the gospel speak divers things: the one being the manifestation of God’s justice, tells us what we are by nature; the other, the manifestation of God’s mercy, tells us what we are by God’s mercy in Jesus Christ. The law curseth and condemneth the sinner; the gospel blesseth and justifieth the ungodly." [Denne. Serm. Grace, mercy, & peace, p. 38.] Answer. What is this else but that which Mr. Denne and other Antinomians condemn in us? How can one and the same unchangeable God curse, condemn, and so hate sinners, as to punish them eternally, and yet bless, justify, and love to eternal salvation their persons, except they teach the same very thing which we do? For the law and the gospel are no more contrary one to another, than love to the persons of the elect, and hatred and revenging justice to their sins. Mr. Denne would further clear the point thus: "Whatever wrath the law speaketh, it is to the sinner under the law; although the elect are sinners in the judgment of the law, sense, reason, yea ofttimes conscience, yet, having their sins translated into the Son of God (in whom they are elected) they are righteous in Christ the Mediator." Answer. The law speaketh wrath, in regard of its reign and dominion to death, to the elect not yet converted, and to the reprobate, without exception of persons. But it cannot speak wrath to the believer, though he be one that daily sins, and is under the law; that is, under the rule of the law. Now, to be under the law, to Paul, is to be under the damnation of the law. (Rom. 6 and 7.) In which regard, believers are not under the law, but under the sweet reign of pardoning grace; yet are they under the law as a tutor, a guide, a rule. And that the rule and reign of the law are different, is evident, (1.) Because the ruling power of the law is an essential ingredient of the law, without the which, the law is not the law. The reign or damnation of the law agreeth to the law by accident, insofar as man is a sinner, which is a state accidental to the law. (2.) The law is a rule, and hath a proper guidance and tutory over the confirmed angels, and should have had over man, if he had never sinned; but the law can have no reign to death over the confirmed angels, and man, in that case; as the jailor, hath no power over the man, who was never an evil doer. (1.) We are sinners in the judgment of law, both sin dwelling in us; and (2.) The guilt of the law lying on us to condemnation. But being once in Christ, and justified, we remain sinners, as touching the indwelling blot; but we are not sinners, as we are justified in Christ, as touching the law-obligation to eternal condemnation, from which we are fully freed. But the justified and redeemed of Christ, remain as formally and inherently sinners, as milk is formally white, a raven black. Justification removeth not the indwelling of sin; and so, in regard of sense, reason, and conscience, we are sinners to our dying day, but not condemned sinners. Mr. Denne objecteth—we pray daily, "Forgive us our sins;" then we are not righteous in Christ: he answereth, that Protestants say, we beg greater certainty and assurance of forgiveness. But not content with this answer, he addeth, "When we pray for forgiveness, we magnify His grace, who hath freely given us forgiveness: it were not folly to a condemned person, having received a pardon, and being assured of it, to fall down and say, Pardon me, my lord the king." Answer. (1.) What Protestant divines say in this, we acknowledge; but if we seek only a fuller certainty of forgiveness in this petition, and not also the application of the general pardon, as appropriated to the sins we daily fall in, I see no other thing we seek, but a greater measure of faith, to lay hold on remission. I should ask a warrant of Scripture to prove, that forgiveness of sin signifieth assurance of the pardon of sin. (2.) That to seek forgiveness daily, is to glorify and magnify him from whom we once received forgiveness, is not to purpose, for that is a general in all petitions that we put up to God, no less than in this. (3.) If a pardoned malefactor, having assurance he were pardoned, should fall down and beg pardon of the king, and not rather tender him thanks and blessings for a received pardon, I should believe he called in question the king’s favour; but should he every day, when he eateth bread, beg pardon from the king, as we beg daily forgiveness, he might be charged with more than ordinary folly. Mr. Denne [pages 45, 46, 54.]—God loves us in blood (saith he) and pollution, as well before conversion, as after conversion. And though faith procure not God’s love and favour, yet it serveth us for other uses, that we may be sealed by believing, (Eph. 1:13,) and may thereby know the love of God. It is said, he that believeth not, is damned; not because his believing doth alter or change his estate before God, but because God hath promised, that he will not only give us remission, but also faith for our consolation; and so, faith becometh a note, and a mark of life everlasting, as final infidelity is of eternal condemnation. Answer. It is true, God loveth the elect before conversion equally as after conversion, in regard of that free love of election, that moved him to give his Son to death for them, (John 3:16,) and to call them effectually, (2 Tim. 1:9; Eph. 2:1-4; Titus 3:3,4).

How God Loveth us before Time & how He Loveth us in Time.

PROPOSITION 4. It is a palpable untruth, that the elect, by believing in Christ, and being translated from death to life in their conversion to God, are equally loved of God before conversion, as after conversion, if we speak of God’s love of complacency; for though the inward affection and love of God, as it is an immanent and indwelling act in God, be eternal, and have not its rise in time, and be not like the love of man to man, which is like the sea ebbing and flowing; or the moon, which admitteth of a cloudy and dark visage, and of an enlightened and full condition; yet as the same love of God is terminated upon sinful men, or rather, that which is called the love of complacency, which is indeed the effect of God’s love; it is not every way one and the same, after conversion and before; as it is the same fountain and spring that runneth in its streams toward the south, which, by art and industry of men, may be made to run toward the north: the change is in the streams, not in the fountain; yet we say the fountain now runneth not southward, as it did before, but northward. Also, give me leave to doubt, if these same very visible sun-beams, that did fall upon Adam and Eve, do this summer fall upon us; yet, I doubt not, but the same sun that did shine the first six hours of the creation, on the garden of Paradise, shineth upon all our gardens and orchards that now are. So God’s love is one and the same toward the elect before time, and while they are wallowing in the state of sinful and depraved nature, and now, when they are changed in the spirits of their mind. But it may well be said that God loveth his Church, as washed, as fair, and spotless, (Cant. 4:7,) and that he doth now say of her, "How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! how much better is thy love than wine, and the smell of thine ointments than all spices?" (Cant. 4:10.) Whereas, the Lord said before of her, "Thy birth and thy nativity is of the land of Canaan; thy father was an Amorite, thy mother an Hittite; as for thy nativity, in the day that thou wast born, thy navel was not cut, neither wast thou washed in water to supple thee; thou wast not salted at all, nor swaddled at all;" (Ezek. 16:3,4). "And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thy blood, I said unto thee, when thou wast in thy blood, live." (verse 6.) And all this the Lord might speak to the same Church yet unconverted; and at that time, the Lord could not utter that expression of love, to say to a bloody and polluted church, as he doth, "Thou art all fair, my love, there is not a spot in thee."(Cant. 4:7,) Now, could it be said, that the Father and the Son love such a Church, as such as loveth the Father, and keepeth the words of the Son, as it is, (John 14:21,23,) when the church was not fair, not spotless; but filthy, polluted, not washed, not justified as yet? And though it be true, that faith procures not God’s love and favour (it is a calumny, that ever a protestant divine taught any such thing); for the work of God’s eternal love in election to glory, or his hatred in reprobation, is not the yesterday or to-day’s-birth of our faith, or our unbelief; yet that believing, or our effectual conversion maketh no alteration or change in our state before God, is a gross untruth. Faith and conversion make indeed no change of any state in the Ancient of days, in the Strength of Israel, who cannot lie or repent; and putteth not God from the state of a reprobating or hating, or a not loving and choosing God; whereas, before he was such, who did love and choose us to salvation. The Lord is our witness, we asserted the contrary doctrine of free grace, against Arminians and Papists.

PROPOSITION. 5. Our believing and conversion to God, doth alter and change our state before God, (1.) Because God esteemed an unbeliever that which he was,—even an unbeliever, a child of wrath, one that is disobedient, serving divers lusts; a soul unwashed, polluted in his blood before his conversion to God: but being once converted, and graced to believe, his state before God is altered and changed, even in the court of heaven; in the Lord’s books he is another man, he goeth now for a fair and undefiled soul. The church that was in a polluted, filthy, and miserable condition, (Ezek. 16:3-8,) is now in Christ’s heart as a seal, (Cant. 8:6,) so fair, as her beauty ravisheth the heart of Christ. Now, Christ nameth things according to their nature. (2.) The condition is so changed before God, that "It cometh to pass, that in the place where it was said to them, Ye are not my people, there it shall be said unto them, ye are the sons of the living God." (Hos. 1:10.) "Which in time past, were not a people, but are now the people of God; which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy." (1 Pet. 2:10.) The words of Scripture, that import a real change, do prove the same; as Col. 1:12, "Who hath made us meet, (or sufficiently qualified us,) to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light." Christ is a qualified workman, and changeth hell, and the most untoward timber of hell, to heaven, and to a vessel of glory. It is a vain thing to dream, that Christ hath no other esteem and warmness of heart to us, when we are dead in sins and trespasses, and posting as in a horse-race after the devil, who rideth, and acteth, and breatheth in the children of disobedience; and when he hath raised and quickened us for his great love, and placed us in heaven with Christ, "And made us kings and priests unto God." (Eph. 2:1-4.) Then the state of hell and death, should be the very state of grace and heaven, before God. "A new creature, (2 Cor. 5:7). "Light in the Lord," (Eph. 5:8). "Partakers of the divine nature," (2 Pet. 1:4). "Renewed in the spirit of the mind," (Eph. 4:23). "Such as are begotten again, unto a lively hope, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead," (1 Pet. 1:3). "Born again, not of corruptible seed," (1 Pet. 1:23). "Kings and priests unto God," (Rev. 1:5). "A generation of kings and priests unto God," (1 Pet. 2:9,) must be in their state some other thing than old creatures, than darkness, than unrenewed, uncircumcised old men, slaves of sin, persecutors, blasphemers, injurious persons. The Lord speaketh of a change great enough; "Since thou wast precious in my sight; thou hast been honourable, and I have loved thee." (Isa. 43:4.) Were the children of wrath from eternity honourable? No. Were they more precious and honourable actually before God from eternity, than the rest of the nations? No; the contrary is evident, (Ezek. 16:3; Deut. 7:7,8; Psalm 147:19,20; Deut. 26:5). Certainly, if faith or conversion to God, (a special part of which is faith), doth not alter the state of believers before God, then are they believers, and actually converted before God, and so, justified from eternity. When were they then sinners? Never; their sins were just no sins from eternity, and blotted away as a cloud, as a thick cloud, as it is, Isa. 44:22, and that from eternity, and from eternity sought and not found, because pardoned, (Jer. 5:20). "No more remembered," (Isa. 43:25). Now they were justified from eternity, and ere they believe in him that justifieth the ungodly, no other ways than in God’s decree and eternal purpose.

