DISCOURSE TWENTY THIRD

FRANCIS ATTERBURY, D. D.

ATTERBURY was born in 1662, and educated at Westminster School, and Christ Church, Oxford. After being lecturer at St. Bridge's, London, he became Chaplain to William and Mary, and in 1713 was appointed Bishop of Rochester. Upon the accession of George First, his tide of popularity fell, and becoming implicated in political affairs, he was ar rested as a traitor in 1722, confined in the Tower, and finally banished his country. He died an exile, at Paris, in 1732.

Atterbury was a man of uncommon abilities, and great learning. As a preacher he was unrivaled in his time, and to his brilliant sermons, delivered from memory (in keeping with the most general custom in the seventeenth century), his preferment is to be ascribed. His sermons are pronounced to be models of exact method, strength of argument, weight of reflection, purity, and often vigor of language. His periods are easy and elegant, and his style flowing and beautiful. Doddridge declares Atterbury (perhaps with somewhat of extravagance), "the glory of our English orators." The following is his criticism upon his sermons. "In his writings we see language in its strictest purity and beauty. There is nothing dark, nothing redundant, nothing deficient, nothing misplaced. On the whole he is a model for courtly preachers." Doddridge also names the sermon which is here given as one of his chief productions.

THE TERRORS OF CONSCIENCE.

"At that time Herod the Tetrarch heard of the fame of Jesus, and said unto his servants, this is John the Baptist, he is risen from the dead; and therefore mighty works do show forth themselves in him. For Herod had laid hold on John and bound him, and put him in prison," etc.-MATT. xiv. 1–3.

"The wicked (says the prophet) are like the troubled sea, when it can not rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt." That is, men of flagitious lives are subject to great uneasiness. Whatever calm

and repose of mind they may seem for a scason to enjoy, yet anon a quick and pungent sense of guilt (awakened by some accident) rises like a whirlwind, ruffles and disquiets them throughout, and turns up to open view, from the very bottom of their consciences, all the filth and impurity which hath settled itself there; a truth, of which there is not perhaps, in the whole book of God, a more apt and lively instance than that which the passage I have read from the Evangelist sets before us. The crying guilt of John the Baptist's blood sat but ill, no doubt, on the conscience of Herod, from the moment of his spilling it. However, his inward anguish and remorse was stifled and kept under for a time, by the splendor and luxury in which he lived, till he heard of the fame of Jesus, and then his heart smote him at the remembrance of the inhuman treatment he had given to such another just and good man, and wrung from him a confession of what he felt, by what he uttered on that occasion: He said unto his servant, "this is John the Baptist! He is risen from the dead! And therefore mighty works do show forth themselves in him." There could not be a wilder imagination than this, or which more betrayed the agony and confusion of thought under which he labored. He had often heard John the Baptist preach, and must have known that the drift of all his sermons was, to prepare the Jews for the reception of a prophet, "mightier than him, and whose shoes he was not worthy to bear." Upon the arrival of that Prophet soon afterward, Herod's frightened conscience gives him no leisure to recollect what his messenger had said, but immediately suggests to him that this was the murdered Baptist himself! Herod, as appears from history, was, though circumcised, little better than an heathen in his principles and practices; or, if sincerely a Jew, was, at most, but of the sect of the Sadducees, who said "there was no resurrection ;" and yet, under the present pangs and terrors of his guilt, he imagines that John was risen from the dead, on purpose to reprove him. It was the Baptist's distinguishing character that he did no miracles, nor pretended to the power of doing them; and yet even from hence the disturbed mind of Herod concludes that it must be he, because mighty works did show forth themselves in him. And so great was his consternation and surprise, that it broke out before those who should least have been witnesses of it; for he whispers not his guilty fears to a bosom friend, to the partner of his crime and of his bed, but forgets his high state and character, and declares them to his very servants. Surely nothing can be more just and apposite than the allusion of the Prophet in respect to this wicked Tetrarch, "he is like the troubled sea, when it can not rest,

whose waters cast up mire and dirt." And such is every one that sins with a high hand against the clear light of his conscience; although he may resist the checks of it at first, yet he will be sure to feel the lashes and reproaches of it afterward. The avenging principle within us will certainly do its duty, upon any eminent breach of ours, and make every flagrant act of wickedness, even in this life, a punishment to itself.

With this general proposition the particular instance of the text (duly opened and considered) will furnish us; and this proposition, therefore, I now propose, by God's blessing, to handle and enforce. And in order to fix a due, lively, and lasting sense of it upon our minds, I shall, in what follows, consider conscience, not as a mere intellectual light or informing faculty, a dictate of the practical understanding (as the phrase of the schools is), which directs, admonishes, and influences us in what we are to do; but as it acts back upon the soul, by a reflection on what we have done, and is, by that means, the force and cause of all that joy or dejection of mind, of those internal sensations (if I may so speak) of pleasure or pain, which attend the practice of great virtues or great vices, and begin that heaven and that hell in us here which will be our future and eternal portion hereafter. "The spirit (or conscience) of man is the candle of the Lord," which not only discovers to us, by its light, wherein our duty consists, but revives also, and cheers us with its bright beams, when we do well; and when we do ill, is as a burning flame, to scorch and consume us.

