(1.) God's gracious love and condescension to

man.

(2.) The worth of souls.

(1.) For the first of these, was it not wonderful that the whole Trinity should thus stoop down to regard and advance us? It is, as if a king should call his parliament to invent ways and means how to prefer a few beggars.

Twelve poor fishermen were those to whom the Father and the Son first sent the Holy Ghost to be their comforter. And were not these worthy persons, to whom God should send an embassy from heaven! Yet the love of God thought all this little enough to carry on the good of mankind. The Trinity is indeed a great mystery, yet it is a question, whether God is not yet more wonderful in his love, than in the way of his subsistence.

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(2.) We learn hence the worth of souls. Though the divine nature is so glorious, that there is room enough for condescension, even in his treating with the most excellent of his creatures; yet surely the Lord of the universe does not busy himself about trifles, nor lay designs and use great counsels to pursue the air and the wind.

We can quaff away a soul, swear away a soul, and squander away eternity upon brutish and senseless gratifications of the flesh; but the omniscient, all-wise God has another judgment of souls; he looks upon them as worth his own taking pains upon. Shew me so much as one footstep in scripture, where God with such solemnity expresses a design to make any man rich or honourable; those things he scatters abroad with a looser, a promiscuous, and more careless hand.

But the salvation of souls is never left to chance, nor to any thing like contingency. All the Persons of the Trinity are ready (as I may speak with reverence) to wait upon us in our way to heaven; solicitous to secure us in our passage, and by all ways, methods, and encouragements, to comfort us in this world, and at length to waft us to a better.

To which, God of his infinite mercy vouchsafe to bring us.

SERMON XXX.

PROVERBS Xviii. 14.

But a wounded spirit who can bear?

THE corruption of man's nature is, by sad experience, found to be so great, that few are kept from sin, but merely by the check of their fears, representing to them the endless, insupportable torments of another world, as the certain consequent and terrible reward of it. Which fears, if men arrive to such a pitch of atheism as to be able to shake off, (a perfection nowadays attained to by many, and aspired to by more,) there seems to be nothing left further to work upon such persons, in the way of fear, nor consequently to control, and put a stop to the full career and fury of their lusts.

Upon which account it will (I conceive) be no ill service to religion, to let such profligate wretches know, that their infidelity cannot set them so far out of the reach of vengeance, but that, while they endeavour to cast off all dread of future damnation, God can antedate the torments they disbelieve, and convince them of the possibility of such miseries hereafter, by an actual foretaste of the same here; that he can kindle one hell within them, before they enter into another; and by what he can make them feel, teach them the certainty of what they refuse to fear.

It is indeed none of the least of God's titles and

prerogatives, that he is the God of the spirits of all flesh; and that, as he first made the soul, so he retains an immediate, irresistible power over it, so as to be able to turn the inclinations, and to dispose of the comfort and the sorrows of it, as he pleases; and all this independently upon any of those objects, which by the ordinary course of nature it converses with. The usual materials, of which the soul makes up its comforts and satisfactions here on earth, are the felicities of this world; and the ordinary cause of its sorrows are the adverse and cross accidents of the same: nevertheless, God can infuse comfort into the soul, in spite of the sharpest earthly calamities, and on the other hand, smite it with the severest anguish and bitterness, in the midst of the highest affluence and prosperity.

The text presents us here with a short but full comparison between the grief that afflicts the outward man, and that which preys upon the inward; together with the transcendent greatness of the latter above the former, as shall be made out presently in the grand instance of both these sorts of sufferings, even our blessed Saviour himself. For let this outside, or shell of nature, the body, be under never so much pain and agony, yet a well-settled and resolved mind will be able to buoy it up, and keep it from sinking: the spirits will bear, and by bearing will at length master all these infirmities. But when the spirit itself is wounded, and struck through, the grief presently becomes victorious, and intolerable. The soul in this case being like a bird wounded in the wing, the proper instrument and natural engine of its support, this immediately puts

an end to its flight, and makes all striving vain; for fall it must to the ground.

In the words there are two things to be explained.

I. What is meant by spirit.

II. What is imported by its being wounded.

1st. For the first of these, we are to observe, that both scripture and philosophy hold forth to us in the soul of man an upper and a lower part; not indeed in respect of its substance, for that is indivisible, but in respect of its faculties. And as this lower, or inferior part, consists of those sensitive faculties and appetites, whose operations being wholly tied to the organs of the body, do accordingly converse only with bodily and gross objects; so there is an higher and more noble portion of the soul, purely intellectual; and in operation, as well as in substance, perfectly spiritual. Which is called by philosophers to yeμovikov, that is, the leading, ruling, and directing part of the soul; and by the scripture, the spirit of the mind; that is, the most exalted, refined, and quintessential part of it, in Ephes. iv. 23, Be ye renewed in the spirit of your mind. For that the soul is a spirit, that is to say, a substance void of matter and dimensions, I suppose none will deny, but those who (with your oracle, Hobbes, in the head of them) admit of no substance, but body; and having fully subdued faith to senses, and so (like Thomas) resolving to believe no further than your eyes and hands can reach, will perhaps in religion, as well as natural objects, make the tube, the still, and the telescope, the sole measure of their creed. In defiance of which athe