But the truth is, this is the principal false and rotten pillar of all Libertinism, which I evert thus, and they shall never be able to answer it: If faith be so far forth a manifestation of our justification before God, because justification was in the sight of God actually done from eternity, before all time, then are we never ungodly, and actually sinners before God: ‘For it is impossible,’ say Antinomians, ‘that God can both hate us, as ungodly, and love us, as justified in Christ; and it is vain and nonsense,’ say they, ‘that God loved the persons from eternity, and hated the sins; or that he loved the elect with the love of election, or love of good-will, and did not also love them with the love of justification,’—this is their term, not mine—‘or with the love of complacency, and his good liking to faith in them.’ Then, say I, from eternity the justified were never ungodly, never sinners, never the heirs of wrath, never such as served divers lusts, and were disobedient, polluted in their own blood: which is downright contrary to the word of truth.

Observe the principle of Antinomians:—We are not justified by faith, say they. How then? Because ‘we are justified from eternity, only we are said by Paul to be justified by faith, in that, by faith, we come to the knowledge and assurance of the state of election, and of justification, and God’s act of not imputing sin to us, which acts were passed upon us from eternity, and before the children had done good or evil,’ (Rom. 9:13). And observe the words of Mr. Henry Denne ["Sermon of Grace, Mercy, & Peace," pages 33,34.] to this purpose:—‘I do believe,’ saith he, ‘sin to be of that hideous nature, and the justice of God so perfect, that he cannot but hate the person unto whom he imputeth, and upon whom he chargeth sin, if so be the person charged cannot give full, perfect, and present satisfaction; and yet will I not say, that the Son of God, upon whom all our iniquities were charged, was at any time filius odii, a son of hatred, (for the Father was eternally well pleased with him): the reason is, that our sins were no sooner charged upon him, but that he had given full and perfect satisfaction, being the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world,’ (Rev. 13:8).

Answer 1. If God cannot but hate the person upon whom he chargeth sin, either God never charged our sins upon Christ, contrary to Scripture, (Isaiah 53:6; 1 Pet. 2:23,24; 2 Cor. 5:21,) or then he hated Christ; which no sound divine dare say. The payment and satisfaction which Christ made, cannot hinder Christ to hate sin, & so the person upon whom sin is (as Antinomians teach, while as they refuse this distinction), no more than the satisfaction that Christ made for sin, can hinder itself, or hinder Christ to die for sin; for if God should hate Christ, it should be satisfactory hatred, and penal.

2. I much wonder, if God, from eternity, charged sin upon his Son Christ, (for the place he citeth, Rev. 13:8, and the judgment of Antinomians so expounding it, evinceth this to be his meaning), how Christ from eternity could give full, perfect, and present satisfaction, to prevent the hatred of his Father, is not imaginable. Indeed, when Christ gave satisfaction, I believe that it was full and perfect: but that Christ from eternity gave present satisfaction, and that to make us actually justified from all eternity, is a point no head can conceive, except Herod, Pilate, Jews, and Gentiles, the traitor Judas, and all who were wicked actors in killing of Christ, be men uncreated, who had existence and being, and sinned from eternity. This lieth fairly for the eternal world of Aristotle. Then, surely, faith doth not bring us to the knowledge only of our state of justification, as past, and done from eternity, as if election to glory, and the love of God therein, and justification, and that love, as manifested by faith, were two co-eternal twins, both at once begotten from eternity. Sure I am, we are justified by faith; but sure I am, we are not elected and chosen to life eternal by faith. And if to be justified by faith be, as our masters (though ignorantly) teach, nothing but this, that we come to the knowledge of our justification by faith, as by a sign, even as the day-star maketh not the sun to rise, it being only a sign that the sun shall rise, and that justification is as old a child of free love, as election to life; then, say I, Paul might have taken the like pains to prove these propositions: "We are chosen to glory before the world was, by faith, and not by the good works of the law:" And this, "Men are reprobated from eternity by final unbelief." For sure it is, that we come to the knowledge of our election to glory, by believing; not to say, that Paul’s large dispute with justiciaries, was not, whether we know and apprehend our own justification by the works of the law, or by faith in Christ.

3. If Antinomians say, that Christ was slain for our sins from eternity, not actually, but only in God’s eternal purpose, and they must say, either he was the Lamb, actually crucified for us from eternity (which is a new eternal world,) and we are actually justified from eternity, and our sins imputed to Christ, and actually translated off us, and laid on him, and so our sins actually pardoned from eternity—or then they must say, Christ was the Lamb slain from eternity, not actually, not really, but only in the decree and gracious purpose of God: now, that is, I grant, sound divinity. Christ died not from eternity; but God only decreed and purposed, that in the fullness of time he should die. But then it must follow, that God did not actually charge sin on Christ from eternity, and that Christ did not actually from eternity justify the ungodly, but only in his eternal purpose he did justify the ungodly. Then the ungodly are justified in time;—and when is this time? I believe the word of God, that it is never while [until] the poor soul believes; even as the sinner is condemned, and under wrath, but never while [until] he misbelieves, and rejects the Son of God.

But, 4. If the meaning (that Christ is the Lamb slain for our sins from eternity) be, that he is slain only in God’s purpose, then we are no more justified and pardoned from eternity, and so before we believe, than the world was created from eternity. Now, in the Antinomian sense, as we are justified by faith, that is, we come to know that we were in God’s mind actually justified, then it may be said, the world was created by faith; for through faith we understand that the world was created; (Heb. 11:3;) and God laid our sins upon Christ by faith: and Christ died for us, and bare our sins, on his own body, on the tree, by faith. For, by faith, we come to know, that God made the world; but because the knowledge and apprehension of the creation, (may some say,) is not a point serving for peace of conscience and Christian consolation, which yet is false (every point of saving faith is apt to breed peace and consolation), yet certainly, we come to know and apprehend, that God laid our sins upon Christ, by faith, (Isa. 53:6:) and that Christ died for us, and bare our sins on his own body on the tree, by faith, and by faith only, to our peace and consolation. And so, if justification by faith be nothing but the manifestation of God’s love to us, in imputing our sins to Christ, and have no subordinate organical act in our justification, but we be justified before we believe, and that from eternity, upon the very same ground, God created the world by faith, Christ died for our sins by faith.

5. Yea, in this sense, the world must be created from eternity, and all things which fell out in time, fell out in eternity; because, as Christ was the Lamb slain from eternity, in God’s eternal purpose, so were all things, and the world created from eternity in God’s purpose and decree. But things that only have being in the decree of God, are not simply, nor have they any being at all; and, therefore, our free justification from eternity had no being, but only was to be, and actually is, when God giveth us faith to lay hold on the remission of our sins.

Nor is it enough to say, that faith is only given for our joy and consolation, and not for the alteration and change of our state; that of unjustified, we may be justified: for this layeth down these false grounds, (1.) The believer is so in every moment of time to rejoice, as he is never to sorrow for sin, nor to confess sin, because sins were pardoned from all eternity; but so, neither after a soul believes, nor before he believes, is he to confess sins, or mourn for them; because both after and before, yea, from eternity, sins are not at all, but removed in Christ. (2.) It layeth down this ground, that we are justified no more by faith, than by the works done, by the saving grace of God after regeneration; and that Paul in the Epistle to the Romans and Galatians, does contend with justiciaries, how these who were from eternity justified, shall come to know and apprehend, for their own peace, joy, and consolation, that they were justified and elected to glory—whether men may know this by faith in Christ, or by the works of the law. But, [1.] This is not the state of the question between Paul and the justiciaries. For (Rom. 3,) Paul concludeth strongly, we are really and indeed changed from a state of sin, unto a state of justification even before God; not because, by keeping the law, we know we are justified, but because all have sinned, and are come short of the glory of God, and so are inherently wicked, abominable, doers of ill, and condemned therefore before God, from David’s testimony, (Psalms 14, 53). This argument concludeth real and intrinsical condemnation, not the knowledge of condemnation, nor the knowledge that we are not justified by the works of the law. Paul proveth that we are justified as David and Abraham were. (Rom. 4.) Now they are not said to be justified by faith, because they come by faith to the knowledge of their justification. For Abraham’s righteousness, and the blessedness of the justified man, opposed to the curse of the law, from which we are freed in justification, (Gal. 3:10-13,) is the real fruit of justification, and of believing in him that justifieth the ungodly, (Rom. 4:1-9). But this blessedness, and freedom from the curse of the law, is not any fruit, or effect, or consequent of our knowledge and apprehension of our justification in Christ, as if we were, before we believe, blessed and freed from the curse of the law; because even the elect, before they believe, are under the curse, and are not blessed: {1.} Because they are, before they believe, the children of wrath, (Eph. 2:2). Ergo, they are under the curse. {2.} Because Paul and the elect, before they be under grace and belief, were under the law, and so, under wrath: (Rom. 6:14-17:) "Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the law, by the body of Christ, that ye should be married to another." (Rom. 7:4.) "For when we were in the flesh, the motions of sins, which were by the law, did work in our members, to bring forth fruit unto death. But now, we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in oldness of the letter." (verses 5,6.) Hence it is clear, there was a time when Paul, and the elect at Rome were servants of sin, (Rom. 6:20,21,) under the lusts and motions of sin, which work in their members to bring forth fruit, that is, sins to death eternal, Rom. 7:5;) ergo, they were then under the curse of the law, and so, far from blessedness, and the servants of sin, (Rom. 6:20,) and persons in the flesh. But the case is changed; they are now not the servants of sin, but servants of righteousness, (Rom. 6:22,) married to a new husband, Jesus Christ, (Rom. 7:4). Whence came this change of two contrary states, yea, and before God contrary? (for before God, it cannot be one state, to be servants of sin, under the law, and servants of God, and under grace). Certainly, from faith on our part, or some other grace in us—at least, there must be something of grace by which the alteration from a cursed estate to a blessed estate is made. Then faith is not a naked manifestation of the blessedness of justification, to the which we were entitled before we believed; for before we believed, we were in a cursed estate. This also may be added, that if faith be but a declaration or manifestation that we are justified before we believe, Paul had no reason to deny that we are justified—that is, that we know to our comfort, by works of holiness, that we are justified; for works of sanctification are evident witnesses that we are in Christ, and are justified, (2 Cor. 5:17; 1 John 3:14; 2:3; James 2:24,25; 2 Peter 1:10). (3.) It layeth down this false ground, that grace is nothing in us, but a mere comfortable sense and apprehension of free love, and grace is conceived to be only and wholly in Christ; so that there is no inherent grace in the believer, by which he is distinguished from an unbeliever; sanctification and duties flowing from the habit of grace are nothing but dreams of legal men: Christ justifying the sinner is all and sum in the elect; strict and precise walking conduce nothing to salvation. ‘To think that it can do anything in order to salvation, is to worship,’ saith Mr. Denne, ‘an angry Deity; to satisfy justice with our works, fastings, tears, duties.’ Therefore our

