support of the weak, the confidence of the strong, the magazine of promises, and the title to very glorious rewards; we may easily imagine, that it must have in it a work and a difficulty, in some proportion answerable to so great effects. But when we are bidden to believe strange propositions, we are put upon it, when we cannot judge, and those propositions have possessed our discerning faculties, and have made a party there, and are become domestic, before they come to be disputed; and then the articles of faith are so few, and are made so credible, and, in their event and in their object, are so useful and gaining upon the affections, that he were a prodigy of man, and would be so esteemed, that should, in all our present circumstances, disbelieve any point of faith: and all is well as long as the sun shines, and the fair breath of heaven gently wafts us to our own purposes. But if you will try the excellency, and feel the work of faith, place the man in a persecution; let him ride in a storm; let his bones be broken with sorrow, and his eyelids loosened with sickness; let his bread be dipped in tears, and all the daughters of music be brought low; let God commence a quarrel against him, and be bitter in the accents of his anger or his discipline; then God tries your faith. Can you then trust his goodness; and believe him to be a father, when you groan under his rod? Can you rely upon all the strange propositions of Scripture, and be content to perish, if they be not true? Can you receive comfort in the discourses of death and heaven, of immortality and the resurrection, of the death of Christ and conforming to his sufferings? Truth is, there are but two great periods, in which faith demonstrates itself to be a powerful and mighty grace and they are persecution and the approaches of death, for the passive part and a temptation for the active. In the days of pleasure and the night of pain, faith is to fight her agonisticon, to contend for mastery and faith overcomes all alluring and fond temptations to sin, and faith overcomes all our weaknesses and faintings in our troubles. By the faith of the promises, we learn to despise the world, choosing those objects which faith discovers; and, by expectation of the same promises, we are comforted in all our sorrows, and enabled to look through and see beyond the cloud but the vigour of it is pressed and called forth, when all our fine dis : For in our health courses come to be reduced to practice. and clearer days it is easy to talk of putting trust in God'; we readily trust him for life, when we are in health; for provisions, when we have fair revenues; and for deliverance, when we are newly escaped: but let us come to sit upon the margent of our grave, and let a tyrant lean hard upon our fortunes, and dwell upon our wrong, let the storm arise, and the keels toss till the cordage crack, or that all our hopes bulge under us, and descend into the hollowness of sad misfortunes; then can you believe, when you neither hear, nor see, nor feel any thing but objections? This is the proper work of sickness: faith is then brought into the theatre; and so exercised, that if it abides but to the end of the contention, we may see the work of faith, which God will hugely crown. The same I say of hope, and of charity, or the love of God, and of patience, which is a grace produced from the mixtures of all these: they are virtues, which are greedy of danger, and no man was ever honoured by any wise or discerning person for dining upon Persian carpets, nor rewarded with a crown for being at ease. It was the fire, that did honour to Mutius Scævola; poverty made Fabricius famous; Rutilius was made excellent by banishment; Regulus by torments; Socrates by prison; Cato by his death and God hath crowned the memory of Job with a wreath of glory, because he sat upon his dunghill wisely and temperately; and his potsherd and his groans, mingled with praises and justifications of God, pleased him like an anthem, sung by angels in the morning of the resurrection. God could not choose but be pleased with the delicious accents of martyrs, when in their tortures they cried out nothing but “ Holy Jesus" and "Blessed be God;" and they also themselves, who, with a hearty designation to the Divine pleasure, can delight in God's severe dispensation, will have the transportations of cherubim, when they enter into the joys of God. Mors ipsa beatior indè est, Et ad astra doloribus itur. Prud. Hymn. in Exeq. Defunct. • Virtutes avidæ periculi monstrant, quàm non pœniteat tanto pretio æstimâsse virtutem.-Senec. Non enim hilaritate, nec lasciviâ, nec risu, aut joco comite levitatis, sed sæpe etiam tristes firmitate et constantiâ sunt beati.-Cic. de Fin.l. xxii, If God be delicious to his servants, when he smites them, he will be nothing but ravishments and ecstasies to their spirits, when he refreshes them with the overflowings of joy in the day of recompenses. No man is more miserable, than he that hath no adversity; that man is not tried', whether he be good or bad: and God never crowns those virtues, which are only faculties and dispositions: but every act of virtue is an ingredient into reward. And we see many children fairly planted, whose parts of nature were never dressed by art, nor called from the furrows of their first possibilities by discipline and institution, and they dwell for ever in ignorance, and converse with beasts; and yet if they had been dressed and exercised, might have stood at the chairs of princes, or spoken parables amongst the rulers of cities. Our virtues are but in the seed, when the grace of God comes upon us first: but this grace must be thrown into broken furrows, and must twice feel the cold, and twice feel the heat", and be softened with storms and showers, and then it will arise into fruitfulness and harvests. And what is there in the world to distinguish virtues from dishonours, or the valour of Cæsar from the softness of