wise confounding our English Egyptians with the thick darkness of faction and ignorance; and lastly, snatching away that firstborn of tyranny, perjury, and rebellion, and blowing him out of the world, as he did the locusts out of Egypt; till at length breaches and divisions amongst themselves, like the dividing of the Red sea and the parting of the mighty waters, both swallowed up them, and became as a wall of brass on both hands to our king and his loyal, exiled subjects, to convey them safe into a possession of those rights, which, both by the gift of God and the laws of men, were so undoubtedly their own.

Thus we have seen some resemblance between the transactions of Providence with Israel and with ourselves. We have seen how like we are to them for their miraculous deliverances; and, which is the worst, though perhaps the nearest part of the resemblance, it will appear also presently, how like we are to them for their miraculous ingratitude.

In the text we have these three things observable. I. The unworthy and ungrateful deportment of the Israelites towards God upon a most signal mercy and deliverance: they provoked him.

II. The aggravation of this unworthy deportment from the nature and circumstance of the deliverance: they provoked him at the sea, even at the Red sea.

III. and lastly, The cause of this misbehaviour and unworthy deportment, which was their not understanding the designs of mercy in the several instances of it: they understood not thy wonders in Egypt.

I. And first for the first of these, the Israelites' ungrateful and unworthy deportment towards God: they provoked him.

To provoke, is an expression setting forth a pecu

liar and more than ordinary degree of misbehaviour; and seems to import an insolent, daring resolution to offend. A resolution not contented with one single stroke of disobedience, but such a one as multiplies and repeats the action, till the offence greatens and rises into an affront; and as it relates to God, so I conceive it strikes at him in a threefold respect. 1st, of his power. 2dly, Of his goodness. 3dly, Of his patience.

1st, And first it rises up against the power and prerogative of God. It is, as it were, an assault upon God sitting upon his throne, a snatching at his sceptre, and a defiance of his very royalty and supremacy. He that provokes God, does in a manner dare him to strike, and to revenge the injury and invasion upon his honour. He considers not the weight of God's almighty arm, and the edge of his sword, the swiftness and poison of his arrows, but puffs at all, and looks the terrors of sin-revenging justice in the face. The Israelites could not sin against God, after those miracles in Egypt, without a signal provocation of that power that they had so late and so convincing an experience of: a power, that could have crushed an Israelite as easily as an Egyptian; and given as terrible an instance of its consuming force upon false friends, as upon professed enemies; in the sight of God perhaps the less sort of offenders of the two.

And can the sins of any nation in the world more affront God, in the grand attribute of his power, than the sins of ours; which has given such flaming, illustrious experiments of itself, as have dazzled our eyes and astonished our hearts! For have we not seen a flourishing state and a glorious church broke in pieces, and as it were extinguished in a moment?

and a prince, as great as good, torn out of his throne, stripped of his power, and at length disastrously cut off by the hand of violence? And dare we now sin against that power that has thus shewn us how easily it can confound and overturn all the glories of worldly grandeur ? and which, after all this, has, by a miraculous exertion of itself, called up a buried church and state from the grave, and given them a stupendous resurrection from the confusion and rub→ bish of a long and woful desolation: and this by bringing back the banished son of a murdered father, even over the heads of his enemies armed and potent, and rather amazed than conquered into their former allegiance. A work so big with miracle and wonder, so apparently above, nay even against the common methods of human acting, that were there no other argument to prove a Providence, this one passage alone were sufficient; and that such an one as carries in it the force and brightness of a demonstration.

2dly, Provoking God imports an abuse of his goodness. God, as he is clothed with power, is the proper object of our fear; but as he displays his goodness, of our love. By one he would command, by the other he would win and (as it were) court our obedience. And an affront to his goodness, his tenderness, and his mercy, as much exceeds an affront of his power, as a wound at the heart transcends a blow on the hand. For when God shall shew miracles of mercy, step out of the common road of providence, commanding the host of heaven, the globe of the earth, and the whole system of nature out of its course, to serve a design of goodness

not a provocation, after such obliging passages, infinitely base and insufferable, and a degree of ingratitude, higher than the heavens it struck at, and deeper than the sea that they passed through?

3dly, Provoking God imports an affront upon his longsuffering and his patience. The movings of nature, in the breasts of all mankind, tell us how keenly, how regretfully, every man resents the abuse of his love; how hardly any prince, but one, can put up an offence against his acts of mercy; and how much more affrontive it is to despise mercy ruling by the golden sceptre of pardon, than by the iron rod of a penal law. But now patience is a further and an higher advance of mercy; it is mercy drawn out at length; mercy wrestling with baseness, and striving, if possible, even to weary and outdo ingratitude and therefore a sin against this is the highest pitch, the utmost improvement, and, as I may so speak, the ne plus ultra of provocation. For when patience shall come to be tired, and even out of breath with pardoning, let all the invention of mankind find something further, either upon which an offender may cast his hope, or against which he can commit a sin. But it was God's patience that the ungrateful Israelites sinned against; for they even plied and pursued him with sin upon sin, one offence following and thronging upon the neck of another, the last account still rising highest, and swelling bigger, till the treasuries of grace and pardon were so far drained and exhausted, that they provoked God to swear, and what is more, to swear in his wrath, and with a full purpose of revenge, that they should never enter into his rest.

And thus I have given you the threefold dimen

sion of the provocation that the Israelites passed upon God; and it is to be feared, that our sins have been cast into the same mould, they do so exactly resemble them in all their proportions; for we are as deep in arrears to Heaven, and have as large a sum of abused goodness and patience to account for, as ever they had; and so much greater is our account than theirs could be, that we had the advantage of their example to have forewarned us.

II. I proceed now to the second thing proposed from the text; which is, the aggravation of the Israelites' unworthy deportment towards their almighty deliverer, set forth in these words: they provoked him at the sea, even at the Red sea.

The extraordinary emphasis of which expression, in the repeated use of the same words, shews what a particular and severe observation God passed upon their behaviour. The baseness and ingratitude of which he casts in their teeth, by confronting it with the eminent obligation laid upon them, by the glorious deliverance he vouchsafed them; a deliverance heightened and ennobled with these four qualifications.

1st, Its greatness. 2dly, Its unexpectedness. 3dly, Its seasonableness. 4thly, Its undeservedness.

Of each of which in their order.

1st, And first for the greatness of the deliverance. Very great surely it must needs have been, comparing the contemptible weakness of the persons delivered, with the strength and terror of the enemy from whom they were delivered. What were a company of poor oppressed bricklayers, inured to servitude as to an inheritance, for four hundred years successively, and consequently whose very