PROPOSITION. 6. is, That it is a vain distinction of Mr. Denne, who would have a reconciliation of God to man, and of man to God; (1.) Because we read that man is reconciled to God, (Rom. 5:10; 2 Cor. 5:18-20; Col. 1:20,21; Eph. 2:16). Man is the enemy, whereas in Adam he was a friend, and in Christ, the second Adam, he is made a friend. But that God is reconciled to man, or changed toward his own elect from an enemy, and a God that hateth their persons, into a friend and lover of them, I never read: if at any time God be said to be comforted toward his people, or eased, these are borrowed speeches. (2.) Love of election, yea, the love that putteth God on work to redeem, call, justify, sanctify the elect, is no love bought with hire, yea, the price of redemption which Christ gave for sinners, cannot buy eternal love. Blood, and the blood of God shed, cannot wadset ancient love; all the sins of devils, of men, cannot forfeit it: make sins, floods and seas, and ten thousand worlds of rivers, they cannot quench that eternal coal and flame in the breast of so free a lover as God;—in a word, the shed blood of Christ is an effect, not a cause of infinite love. (3.) What then, doth reconciliation place any new thing in God? No. Doth it turn him from a hater into a lover? No. Reconciliation active on the Lord’s part, is a change of his outward dispensation, not of his inward affections. "Fury is not in me," he saith himself, (Isa. 27:4). He cannot wax hot and fiery in the acts of his spotless and holy will. Reconciliation turneth not the heart, but the hand of the Lord upon the little ones, as he speaketh, so that he cannot deal with or punish his elect, as otherwise he would do. The Lord’s justice may be satisfied, his love cannot be bribed or hired, and the effect of justice, the inflicting of infinite wrath, is diverted, as a river that runneth east, hath been made to run west, and an issue of blood in one member of the body, hath been diverted to run in another channel. Justice was to run through the elect of God in the due and legal punishment of the sinner, (which yet is extraneous to the just and eternal will of God;) but infinite wise mercy, caused that river to run in another vein, through the soul of Jesus Christ.

PROPOSITION. 7. Joy of the Holy Ghost is a fruit of the kingdom of grace, (Rom. 14:17). But not that joy spoken of, Rev. 21:4, and Isa. 35:10, which excludeth all tears, death, sorrow, crying, all sighing, as Mr. Denne dreameth; so as joy can no more be separated from the subjects of that kingdom, than light from the sun, heat from the fire, or ebbing and flowing can be stopped in waters, as he saith. Far less is it true, that actual love and obedience do inseparably follow this condition, except we were made angels, when we are once justified. Nor is the kingdom of God spoken of, 1 Cor. 6:9,10, and the seeing of God, Heb. 12:14, the kingdom, or state of grace, or the seeing of God in a vision of faith here in this life (but of the kingdom of glory and of the vision of God in the other life) as Mr. Denne expoundeth it [Sermon I, Reconciliation pages 85-87], that he may elude all necessity of holiness; but that which floweth from no obligation of any law or commandment of God, but which is in our power of love to perform or not perform, if we perform it not, it is no transgression of any law of God.

1. Mr. Denne himself granteth, page 84, ‘God is not like some niggardly man, who will not bid us welcome to his house, unless we bring our cost with us.’ Nor is holiness required of us without faith, and before we believe and enter citizens of the kingdom of grace; nay, by this interpretation, 1 Cor. 6, we must be justified and washed before we can inherit this kingdom, (verses 9-11). But we are not to be washed and justified, before we inherit the kingdom of grace, and before we believe; for so, we should be justified and washed before we be justified and washed. And the like I say of the kingdom of God, (John 3:3.) For it should follow that a man must be born again, ere he be born again, if he must be born again ere he enter a subject of the kingdom of grace. Nay, not any such condition can go before man’s reconciliation to God.

PROPOSITION. 8. Christ can love dearly, and tempt roughly both at once. (1.) His love consisteth not in a taking his Church into his bosom, and a continual, and never interrupted laying of her between his breasts; yea, tempting floweth from the love of God, nor is it any act of justice, yea to take vengeance on the inventions of his people (satisfying justice he cannot exercise toward his elect; yet, a punishing and correcting justice, he may, and doth, put forth on them), but it hath its rise from love. All the wheels of God’s dispensation; sweet or sour, are rolled upon this axle-tree of free love: the bowels of Christ act, move, and breathe all dispensations to the saints, through no other pipe and channel, but free and tender compassion, so as mercy is an immediate actor, when the Lord is wasting his church with bloody wars. And, which is wonderful, Mercy is Christ’s armour-bearer, and Mercy immediately killeth, even when Death climbeth in at the windows, and enters into the house of the believer, either in a pestilence known to come from no creature or second cause, or in the raging sword, when "the carcasses of men fall as dung in the open field, and as the handful after the harvestmen, and there be none to bury them," (Jer. 9:21,22). (2.) Tempting mercy is wise mercy; it were not a tempting mercy, if we saw all the secrets of love, and the reasons why the Lord buildeth Zion with blood. Even the elect and beloved of God, though they be in Christ’s court, they are not always upon his council, (John 13:7). Many are within the walls of the palace, that are not in the king’s parlour, and taken into his house of wine. The love of Christ hath its own mysteries and unknown secrets; as why one saint is led to heaven, and to men’s eye "the candlestick of the Almighty shineth on his tabernacle, and he washeth his steps in oil," he is rich, holy, prosperous; and another no less dear to Christ, never laugheth till he be within the gates of heaven, but eateth the bread of sorrow all his days; his face never dryeth till he be in glory, is a secret of heaven. The love of Christ is often veiled and covered, and we know not what he meaneth: but he hasteth to show mercy.

USE. This should make us very charitable of Christ when he frowneth, and covereth himself with a cloud, and very inclinable to pardon (if I may so speak) rough and bloody dispensations in Christ. He loveth, and he bleedeth, scourgeth, and giveth his own child a cup of gall and wormwood. Could we in silence believe it is Christ with two garments on him at once—Christ clothed with love, wrapt in the unseen mystery of tenderness of compassion, and yet his upper garment is vengeance, and rolled in blood, we should kiss the edge of Christ’s bloody sword. So we are to believe, for Christ at one time "travaileth in the greatness of his strength, and speaketh in righteousness, and is mighty to save," and at the same time his upper garment is blood. (Isaiah 63:1.) It is true, it is the blood of his enemies; but it is often the blood of the children of his own house and sanctuary, (Ezek. 9:6; 1 Peter 4:17). And what more concerneth us, than to keep our first love to Christ, when he multiplieth our widows in the three kingdoms, as the sand of the sea, and bringeth against the mother of the young men a spoiler at noonday? (Jer. 15:8.) This woman stayed on her watchtower, and now, the vision speaketh mercy to her. Say they were injuries that Christ inflicteth (which is a blasphemous impossibility) yet it is Christ, it is the Lord, let him do what seemeth good to him. The absolute liberty of the potter closeth the mouth of the clay vessel, if it could speak, (Rom. 9). That unbelief hath no reason to stomach and dispute against hell’s fire coming from him, who hath absolute dominion over us. As devils and wicked men burn in hell with eternal fretting against God for their pain; so, if it were possible, that the elect and regenerate were thrown into hell, they are to have eternal charity and love to the holy and just Lord, and to believe his eternal love. 

TRIAL AND TRIUMPH OF FAITH.

SERMON XXV.

"BE it unto thee as thou wilt." (Genetheto soi;) it is a word of Omnipotency, to create being. (1.) It is spoken of Satan, and to Satan, (Mark 9:25; Luke 4:35). (2.) None can speak to leprosy, but Christ, "Be thou clean." (Matt. 8:3; Luke 4:39.) (3.) Christ can speak to stark death: "Jesus cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth." (John 11:43; 5:28.) (4.) He can speak to life, in the abstract, "Come from the four winds, O breath, breathe upon these slain, that they may live." (Ezek. 37:9.) (5.) God can speak to mother-nothing, as if Nothing had ears and reason, and could hear; "He calleth things that are not, as though they were." (Rom. 4:17.) He did but nod upon nothing, and out of nothing there compeared before him "the great host of heaven and earth, and all things in them," (Psalm 33:9). (6.) There is a language of providence, by which every being, as being, hath a power obediential to hear what God saith, and do it: "The Lord spake to the fish, and it vomited out Jonah on the dry land." (Jonah 2:10.) "And he rose and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still; and the wind ceased, and there was a great calm." (Mark 4:39.) What wise man can boast the sea? What ears have the senseless and lifeless waters? Yet they hear Christ’s language—they speak, ‘Yonder standeth our Creator boasting us, and therefore we will obey,’ (Isaiah 50:2). Here himself speak: "Behold, at my rebuke, I dry up the sea," (Psalm 114). There is a question put upon the creatures, that they can well answer, "What aileth thee, O thou sea, that thou fleddest? thou, Jordan, that thou wast driven backward?" (verse 5.) What ailed you, "Ye mountains, that ye skipped like rams, and ye little hills, like lambs?" (verse 6.) Good reason, saith the Spirit: "Tremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob." (verse 7.)