the Egyptian eunuchs, or that can make any thing rewardable, but the labour and the danger, the pain and the difficulty? Virtue could not be any thing but sensuality, if it were the entertainment of our senses and fond desires; and Apicius had been the noblest of all the Romans, if feeding a great appetite and despising the severities of temperance had been the work and proper employment of a wise man. But otherwise do fathers, and otherwise do mothers handle their children. These soften them with kisses and imperfect noises, with the pap and breast-milk of soft endearments; they rescue them from tutors, and snatch them from discipline; they desire to keep them fat and warm, and their feet dry, and their bellies full; and then the children govern, and cry, and prove fools and troublesome, so long as the feminine republic does endure. * Nihil infelicius eo cui nihil unquam contigit adversi. Non licuit illi se experiri. Seneca. ་ u Illa seges votis respondet avari Agricolæ, bis quæ solem, bis frigora sensit. Virg. Georg. 1. Languent per inertiam saginata, nec labore tantùm, sed mole et ipso sui onere deficiunt. - Seneca. But fathers, because they design to have their children wise and valiant, apt for counsel or for arms, send them to severe governments", and tie them to study, to hard labour, and afflictive contingencies. They rejoice, when the bold boy strikes a lion with his hunting spear, and shrinks not when the beast comes to affright his early courage. Softness is for slaves and beasts, for minstrels and useless persons, for such who cannot ascend higher than the state of a fair ox, or a servant entertained for vainer offices: but the man, that designs his son for noble employments, to honours and to triumphs, to consular dignities and presidencies of councils, loves to see him pale with study, or panting with labour, hardened with sufferance, or eminent by dangers. And so God dresses us for heaven. He loves to see us struggling with a disease, and resisting the devil, and contesting against the weaknesses of nature, and against hope to believe in hope, resigning ourselves to God's will, praying him to choose for us, and dying in all things but faith and its blessed consequences; ut ad officium cum periculo simus prompti; and the danger and the resistance shall endear the office. For so I have known the boisterous north wind pass through the yielding air", which opened its bosom, and appeased its violence by entertaining it with easy compliance in all the regions of its reception: but when the same breath of heaven hath been checked with the stiffness of a tower, or the united strength of wood, it grew mighty, and dwelt there, and made the highest branches stoop, and make a smooth path for it on the top of all its glories. So is sickness, and so is the grace of God: when sickness hath made the difficulty, then God's grace hath made a triumph, and by doubling its power hath created new proportions of a reward; and then shews its biggest glory, when it hath the greatest difficulty to master, the greatest weaknesses to support, the most busy temptations to contest with; for so. God loves, that his strength should be seen in our weakness and our danger. Happy is w Callum per injurias ducunt; Ut sit luminis atque aquæ cœlestis patiens latus. - Modestiâ filiorum delectantur; vernularem licentia et canum, non puerorum. y Ventus ut amittit vires, nisi robore densæ Occurrunt sylvæ, spatio diffusus inani.. Lucan. z Marcet sine adversario virtus. that state of life, in which our services to God are the dearest and the most expensive". 5. Sickness hath some degrees of eligibility, at least by an after-choice; because to all persons, which are within. the possibilities and state of pardon, it becomes a great instrument of pardon of sins. For as God seldom rewards here and hereafter too; so it is not very often, that he punishes in both states. In great and final sins, he doth so; but we find it expressed only in the case of the sin against the Holy Ghost," which shall never be forgiven in this world, nor in the world to come," that is, it shall be punished in both worlds, and the infelicities of this world shall but usher in the intolerable calamities of the next. But this is in a case of extremity, and in sins of an unpardonable malice in those lesser stages of death, which are deviations from the rule, and not a destruction and perfect antinomy to the whole institution, God very often smites with his rod of sickness, that he may not for ever be slaying the soul with eternal death. "I will visit their offences with the rod, and their sin with scourges: nevertheless my loving-kindness will I not utterly take from him, nor suffer my truth to fail"." And there is, in the New Testament, a delivering over to Satan, and a consequent buffeting, for the mortification of the flesh indeed, but that the soul may be saved in the day of the Lord. And to some persons the utmost process of God's anger reaches but to a sharp sickness, or at most but to a temporal death; and then the little momentary anger is spent, and expires in rest and a quiet grave. Origen, St. Augustine, and Cassian say, concerning Ananias and Sap-. phirad, that they were slain with a sudden death, that by such a judgment their sin might be punished, and their guilt expiated, and their persons reserved for mercy in the day of judgment. And God cuts off many of his children from the land of the living; and yet, when they are numbered amongst the dead, he finds them in the book of life, written amongst those that shall live to him for ever. And thus it happened a Lætius est, quoties magno tibi constat honestum. c 1 Cor. v. 5. 1 Tim. i. 20. Psalm lxxxix. 32, 33. a Digni erant in hoc sæculo recipere peccatum suum, ut mundiores exeant ab hac vita, mundati castigatione sibi illata per mortem communem, quoniam credentes erant in Christum. Origen, St. August. 1. iii. c. 1. contr. Parmen. et Cassian. collat. vi. c. 11. |