As such I shall consider it in my present discourse; wherein,

I. I shall endeavor to illustrate this plain but weighty truth (for indeed it needs illustration only, and not proof), by some considerations drawn from Scripture, reason, and experience.

II. I shall account for a particular and pressing difficulty that seems to attend the proof of it. And,

III. Lastly, I shall apply it to (the proper object of all our admonitions from the pulpit, but most especially of this) the hearts and consciences of the hearers.

1. I am to illustrate this truth by some considerations drawn from Scripture, reason, and experience.

That guilt and anguish are inseparable, and that the punishment of a man's sin begins always from himself, and from his own reflections, is a truth every where supported, appealed to, and inculcated in Scripture. The consequence of the first sin that was ever committed in the world, is there said to have been, that our offending parents perceived their own nakedness, and fled from the presence

of God: that is, a conscious shame and fear succeeded in the room of lost innocence, and the presages of their own minds, those auguria prna futura (of which even the heathen moralists speak), anticipated the sentence of Divine vengeance. In relation to this office of conscience, it is that the inspired writers speak of it (in terms borrowed from the awful solemnities of human judicatories) as bearing witness against us, as accusing or excusing, judging and condemning us. And the Prophet therefore adds this woe to the other menaces which he had denounced on a disobedient and profligate people, "that their own wickedness should correct them, and their backsliding should reprove them." A correction so severe and terrible that Solomon, balancing the outward afflictions of life and bodily pains with the inward regrets and torments of a guilty mind, pronounces the former of these to be light and tolerable in comparison of the latter: "The spirit of a man (says he) will sustain his infirmities, but a wounded spirit who can bear?" Isaiah describes the dismal reflections and foreboding thoughts that harbor in such a breast, after this manner: "The sinners of Sion are afraid, fearfulness hath surprised the hypocrites! Who shall dwell with devouring flames? Who shall dwell with everlasting burnings ?" But no part of Scripture gives us so lively an account of this inward scene of dejection and horror as the Psalms of penitent David. In one of them particularly he thus complains: "Mine iniquities are gone over my head, as an heavy burden; they are too heavy for me. I am feeble and sore broken, I have roared by reason of the disquietness of my heart. I am troubled, I am bowed down greatly: I go mourning all the day long. My heart panteth, my strength faileth me; and as for the light of mine eyes, it is also gone from me. For Thine arrows stick fast in me, and Thy hand presseth me sore. There is no soundness in my flesh, because of Thine anger; neither is there any rest in my bones, because of my sin."

This is the expressive language of Holy Writ when it would let out to us the disorders and uneasiness of a guilty, self-condemning mind. And,

2. There is nothing in these representations particular to the times and persons on which they point: nothing but what happens alike to all men in like cases, and is the genuine and necessary result of offending against the light of our consciences. Nor is it possible indeed, in the nature of the thing, that matters should be otherwise. It is the way in which guilt doth and must always operate. For moral evil can no more be committed than natural evil can be suffered without anguish and disquiet. Whatever doth violence to the

plain dictates of our reason concerning virtue and vice, duty and sin, will as certainly discompose and afflict our thoughts as a wound will raise a smart in the flesh that receives it. Good and evil, whether natural or moral, are but other words for pleasure and pain, delight and uneasiness. At least, though they may be distinguished in the notion, yet are they not to be separated in reality: but the one of them, wherever it is, will constantly and uniformly excite and produce the other. Pain and pleasure are the springs of all human actions, the great engines by which the wise Author of our natures governs and steers them to the purposes for which He ordained them. By these, annexed to the perception of good and evil, he inclines us powerfully to pursue the one and to avoid the other; to pursue natural good, and to avoid natural evil, by delightful or uneasy sens ations that immediately affect the body; to pursue moral good, and to avoid moral evil, by pleasing or painful impressions made on the mind. From hence it is that we so readily choose or refuse, do or forbear, every thing that is profitable or noxious to us, and requisito to preserve or perfect our beings. And because it is an end of far greater importance, and more worthy of our all-wise Creator's care, to secure the integrity of our moral, than of our natural perfections, therefore He hath made the pleasures and pains, subservient to this purpose, more extensive and durable; so that the inward complacence we find in acting reasonably and virtuously, and the disquiet we feel from vicious choices and pursuits, is protracted beyond the acts themselves from whence it arose, and renewed often upon our souls by distant reflections; whereas the pleasures and pains attending the perceptions of natural good and evil are bounded within a narrower compass, and do seldom stay long, or return with any force upon the mind, after a removal of the objects that occasioned them.

Hence, then, the satisfactions or stings of conscience severally arise. They are the sanctions, as it were, and enforcements of that eternal law of good and evil to which we are subjected; the natural rewards and punishments originally annexed to the observance or breach of that law, by the great Promulger of it, and which being thus joined and twisted together by God, can scarce by any arts, endeavors, or practices of men, be put asunder. The prophet therefore explains good and evil by sweet and bitter: "Woe be to them," (says he) "that call evil good, and good evil! That put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!" Implying that the former of these do as naturally and sensibly affect the soul as the latter do the palate, and leave as grateful or displeasing a relish behind them. But,

3. There is no need of arguments to evince this truth; the uni