(1.) This obediential power is not any quality created in the creature different from their being, for God may use any creature to infinite effects of omnipotency; and so there should be infinite created qualities in every finite creature. (2.) This obediential power was in that Mother-nothing, out of which God, by an omnipotent act of creation, extracted all the host of creatures that now are; and it is in that other Mother-nothing, yet objected to omnipotency, according to which, God may create infinite more worlds than now are, so it please him. It is then nothing but a non-repugnancy to hear and obey God in these particulars: As, (1.) Omnipotency of strong grace can speak to sin, which none can do, but God: "I said to thee, when thou wast in thy blood, live." (Ezek. 16:6.) This mandate of omnipotent grace is spoken to Jerusalem as hardened and cold, dead in sin, wherefore he saith, "Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light." (Eph. 5:14.) This is a commandment of Omnipotency, given out of sinful rebellion. If Omnipotency say, ‘See, ye blind; hear, ye deaf;’—grace is a king over sin, and Omnipotency a mighty conqueror: rebellion cannot stand before the grace of God: could we resign rebellious and dead hearts to God, he should change them, though we be most unable to master them. (2.) Mere nothing is a servant to Omnipotency. He sendeth his mandate or statute of heaven to mere nothing; and darkness, as the sergeant and pursuivant of God, must send out light, by virtue of a creating mandate, (2 Cor. 4:6). (3.) Every creature is under the awe of Omnipotency, and dare not without (as it were) a written and signed ordinance and statute of the Almighty, exercise their natural operations. As the Lord sendeth an awful mandate to the sea, and God saith, Do not ebb and flow, and the sea is dried up at his rebuke; "The waters saw thee, O God, the waters saw thee, they were afraid." (Psalm 77:16.) So saith he, ‘Winds, blow not; seas, rage not; fire, burn not; lions, devour not; sun, move not; clouds, rain not; devils, hurt not; waters, overwhelm not; sword, destroy not:’ and they all obey. (4.) There is a power obediential in creatures, to be instruments, that can be elevated above, and contrary to their nature, to miracles; as clay to be a plaister to blind eyes, to make them see, whereas clay can put out seeing eyes. By this, iron can swim, Peter walk in the sea; yea, devils and men crossing God’s moral will, fulfill his eternal counsel, according to that, Psalm 119:91: "All are thy servants;" hell, devils, cavaliers, malignants, Papists, are God’s servants. (5.) By this power, whereas nature must have time and hours to work, yet nature followeth the swift pace of Omnipotency. The fever departeth from Peter’s mother-in-law in an instant. (6.) By this power, creatures creep into nothing, when God commandeth them so to do. God putteth his arm to the heaven, and shaketh it, and the hangings, pillars, walls, plenishing of the house of heaven and earth, are all dissolved: all the old tenants of the world, the heavens, which have sitten in God’s house five thousand years, at the first warning of their Almighty Landlord, must remove and retire into nothing, if God so command them.

USE 1. It is comfort to the believer that all things are possible. Faith hath Omnipotency at its service: the sword and wars are gone, the enemies of the Lord broken, the temple built, Babylon plagued, at the nod of faith. Devils cannot stand, when Christ’s mandate chargeth them to fall.

USE 2. It is but little that we can do; let us have hosts of men, we cannot have the victory. Let man be swift, yet the race is not to the swift; let him be strong, yet the battle is not to the strong; let him be wise and learned, neither is bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, (Eccles. 9:1,11). The word of the Almighty is his deed also; "He spake, and it was done, he commanded, and it stood fast;" (Psalm 33:9;) for he himself spake, and it was. The Lord’s word giveth being to things; by the contrary, men’s deeds are nothing but words; so the lives, being, and actions of the kings of Israel and Judah, are called (Dibre hajamim), words of days. They are the acts and deeds of men living and dying, and compassed with days: for the deeds and acts of men are but words; they live, and speak a little on earth, and die; their acts are of as little worth, and reality, as the airing out, or breathing forth of words. The greatest prince maketh a sound for a time, as one that speaketh words, and then he is gone, and lieth silent in the grave. Solomon did many acts, but they are called words only, (1 Kings 11:41): "And the rest of the acts of Solomon, (Hebrew, ‘The rest of the words of Solomon,’) are written in the books of the Acts, (Hebrew, ‘of the words’) of Solomon." "And the rest of the words which Amon did, are written in the book of the words of the days of the kings of Judah." (2 Kings 21:25.) We use not properly to do or act words, but to speak words; but the holy language maketh man, and all his noble acts, but words, and would express that he is a creature of no great action, and can say more than he can do. Strong and mighty man is but a creature of words; he is a speaking body of clay, and can do but little. We boast much, that this and that we shall do; God hath a lock and a chain of iron on all the creatures: armies are not to be feared, the Lord smites the horse and the rider, and maketh war to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire, (Psalm 46:9). Be not afraid of clay, (Isaiah 51:12).

USE 3. If the Lord’s word create the being of things, then are we to conceive of him, as of an independent sovereign: we forget this, and worship a dependent God. If I suffer the people to go to worship at Jerusalem (saith Jeroboam) I shall lose both life and kingdom; God had promised the contrary, to establish him and his kingdom, so [long as] he would ‘do what is right in the sight of the Lord,’ (1 Kings 11:37,38). But he believed, that God, in the fulfilling of his promise, must depend upon the calves set up at Dan and Bethel. So the Jews will have God, in the preserving of their kingdom and place, to depend upon the sinful murdering of the Lord of glory; (John 11:48,) yea, we imagine, that God cannot carry on the work of reformation, except we comply with some sort of antichristian prelate. The king thinketh he cannot be a monarch, except he have a prerogative to play the tyrant; and his throne must fall, except the antichrist, and blood, and unlawful peace with the bloody Irish murderers, and destroying of the Lord’s redeemed flock in both kingdoms, be the bloody pillars of his throne and royal power. So God cannot save us, if France, Denmark, Spain, and Ireland come against these kingdoms; we are so wasted, except we make a peace dishonourable to Jesus Christ, and his prerogative royal. All this is to place God in a state of dependency: we are too wickedly careful how God shall acquit himself in his office of governing the world. Ere you or I were born, the Lord governed the world and his church without a miscarry (the church’s heaven cannot be marred in Christ’s hand); and when we are rotten in the dust, he shall carry on all in righteousness and wisdom:38but we take it ill, if we cannot have a Providence as fair and eye-sweet as white paper, though indeed there be not one spot in God’s ways. So Martha, "Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died; (John 11:21,) but Christ-God, in preserving lives, dependeth not on his own bodily presence here or there. Another complaineth, ‘God hath forgotten me, he is not my God.’ Why? ‘Because I walk in darkness, and have no light, nor any sense of his love: it is the black and dead hour of midnight with me.’ So the church argueth, (Isa. 49:14,15; Psalm 77:3-9). But his unchangeable love depends not on the ebbing and flowing of your transient, and up and down sense: in this, you worship a dependent God.

There is no rule without God to regulate him, or yet to straighten him in his walking. We are not to misplace God; for though the God of hosts hath purposed to stain (Lechallel), to cast a blot on, and profane the pride of all glory, (Isa. 23:9,) and suffer Parliaments, Assemblies, armies, councils of war, statesmen, the godly, the princes, judges, pastors, men of wisdom, learning, eloquence, parts, to miscarry in this great service against Babylon, it is to cry down the creature’s garland, and the rose of their eminency, that when all spots of sacrilege and idol-confidence in men are washed off the work, the Lord only may be exalted. It is our wisdom to suffer God to be wise for us. Yea, Antinomians will have Christ no independent Redeemer; but to them his grace shall not be perfect in pardoning, except all sin in root and branch be removed from the justified, and they made as sinless as Adam before his fall, and the elect angels. Yea, how many connections of Providence do we spin and twist out of our own head?—as, How happy had we been, if the king had remained with the parliament, to countenance it! Yea, but rather how unhappy; for our reformation had been as an untimely birth, if so it had been. How blessed should I have been, saith another, if I had been rich and learned! Yea, rather, you should have dishonoured God in that condition. The catholic and mother sin is, God must be dependent, we independent.

USE 4. All of us have need of a devil, one or other, to exercise and humble us: but we go wrong to work, when we think to make good our party against the devil by our own strength. This woman yoked Christ and the devil together, and would not yoke with him her alone, and the success is blessed. We go to dispute with temptations ourselves, by reason: you shall not dispute Satan to hell with all your logic; nor can policy and state-wit calm the Prince of the bottomless pit, who is let loose now in these three kingdoms to kill with the sword. The horseman, upon the red and bloody horse, and his footman, Death, are posting through the kingdoms. More wresthng by prayer, the putting of Satan in Christ’s grips, by faith effectual, by love, and sincere humiliation, should create peace; for peace is a work of creation. There is but one only can create: I mean, God, by, or at the exercise of these graces, should create peace. We lie bleeding and dying under our lusts, because Christ was not entrusted with mortification. If we gave in a bill of complaint against our devils, as this woman did, Christ should loose Satan’s works and help us.

"Be it unto thee."—Faith obtaineth the most excellent favours, refined mercies; and these are immediate favours, acts of immediate Omnipotency. Christ sent an immediate post to the Devil, though in a remote place, (it is an act of immediate creation) and Satan must be gone. No creature here interveneth; it is Christ’s genetheto, his omnipotent Be it so, that doth the turn. It is not faith, it is not a good angel expelling an evil one, nor one devil beating another, nor the disciples helping the woman, though they also did cast out devils. The more immediate mercies be, the more love-expressions of God in them; the first roses, the first trees, and plants that God’s own immediate art produced, and in which nature could not share, are the most perfect creatures; the rest of the creatures, after the fall, come not near in goodness and beauty to God’s first sampler; which are, as it were, the first assays of Omnipotency. The greatest mercies are most immediate; these be sweet favours that come, as it were, hot and new, immediately from God himself. See it in all the excellent things that God giveth us, especially in these four: (1.) In Christ; (2.) Grace; (3.) Glory; (4.) Comfort. (1.) Christ is God’s highest love-gift. Now Christ, the Mediator, was given without any medium, or any intervening mediator. God, out of the mere bottom of free love, giveth Christ. The Lord Christ was not given by so much as request, or counsel of men or angels. Christ, "by himself purged our sins," (Heb. 1:3). He "gave himself a ransom for all," (1 Tim. 2:6). "Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree." (1 Pet. 2:24.) He satisfied and paid in his own person. It was not a deputed work: God, the Lord of life, in proper person, redeemed us. Christ’s love to us was not deputy-love—he loved us not by a vicar; Christ is given freely, as a Redeemer is more essentially a gift of free grace, to speak so, than the grace of faith, which is given to those who hear and are humbled for sin. And Christ given to die for sinners, is a more immediate and pure gift of grace, than remission of sins and eternal life, which are given to us upon condition of faith; whereas a Redeemer is given to die for us, without any condition, thought, desire, any sweating or endeavour in man or angel. (2.) So is grace given out of grace: saving grace is made out of nothing, not out of the potency of the matter. The new heart is a creation; and, as it is grace, is framed without tools, agents, art, or service. Grace issueth immediately out of Christ’s heart; he hath no hire, no payment for it; non-payment, no money, is grace’s hire. (3.) And heaven is given, not by art, not by merit, not for sweating; but how? "It is the Father’s will;" (Luke 12:32;) and (4.) "God shall wipe all tears from their eyes." (Rev. 21:21.) It is the sweeter, that no napkin, but his own immediate hand, shall wipe my sinful face.

In heaven, the vision of Him that sitteth upon the throne is immediate; the mirror or looking-glass of Word and Sacraments being removed, there is but a vision of God "face to face;" (1 Cor. 13:12). "And I saw no temple therein." (Rev. 21:22.) If any should ask tidings and say, ‘John, what sawest thou in that new city? Was there any temple, any priests, any prophets, any candlesticks there?’ He should answer, ‘Oh, you know not what you speak! I saw no temple there; I saw a more glorious sight than all the temples of the earth; I saw the Lamb, the King in the midst of them; I saw Christ, the fountain of heaven. And though ye should know Moses, David, Paul, in glory, you should be so taken with beholding the face of the Lamb for evermore in an immediate vision, that you find no leisure to look over your shoulder to Moses or any other; "for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it."’ It must be sweeter, when the sweet immediate hand of Jesus Christ shall pluck the soul-delighting roses of the high garden, and hold them to your senses with an immediate touch, so as you shall see, behold, smell, and touch his hand with the rose, and when he shall put immediately in your mouth the apples of the tree of life, and the King himself shall make himself, as it were, your cupbearer; for there shall be neither need of pastor, prophet, or of any Christian brother, but only Christ himself, to hold to your head "a cup of the water of life," "And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God, and of the Lamb." (Rev. 22:1,2.) "He showed me;" which He?—"the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb:" "He that talked with me, who had a golden reed to measure the city;" "He who carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and showed me the great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God." (Rev. 21 and 22.) No created angel could show to John "the Bride, the Lamb’s wife." And what is that, ‘He showed me?’ He made me see. Is that but a naked cast of the eye, or a speculation? No, it is more; he himself who only reveals all the secrets of God, "and measures the temple with a golden reed," he only gave me a drink of the water of life immediately; for to see, in the holy language, is to enjoy, (Heb. 12:14; Rev. 22:4; Jer. 17:6; Psalm 34:12; Job 19:26). And then, "he showed me," must be this in good sense, ‘He, he the uncreated King himself made me, or caused me to enjoy.’ Messengers carry love-letters; now, there is no need of love-letters between the Lord Jesus and "the Bride, the Lamb’s wife," in this condition. Certain it is, a draught of such water at the well-head must be sweetest; then immediate comforts, in a heavy condition, must be sweetest also; as in heavy desertions, word, ministry, pastors, prayer, and ordinances, cannot raise up the spirit. What doth the Lord else speak in this? No less than that mediation of means is but mediation of means, and Christ is Christ. Means in a soul sickness, yea, apostles, angels, watchmen fail; but Christ himself, with his immediate action, faileth not, (Cant. 3:1-4; John 20:8-17). Christ himself, immediately by himself, will do in a moment, that which all means, all ordinances, all sweatings, all endeavours cannot do.

I do not now cry down means, and extol immediate inspirations: the latter I deny not in some cases; but I only compare means and Christ. And is not this an experience of some who are brought to the margin and black borders of hell and despairing, all creature comforts having failed them, and they having received the sentence of the second death? Yet Christ cometh with an immediate glimpse, like a fire-flaught [flash of lightening] in the air, which letteth the lost and bewildered traveler, in an extremely dark night, see a lodging at hand, whereas otherwise he should have fallen in a pit and lost himself: and in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the Lord having rebuked the winds and the stormy tempests in the soul, there is a calm and peace, (Psalm 31:22; Jonah 2:4). Christ is speedy, and swift as a roe; his leap is but a stride over a whole mountain at once, over many "mountains and hills," (Cant. 2:8,) especially, in his immediates, when he comforts by himself. He then maketh no use of a deputy sun to shine, or of borrowed light; the sun himself riseth with his own immediate salvation, and his own immediate wings; and we see it was Christ’s immediate love, yea comfort, because immediate carrieth with it the heat and smell of Christ’s own hand, it hath the immediate warmness of Christ’s bosom-consolation; it was an act of tender mercy that came hot and smoking from the heart of Christ; the immediate coal of love smelling of the perfume of the hearth it came last from, and that was heaven, and the bowels of Christ. Waters carried from a precious fountain in a vessel many hundred miles, are not so sweet as at the wellhead; because they are separated from the fountain, they lose much of their virtue. Sometimes it is so long since the rose was plucked, that the colour and smell which it had, while it grew on its own stalk, are quite gone. Look how inferior art (which is but medicine for sick nature) is to nature in its beauty and strength: as painted physic can neither purge nor cure, so far are all means and ordinances, being but the deputies of Christ, below Christ himself. What is Paul? What is Apollos? Put all the prophets, all the apostles, all the patriarchs, all the chiefest of saints in one flower, I confess they should cast forth an excellent smell, like the outer borders of the garden of the high paradise; but all their excellency should be mediate excellency, and but somewhat of Christ—but alas! as low, as very nothing to Christ, as the smallest drop of dew that sense can apprehend, to ten thousand worlds of seas, fountains, and floods. We defraud our spirits of much sweetness, because we go no further in our desires than to creature excellency; we rest on mediate comforts, because mediate: painted things do work but objectively: only a painted meadow casteth no smell, a painted tree bringeth forth no apples; the comforts and sweetness of the creatures have somewhat of daubing in them, in comparison of Jesus Christ; all reality, and truth of excellency, is in him.

And we know, God marreth the borrowed influence of means. Armies, parliaments, learning, and all miscarry; therefore, there was never a reformation, nor a great work wrought on earth, but Omnipotency put forth many immediate acts in it. The Lord would not be beholden to Moses; he "himself divided the Red sea." He would not engage himself to fountains and vine-trees, but "he gave them water out of the rock." He would not borrow from the earth, and sowing, reaping, and plowing, bread for his people’s food; he would "give them the bread of angels" from heaven immediately. He would have no engines at the taking of Jericho; the blowing of rams’ horns was a sign, not a cause; God immediately cast down the walls. He would not have a sword drawn, nor a drop of blood shed, in the people’s return from Babylon, but the Lord putteth an immediate impulsion upon the spirit of Cyrus, as if he had been in a dead sleep; and he being awaked by God only, sendeth the people away. And the temple must be builded again, but how? Neither by King nor Parliament, nor armies; for, "Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord." (Zech. 4:6.) When Babylon is to be destroyed (as the work is even now on the wheels in Britain), a mighty angel took up the great millstone, and threw it in the sea. (Rev. 18:21.) Though it be a vision by comparison, yet it holdeth forth an immediate work of God in the ruin of Babylon; and angels pour their vials "on the sea, on the sun, on the river Euphrates," to make for the destruction of Babylon. And, in delivering of Lot, angels did work. God himself spake to Noah for making an ark. Although angels be creatures, yet the Lord’s action by them is more immediate, than when he worketh by natural causes. When the judges scourge and imprison the apostles, no man will speak for them; the immediate power of God doth it, the chains fall off legs and arms; immediate providence is a key also to open the prison doors, and they are saved. There is a bloody war at the taking of the ark, and thirty thousand footmen of Israel killed, (1 Sam. 4:10,11,) but there is not a sword drawn when it is rescued. The ark cometh home,—it is alone God’s immediate providence that driveth and acteth upon two milch kine to bring it home again, (1 Sam. 6:12-14). Who knoweth but when our strength of two kingdoms hath failed us, the Lord shall make kine to bring home his kingdom and reformation to our doors?

Were it possible that creatures could work salvation for us, and freedom from the sword, and sure peace in England, Scotland, and Ireland, without God, or any subordination to him, let it be a deliverance from the creature only, it should be no deliverance, but a curse: that which maketh salvation to be salvation, is, that God hath a finger of power, and an influence of free grace in it. Oh, but this putteth the lustre, sweetness, and smell of heaven on it, that it is "the salvation of the Lord," (Exod. 14:13). In regard of irresistible efficacy and success, under-causes, though chained to the influence of God, are but idol-causes; they lie as ciphers, and do nothing, no more than a lame arm can master a sword: "The Lord worketh all our works for us" (Isa. 26:12); and he is daily marring, and shall further mar our armies, parliaments, councils, undertakings, to the end that more of Christ may appear in these wars, than in other wars. Some immediate power must close and crown this glorious work in Britain; God must be alone, and appear alone, and only Jehovah must be visible "in the mount," to the end that bleeding England, long afflicted Scotland, and wasted Ireland, may, with one shout, cry, "Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name be the glory." [Psalm 115.] This discovereth the deceit of our confidence; for when the Lord and the creature work together for our good, Asa, though his heart was perfect, possibly seeth not whether he trust on the Lord or an the physician; and yet the Scripture saith, when he was diseased in his feet, there was a worse disease about his heart. For, because "he sought to the physicians," he is blamed; yet to seek to physicians is lawful: but the Spirit of God blameth his seeking to the physicians, and saith, (2 Chron. 16:12,) "He sought not the Lord in his sickness;" and the reason is given, "Because he was in the physicians." So the Hebrew readeth it: he is said, "not to seek the Lord," not because he sought to the physicians, for that had not been a sin, but because he was wholly, the whole man, soul and all, in, ‘or on the physicians;’ his care, pains, and heart, was all on the physicians. So also the Greek expresses great care and diligence by the like phrase, 1 Tim. 4:15, En tautois isthi, "Give thyself to these things." Seldom do we seek to God, and trust in him, when God and the creature are yoked together in a work that we are much bent upon, as in wars, in a reformation, yea, in a journey, that the spirit is intent upon; but, in trusting on God, we interpose a folding, and a ply of the creature, between our soul-confidence and the Lord, just as a pillow is put between the man’s shoulder, and a pressing burden, for fear the burden crush a bone. We are afraid we give God too much to do, or more than he is able to bear. When we sail, we seem to betrust ourselves to the Lord and the sea; but the truth is, often we trust more to the strong ship, than to the sea or the Lord. Our confidence shifteth itself from under the Lord, on upon the creature and the arm of flesh; so we walk often in the strength of the Lord, as some walk upon ice—they walk softly and timorously upon it, fearing it should break under them; they put no faith upon cracking and weak ice. We are not daring and venturous in casting ourselves and our "burdens on the Lord."

So in judgments, David’s choice fell upon the pestilence, rather than the sword. Why? God’s hand is sweeter and softer than the devil’s, than the malignant’s hard hand. Samuel is one of the best children, because he is given of God, and is a child of many prayers. Isaac, the joyful child,—why? No thanks to nature, or to Sarah’s dead womb for him; he is the son of an immediate promise. Free-grace is rather Isaac’s father and mother, than Abraham and Sarah. In ordinances a man speaketh, but if Christ himself would speak, oh, his spikenard, oh, his own perfume, oh, his own lips drop honey! Oh, his own Lebanon-like countenance! Alas, we think Christ is not Christ, except the king help him; religion is not religion, except worldly thrones bear it up. The gospel is a very immediate thing; the "lily amongst the thorns," is Christ’s lily; the church stands more immediately by Christ, than any worldly thing doth. God maketh the earth to bud and bring forth her fruits; but the sun, the soil, the season of the year, and nature, are his under-servants; God watereth the earth, but by clouds. Kings are indigent, and very mediate and dependent creatures; they need armies, multitude, navies, prelates, Babylon, Ireland, France, Spain, Denmark, Holland, money, friends, parliaments;—but grace and the gospel are more immediate, and less needy. The gospel can live without all these. 

TRIAL AND TRIUMPH OF FAITH.

SERMON XXVI.

"BE it unto thee as thou wilt."—We see what power Christ hath over the devils: Christ sent him an invisible summons, ‘Let Satan be gone,’ and he must be gone. It is a proper work of Christ to oppose Satan. "He took part of flesh and blood," Ina katargese, that he might make Satan unprofitable, and idle, and fruitless, (Heb. 2:14,) as the word is used, ‘Why doth this fruitless tree keep the ground sapless and barren?’ (Luke 13:7.) So is the word taken, ‘to make a thing of no effect,’ (Rom. 3:3). Things that make sport to children, as nuts, feathers, toys, are called, ‘Things of infants to be put away,’ (1 Cor. 13:11). So hath Christ taken bones, and sap, and strength, from the devil, and made him as fruitless as the feathers that serve to sport children, (1 John 3:8). "For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, (ina lyse) that he might dissolve the works of the devil." The word in Scripture is ascribed to the casting down of a house, (John 2:19,) to the breaking of a ship, (Acts 27:41,) to the loosing any out of chains, (Acts 22:30). The truth is, Satan’s works of sin and hell, in the which he had involved the redeemed world, was a prison house, and a castle of strength, and a strong war-ship, and many strong chains of sin and misery. Christ was manifested to break down and dissolve the house, to break his war-ship, and to set the captives at liberty, (Isa. 61:1,2; John 14:30). "And now cometh the prince of this world, and hath nothing in me." He had much in Christ, he had all his redeemed ones by reason of sin; but Christ took all from him. Since Christ came in the play, and was master of the fields, Satan never did prosper. And consider how easily Christ doth it, with a mere word, "Let it be." How was this? Christ sent an immediate mandate of dominion; he hath an immediate operation upon these invisible spirits of darkness: it is no matter how Christ do it, so it be done. Christ-God is a spirit, and how a spirit acts upon a spirit, is to be believed, rather than searched; but Christ hath these relations to Satan: (1.) As God to all creatures, and thus, Satan is the workmanship of God, as he is a spirit; so whatever partaketh of being, is the adequate and consummate effect of Omnipotency—I mean, being either possible or actual; and so the motions of angels from place to place, and of devils, must be under a chain of Omnipotency, as all other things, motions, and actions of the creature are: let Satan go whither he please, Christ traceth him. (2.) Christ hath the relation of a judge to Satan, and so he is tied in an invisible chain of justice: and as malefactors that are permitted to go abroad, but always with attendance, so do devils trail about with them everlasting chains of blackness of darkness, (Jude, verse 6). Whithersoever the devil go, Christ hath a keeper at his back. (3.) Christ hath the relation of a conqueror to Satan, and Satan is his taken captive, (Col. 2:15); he cannot be loosed from under Christ, either by ransom, or change of prisoner with prisoner. (4.) Christ, as "the heir of all things, beareth up all by his mighty word," (Heb. 1:2,3,) and is he in whom "all things consist," (Col. 1:17;) and so, by reason that the world, by a new gift of redemption, is subjected to Jesus Christ, there is a special and particular providence of Christ upon Satan. It concerneth the redeemed not a little, that Christ keep a strong and watchful guard upon the black camp out of which he hath redeemed us, and that "the seven eyes that are before the throne," take special notice of hell, who come in, and come out, for there is deep counsel there against us. In this consideration, Christ numbers all the footsteps of devils. Satan hath not a general warrant to tempt the saints; but to every new act against Job, (chap 1:12, and Job 2:6,) against Peter, ere he can put him upon one single blast, to cast him but once through his sieve, (Luke 22:31,) yea, against one sow, or a bristle of a sow, (Mat. 8:31,32,) he must have a new signed commission. Christ’s general pass, that Satan be suffered, as any other subject, to pass through Christ’s bounds and kingdom, is not enough.

USE 1.—It is much for our faith and comfort, that our Mediator is a God of gods, a God above the "god of this world," a prince more mighty than "the prince of the air, who ruleth in the children of disobedience." Yea, now we have a greater victory over Satan, than we know: Satan is so totally routed, put off the fields, and Christ so strong, that the weakest of saints is stronger than the world, and the spirit Satan that dwelleth in the world. Christ’s strength of faith, is stronger than Adam’s strength of innocency, (1 John 2:13,14; 1 John 5:5); the weakest measure of saving grace, is stronger than the highest measure of malice in all hell. When Satan tempteth you, fear him not, resist him in the faith; but be watchful, for he hath a pass from Christ, else he could not come so far as the court of guard, to dally with the senses, to hold out an apple to Eve, a world of kingdoms and glory to Christ. Satan hath a warrant to bid, when he cannot buy; his pass will bear him to go to the more inner works than the senses, even to the chamber of the fancy, to send a trumpeter to the understanding: (1.) Yea, to work mediately upon the will and the heart of a Judas, and to act, but in a way of distance, upon David to number the people. But a counterfeit pass with a false subscription, cannot permit Satan to go on in real motions against the will: the chain holdeth him back; there is a restraining link that all the powers in hell cannot break. A moral tie and link of the law of nature in the breast of devils, Satan can, and doth daily break, "because he sinned from the beginning;" but the other link of real acting against the dominion of Providence, is impossible to the strongest of devils or of creatures. (2.) We ourselves may put in execution a conditional pass of the devil; for certain it is, Satan could but knock at Eve’s door, and play the orator and sophist, to delude mind and affections; but he could not make the king’s keys (as we say) and violently break up the door, or force the will, but upon condition that Eve should consent to eat the forbidden fruit: by necessity of divine justice, she must turn the first and oldest devil in the flesh that ever was, to tempt Adam to sin, and to eat; and therefore, if we be not careful to resist, we may sign the devil’s pass of Providence with our moral consent. Yield once to Satan’s first demand of the treaty, and you shall see you are ensnared by a necessity of God’s spotless justice, who punisheth sin by sin, because you go one mile with the devil, to go with him two miles.

USE. 2. If Christ at a nod have such a dominion over devils, we are under Satan’s power in being tempted, more than we need. Certain it is, we improve not Christ’s power of dominion over Satan to the utmost. "Christ can save to the utmost;" (Heb. 7:25,) then he can sanctify "to the utmost," for Christ is a Saviour, not only by merit, but also by efficacy, as our divines hold, against Socinians and Arminians; and therefore he should give actual strength against temptations, if we should not so carelessly improve that power Christ hath over Satan. I do not mean, as Arminians do, that free-will, by order of nature, beginneth, first, to resist Satan, and then God’s grace followeth, as a handmaid; but I intend this, that because Peter is self-strong, and his flesh saith to Christ, that Christ is mistaken, and looketh beside the spirit of prophecy;—for Matt. 26:35, he saith, "Though I should die with thee, yet will I not deny thee;"—belike, if he had been diffident of his own strength, and watched, and trusted in the strength of an Intercessor, he should not have been deserted, so as to deny his Lord. We put not Christ to it, to put forth his omnipotency in every act, to save us that we yield not. I deny not, but there is a necessity in regard of God’s wise providence, that the saints must sin, and that they be passive vessels to carry the lustre, and hold forth the rays and beams of pardoning grace. Yet certain it is, there be hypothetical connections of supernatural providence in God’s eternal decree, never put forth in action, because of our laziness: (As if God shall suffer Job to be tempted, and he by grace sin not; as Job 1:22, the Lord shall also strengthen him when he is tempted the second time, not to sin) and (if Abraham be tempted to offer up his only son for God, and if he yield obedience, God shall surely bless him with the blessing of sanctification, promised in the Covenant) as is clear, Gen. 22:16,17; Heb. 6:12-14, for we see these connections sometimes put forth in acts. But other connections are not put forth in acts, (Matt. 11:21; Luke 16:31; 1 Sam. 23:12,) such as these; if David be tempted by Satan, he shall not resist, but shall number the people: if Peter be tempted, he shall not stand out in confessing his master. Certain it is, that as we come short of these comforts of a communion with God, which we might enjoy, by our loose walking; so, upon the same reason, we fall short of many victories over Satan, which we might have, if we should improve the dominion and kingly power of Christ over that restless spirit.

"As thou wilt."—As thou desirest. God maketh of his free dispensation, a sanctified will and affection in prayer, the measure of his gifts to us. A word, then, (1.) Of a sanctified will and affections; (2.) How these are the measure of God’s goodness towards us, in these positions,

POSITION 1. The soul is never renewed, till the will be renewed; for the will is the heart of the heart, and the new heart is the new man, (Ezek. 36:26; Deut. 30:6). For the heart is the king and sovereign of obedience, (Deut. 30:19).

POSITION 2. All sanctified affections are threaded upon the will; saving grace can lodge nowhere but in the centre of the heart, and that is the renewed will, presupposing new light in the mind: Grace taketh this first castle.

POSITION 3. Hence, how many grains of sanctified will, as many grains of new obedience; so love is the fire of our obedience, and willingness the fat of obedience, which is set on fire by love.

POSITION 4. A civil will, is not a sanctified will; in some men, the will is more moral, less raging, the motions of it being less tumultuous; as in some carnal spirits, the wheels go with less noise. All rivers make not a like action and stirring on their banks; but that taketh nothing from either their nature or deepness, or occasional overswelling.

POSITION 5. The special mark of a sanctified will, is, that it is a broken thing, as it were fallen in the midst in two pieces, and yielding to God and saving light. There was a sea of grace and saving light in Christ: no created will stooped to the light of a revealed decree in such a submissive measure, in a hell of fear, sorrow, and anguish for an evil of punishment more than any creature was able to bear, as he did; Nevertheless, not my will, but thy will be done: far more in other things of less pain should we suffer. Especially in these, the will is to stoop: (1.) In opposing our lusts, as we would testify, that the proudest piece in us, the will, hath felt the influence of Christ’s death on it, "That we no longer should live the rest of our time to the lusts of men," (1 Pet. 4:2,) "but to the will of God," (1 Pet. 2:24; Rom. 6:6). The dominion of will, is the dominion of sin. (2.) In that the soul speaketh out of the dust, and is put to silence before God, and sitteth alone, as melancholics do, (Lam. 3:28,29). A tamed man is broken in his will, in which the pride of opposing God consisteth: then, "The wolf dwelleth with the lamb." (Isa. 11:6.) (3.) The subordination of the will to God, is a great sign of a subdued spirit: nothing affecteth independency more, than the vain will; "Rest on the Lord," (Psalm 37:7) Hebrew, "Be silent toward the Lord;" Vatablus, "Be quiet, repine not as disobedient, neither answer again," Christ is sent to bind up those that are broken in will or heart, (Isa. 61:1); the Hebrew will include both, "He that hearkeneth to reproof, getteth a heart, possesseth his heart," (Prov. 16:31); so Vatablus. The meek spirit, which in obedience submitteth to rebukes, possesseth his heart, and possesseth his own will: now, the contrary must be in the undaunted man; his will and heart must have dominion over him, and his will must possess him, as Prov. 17:18. The unconverted man, is a man wanting a heart and a will: a will not broken to God is as good as no will, and no heart at all. The broken heart is the heart to God, and the broken will, the will.

POSITION 6. The affections in their naturals being corrupt, grace alone maketh them pure; and when they are purest, they are strongest. It is most of the element of the earth, that is all earth, and wanteth all mixture of other elements; that is most fire, that hath least of earth in it; that is finest gold, that hath in it least of other metals, least dross, least ore. When affections are most steeled with grace, they have the least mixture in them; love, having much of grace, hath least of lust; zeal, with much grace, hath least of the wild-fire of carnal wrath: and these are known by the swiftness of their motion toward their kindly objects. The more of earth in the body, the swifter is the motion downward toward the earth. Fire worketh most as fire, when it carrieth up in the air nothing but itself, or fire-sparks like itself; but when it ascendeth, and carrieth up with it houses, mountains, and great loads of earth, the motion is the slower. Grace being essential to gracious affections, they run and move kindly and swiftly; therefore is supernatural love, "strong as death, hard as the grave." In the martyrs it was stronger than burning quick, than the wheels, racks, and the most exquisite torments; and Christ’s love was stronger than hell. Of all loves, that is the strongest that bringeth sickness, swooning, and death. Gracious love produceth love-sickness, (Cant. 2:5,) swooning, (Cant. 5:6). The martyrs have died to enjoy him, and refused to accept of life, because of the love of a union with him, (Heb. 11:37). How many deserted souls come to this, ‘I die if I enjoy not Christ.’

POSITION 7. It is good that the affections be balanced and loaden with heavenly and spiritual light. Lower vaults and under houses, send up smoke to the fair pictures that are in the higher houses; lust’s dominion over light, maketh a misty and unbelieving mind. So, when the light is carnal, and nothing but worldly policy, it is like the highest house, which, if ruinous and rainy, sendeth down rain, and continual droppings on the lower house. Mind and affections vitiate and corrupt one another: grace in either, contributes much to the spirituality of the actions one of another. So the mockers of eternity and judgment are ignorant, because they will be ignorant, (2 Pet. 3:5); and Eli’s sons will be abominably lustful in their affections, because they know not the Lord, and are ignorant of God, (1 Sam. 2:12). Matthew heareth and seeth Jesus, and he followeth him, (Matt. 9:9). The more that Mary Magdalene followeth and loveth, the more she knoweth and seeth the excellency of Christ, (John 20:1-14, compared with verses 17,18).

POSITION 8. When the desires are natural, then heavenly objects are desired and sorrowed for in a natural way. Balaam desires to die the death of the righteous: but Esau weepeth for the blessing in a carnal way. When the desires are spiritual, earthly objects are desired in a spiritual way—even bread, as it savoureth of Christ, (Matt. 6:9, compared with verses 11,12). And so the woman seeketh deliverance to her daughter, spiritually, and with a great faith.

POSITION 9. The believer saith, ‘If the creature will go along with me to my Father’s house, welcome; if not, what then? There I must lodge, though gold refuse to go with me.’

See how God in a manner resigneth his own freedom in giving, and transferreth this honour on the woman’s desire. God keeps pace with a sanctified will in satisfying, when the will keeps pace with God in acting, longing, and desiring. (1.) He putteth heaven upon the choice of a sanctified heart: "Choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live." (Deut. 30:19.) "Whosoever will, let him take of the waters of life freely." (Rev. 22:17.) "Ho! every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters." (Isaiah 55:1.) (2.) Heaven is put upon the quality of the will, and what it desires; "If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that says to thee, give me to drink, thou wouldst have asked of him, and he should have given thee water of life." (John 4:10.) "I will give unto him that thirsteth, of the fountain of the water of life freely." (Rev. 21:6.) There is an edge upon the word "fountain;" for the fountain and first spring of the water of life is above the streams; and this is promised to him that hath a heavenly and spiritual thirst for Christ. (3.) God putteth himself, and the measure or compass of heaven, upon the measure and compass of the bent and pitch of heavenly desires: "If thou criest after knowledge, and liftest up thy voice for understanding; if thou seekest her as silver, and searchest for her as for hid treasures, then shalt thou understand the fear of the Lord, and find the knowledge of God." (Prov. 2:3-5.) There be four words here to express the bent of the will and desire: we are to "cry for wisdom." The Chaldee reads the other part of the verse, "If thou call understanding thy mother;" that the cry spoken of in the former part, may be such a high cry, as children use when they weep and cry after their mother. The other word is, ‘To give the voice to wisdom.’ The other two words do note sweating, digging in the bowels of the earth, casting up much earth to find a treasure of silver or gold: "Open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it," (Psalm 81:10); Vatablus, "Seek what thou wilt, and I will grant it." It is a doubt, if any man, by enlarged desires, can put God’s giving goodness to the utmost extent. (4.) God maketh his fullness in giving, far beyond our narrowness in seeking: "He is able to do," (this is as much as "he is willing to do," Rom. 11:23; Jude 24,) "exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us." (Eph. 3:20.) This is considerable, that when Christ shall put the crown of incomparable glory on the head of the glorified soul, there shall be thousand millions of more diamonds, rubies, and jewels of glory on that diadem, than ever your thoughts or imaginations could reach; and more weight of sweetness, delight, joy, and glory in a sight of God, than the seeing eye, the hearing ear, yea, the vast understanding and heart, which can multiply and add to former thoughts, can be able to fathom, (1 Cor. 2:9). When ye seek and ask Christ from the Father, you know not his weight and worth: when you shall enjoy Christ immediately up at the well-head, this shall much fill the soul with admiration: ‘I believed to see much in Christ, having some twilight and afternoon, or moonlight glances of him down in the earth; but, oh! blind I, narrow I, could never have faith, opinion, thought, or imagination, to fathom the thousandth thousandth part of the worth, and incomparable excellency I now see in him.’ You may over-think and over-praise Paradise, Rome, Naples, the isles where there be two summers in one year; but you cannot over-think, or in your thoughts reach Christ and the invisible things of God; only glorified thoughts, not thoughts graced only, are comprehensive in any due measure, of God—of heaven. The glorified soul shall be a far wider and more capacious circle, the diameter of it in length, many thousand cubits larger in mind, thoughts, glorified reason, will, heart, desires, love, joy, reverence, than it is now. We would, in seeking, asking, praying, in adoring God in Christ, enlarge our own desires, heart, will, and affections, broad and deep, that we may take in more of Christ. Broad prayers flow from broad desires, narrow prayers from niggard and narrow hearts. We may collect the bigness of a ship, from the proportion and quantity of its bottom, in its new framing. If the bottom draw but to the proportion of a small vessel which can endure no more but a pair of oars, the vessel cannot be five hundred tons, or be able to bear sixty pieces of ordnance: Prayer bottomed on deep and broad hunger, and extreme pain of love-sickness for Christ, and great pinching poverty of spirit, must be in proportion wide and deep. Oh! but our vessels are narrow, and our affections ebb and low, the balance that weigheth Christ weak; it is as if we should labour to cast three or four great mountains in a scale of a merchant’s ordinary balance. We are proportioned in our spiritual capacities but for drops of grace: Christ is disposed to give grace as a river. It is too little to seek corn, wine, and oil from God; he is more willing to give great things than small things. To ask a feather, a penny, from a mighty prince, when he saith, "Ask what thou wilt, to the half of my kingdom, and it shall be granted to thee," is the undervaluing of the greatness of his royal magnificence. "Ask what you will," saith Christ, "of my Father in my name, and it shall be granted." Men’s desires run upon removal of the sword, peace, protection, plenty, trafficking, peaceable seas, liberties of parliament, subjects, peers, cities: little are men’s desires employed in seeking Christ to dwell in the land, and that the temple of the Lord be builded. All these suits are below both the goodness of the Lord, and spiritual capacity of sanctified affections; and God giveth to carnal men that which their soul lusteth after, but in his wrath. 

TRIAL AND TRIUMPH OF FAITH.

SERMON XXVII.

"And when she was come to her house, she found the devil gone out and her daughter laid upon the bed."—MARK7:30.

BECAUSE I haste to an end, and shall not now refute the dream of Papists, from this collecting the lawfulness of their bastard confirmation, and of confirming children by the unhallowed blessing of the prelate; only observe the case of the child. Mark saith, Beblemenen epi tes klines, Cast, in a violent manner, in a bed: for this is not to be a bed of rest and security, as some Papists collect, but to express how violent Satan is in his last farewell, as when he is to be cast out; "When the possessed child is brought to Jesus, and when he saw him, straightway the spirit tare him, and he fell on the ground, and wallowed, foaming." (Mark 9:20.) The devil and the unclean spirits are not thrown out of a person, or land, but they must rage and foam.

1. The Lord saith, "I will cut off the names of idols out of the land, and they shall be no more remembered; and I will cause the prophets, and the unclean spirits, to pass out of the land;" (Zech. 13:2;) but this cannot be done but with great violence; the father and the mother shall thrust through "with a sword the false prophet," even their own son, before he be put out of the land, (verse 3.) The devil will not be removed without blood, sweating, and great violence. When the unclean spirits of men given to curious arts, and the idol, Diana, are preached down in Ephesus, "That whole great city was full of wrath, and they cry out, Great is Diana of the Ephesians! And the whole city was filled with confusion." (Acts 19:18,19.) When Christ cometh to the crown and the throne, Jews and Gentiles, the kings and rulers of the earth, Herod and Pilate, with the Gentiles and the people of Israel, are gathered together, (Acts 4:25-27). The word, Psalm 2:1, (Rageshu,) it is, to make a great tumult, as a furious multitude gathered together, that maketh a noise as the noise of a troubled sea. Therefore some, not without reason, say, the sons of Zebedeus are called Benairegesci, Sons of Thunder. Luke, (Acts 2,) useth the word after the seventy ephryaxan which Budeus expoundeth of fierce and wild horses. And certainly Christ is crowned upon Mount Zion, with garments rolled in blood; this is a spoiling of, and a triumphing over principalities and powers. Christ dyed the black cross with red blood, when he performed this noble act of redemption, (Col. 2:14,15). So, when Christ entereth in any soul to dwell, there he must first bind the devil, and then spoil his house, (Matt. 12:29). What wonder is it, that multitudes of heresies and sects, and many blasphemous and false ways arise now, when the Lord is to build up Zion? Satan, when Christ is to sail, and his kingdom a coming kingdom, (as we pray,) raiseth up storms and winds in the broad lake of brimstone, to drown the church of God. Christ hath not fair weather when he goeth to sea, (Matt. 8:23,24,) yet his journey is lawful. When Christ is upon acts of his priesthood, and standeth at the great high altar, with his censer of gold, to offer up the prayers of the saints to God, he casteth fire with the same censer down upon the earth, and there be then thunderings, lightnings, and earthquakes; and hence followeth terrible judgments upon the earth, as hail, fire mingled with blood, and a mountain burning with fire, and the third part of the sea becomes blood; and a clear burning star, like a lamp, called Wormwood, making the third part of the waters bitter, doth fall from heaven, which is as much as, when Christ is upon acts of mercy toward his people, pestilent heresies of the popish clergy, and others, darken the third part of the sun and moon, that is, of the light of the gospel, (Rev. 8:1-12). Even as when our Lord Jesus standeth to intercede for the people, and to pray for fallen Jerusalem, which is as a fire-brand plucked out of the fire, Satan standeth at his right hand, his working hand, to hinder him, (Zech. 3:1-3).

2. This resolveth to many their state. Many are free of the devil. ‘I thank God,’ saith one, ‘I know not Satan, nor any of his works: I have peace; Satan did never tear me, nor cause me to fall to the earth, nor doth he torment me.’ But this is a fearful condition: (1.) It is an argument of a false peace. When the strong man is within, the house is in peace. Not to be tempted of the devil, is the greatest temptation out of hell; and if there be any choice of devils, a raging and a roaring devil, is better than the calm and sleeping devil. When the devil is within, he sleepeth and is silent, and the house or soul he is in is silent, and there is a covenant with Death and Hell, (Isaiah 28:15). Now, hell keepeth true to a natural man for a time; cessation of arms between the soul and Satan, is security for a time, but it is not peace. The devil's war is better than the devil's peace. Carnal hypocrisy is a dumb and silent thing, but it is terrible to be carried to hell without any noise of feet. The wheels of Satan's chariot are oiled with carnal rest, and they go without ratthng and noise. The devil carrieth few to hell with shouting and crying; suspect dumb holiness: when the dog is kept out of doors he howls to be in again. The covenant of Satan to Eve, ("sin and you shall not die,") standeth with all men by nature, till Jesus Christ break peace between us and Satan. (2.) Contraries meeting, such as hot and dry fire, and cold and moist water, they conflict one with another; and where Satan findeth a sanctified heart, he tempteth with much importunity; as at one time, Christ findeth three mighty temptations, and he departed from him only for a little time, (Luke 4:13). Where there is most of God and of Christ, there, there are strong injections and firebrands cast in at the windows, so as some [persons] of much faith have been tempted to doubt, "Is there a Deity that ruleth all; and where is he? We see him not." Another is often assaulted with this, "Is there a heaven for saints? Is there a hell for devils and wicked men? We never spoke with a messenger come from any of these two countries." A third is troubled with this, "Such a business I have expede, whether God will or not." The flower of the soul, the high lamp of the light of the mind, is frequently darkened with foggy and misty spirits coming up from the bottomless pit, and darkening any beams and irradiations of light that come from the Sun of Righteousness. Faith is more assaulted than any other grace: Satan shaketh other graces; but this is winnowed between heaven and earth, (Luke 22:31,32). Satan's first arrow shot at Christ, laboureth to put a terrible if upon his light; "If thou be the Son of God." It is as much as, if God be God, if the Son of God be the Son of God. It is not the evidence and certainty of fundamentals, nor the strength of grace, that privilegeth souls from Satan's shafts. Strength of saving light putteth the saints often under the gunshot of Satan, that he may find a shot at them: there is only law-surety against temptations, up in heaven, when you are over score out of time, within eternity's lists; never till then.

3. Not to be troubled thus, argueth a house not watched. The gates are open night and day, as the gates of hell, that want key and lock; and the soul so secure, that the person seeth not what devils come in, what go out. But the watch set by God's fear, examineth all messengers that come in, all motions, all suggestions, all angels white and black, all rises, falls, ebbings and flowings of love, joy, desire, fear, sorrow, come under search and scrutiny; "Whence come ye? from heaven or hell?" It is time of war with the saints in this life; and then, all cities keep watch, and strangers without a pass are examined, searched, and tried, what correspondence they have with the enemy.

4. God's way of hardening by Satan, is often mysterious, silent, dumb, and speaketh not. "For judgment I came into this world," (John 9:39); but what a judgment!—such as walketh in the dark, and killeth in a midnight sleep, that "they that see may be made blind." This judgment speaketh not. Oh, terrible! God hath put out the man's two eyes; but how, or when, he cannot tell. The nerves and eye-strings of the man's soul are broken; but there was not a crack, nor any noise heard, when God snapped them in two pieces. Christ came when the man was sleeping, and his serjeant, the devil, with him, and put his hand on his heart, and gave the lock, the sprents, and wards of the heart a thraw and a crook, and all the keys in heaven and earth cannot shut or open his heart. And this was done without noise or pain;—the man was never put to his bed for the business; the conveyance of the business was spiritual, but invisible. Oh, sleeping world! awake out of your rotten and false peace. Oh, the Lord bindeth men, and they cry not! and the devil bindeth many and they cry not. Pharaoh knew not when his heart was hardened; the conscience saw it not; even as a stone groweth in the bladder without our sense of it: the business was transacted without one cry, or any witness. Carnal hellish security is dumb-born. 'Let my child sleep,' saith the devil, 'and awake him not till the heat of the furnace of hell melt away his false peace.' Why? But men may be deluded, having no bands in their death, as they lived deluded. Wrath and justice are moving to many souls sleeping in death, without noise of feet; the sword of God is crying to souls without any voice; the wheels of the fiery chariots of God's indignation are moving over slain men in Scotland and England, without the ratthng or prancing of the horses. O pity!—a tempest, a devil comes, and steals away the man's soul and his conscience out of him in the night, and he knoweth not. Christ saith, 'Silence, waken him not, till he be over ears in the lake;' and Satan saith, 'Waken him not, till I be sure of him!' A dumb judgment is twice a judgment. 

Footnotes:

1. In the sermons and theological treatises of the seventeenth century, it was usual to introduce illustrations from the learned languages; and Rutherford, himself an accomplished scholar, has followed the general example. But as Latin, Greek, and Hebrew phrases, are unsuited to the taste of the present age, and would only interrupt the generality of our readers, the critical remarks of this kind are thrown into the form of foot-notes (which have Rutherford's name appended, to distinguish them from the occasional illustrations of the Editor,) so that the entire text of our author is preserved.

2. Themistocles used to roam the streets of Athens at midnight, complaining, that the trophies of Marathon would not let him sleep.

3. Vatabulus expoundeth Malmad, a murmuring, or prayer which trouble poureth out. The Chaldee paraphrast turneth it silentium, silence, because the conscience wakened is silent: it is a prophecy what God's fire doth effectuate, which you have, (Hos. 5:15) "In their affliction, they will seek me early."

4. Alluding to the civil war which during this year, (1645,) was raging not only in England, but also in Scotland and Ireland.

5. A name among the Hebrews for the person next in succession.

6. The Solemn League and Covenant, which was subscribed by England in 1643.

7. Rise and Reign, er. 39.

8. Rise and Reign, er. 33.

9. Rise and Reign, er. 74.

10. Rise and Reign, er. 7.

11. Rise and Reign, er. 61.

12. Rise & Reign, &c. error 33.

13. Rise & Reign, &c. error 43.

14. Unsavoury Speeches, Er. 5.

15. Towne Ans. to D. Tailor, pag. 23. Rise, &c. p. 7.

16. Unsavoury Speeches, p. 19.

17. A distinguished Venetian lawyer of the 16th century, who embraced the Reformation but afterwards recanted, to save his life. A short time after this, he was seized with such anguish on account of his apostacy, that he sickened and died in despair, A.D. 1548. The narrative of his death, which produced a deep sensation in Protestant countries, was in common circulation in Scotland till within these few years [1845].

18. Rise, reign, & ruine of Antinomianism. error 17. pag. 4.

19. Ina me hyperairomai.—Rutherford

20. Error 65.

21. Lorinus, Quasi in transitu videre.

22. Honeycomb of Justification, 371.

23. Chemnitius. exa. Con. Tri. pag. 94.

24. Ouden katakrima; he saith not ouden katakriton, nothing that deserveth condemnation, nihil condemnabile.—Rutherford.

25. Non ut non sit, sed ut non imputetur.

26. Cont. Julian, Lib. 6, c. 5. "Sanat vitiatum a reatu statim, ab infirmitate paulatim."

27. And Gregory, Moral, Lib. 29, c. 2. "Quid in hac vita omnes qui veritatem sequimur, nisi aurora sumus? Aurora enim noctem pr�teriisse nunciat, nec tamen diei claritatem illa satis ostendit; sed dum illam pellit, et hanc suscipit, lucem tenebris permixtam tenet, sic nos qu�dam jam qu� lucis sunt agimus, et tamen in quibusdam adhuc tenebrarum reliquiis non caremus."

28. Quoad actualem reatum �tern� mortis.—Rutherford.

29. Non entis nulla sunt accidentia.—Rutherfurd

30. Even the minimum quod sic.—Rutherfurd.

31. Reatus pœn�, reatus person�, reatus actualis.—Rutherford.

32. So as it is said of him (Chadal ishim), which is, as Vatablus expoundeth it, so contemptible a man, that men would not admit him in company of men.Sanctius saith, "He was not numbered amongst men; he was so despised, that he was the lowest among the lowest of men, or the minimum quod sic of men, as it is, Psalm 22:6, 'A worm, no man,' nobody, not in the class or rank of men."—Rutherford.

33. Anexichniaston plouton tou Christou.—Rutherford.

34. No orator in the Greek tongue hath any so superlative expression, kath hyperbolen eis hyperbolen aionion baros doxes.—Rutherford.

35. These two are conjoined; the one is a word of faith (prosdokontas), "Looking for;" the other, a word of earnest desire, spoudontas,—‘hasting after,’ (Stephanus, votis accelerantes,) "the coming of the day of the Lord."—Rutherford.

36. Ouk ekkakoumen.—Rutherford

37. Me ekleipe.—Rutherford

38. See the last few paragraphs of Dr. Luther’s Treatise Against the Antinomians.

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