by the immediate guidance of the Holy Ghost, to set apart the time of our blessed Saviour's fasting and temptation in the wilderness, to be solemnized with the anniversary exercise of abstinence, and other holy austerities, for the subduing the flesh, quickening the spirit; that so we might conform to Christ, and worship the author of our religion with the devotions of imitation.

Thanks be to God, our church is lately come out of the wilderness; yet let it not cease to imitate what our Saviour did when he was there. I confess the blessed Jesus is a pattern above the imitation of mortality; fitter to terrify than to excite our endeavours; a copy to be admired, not to be transcribed.

His whole life was a continued miracle; in every instance of behaviour his divinity beamed through his humanity, and every action was a cast of his omnipotence; and miracles, I acknowledge, were never intended for precepts; nor is any man bound to be omnipotent, divine, or an angel, nor to do such things as are only the effects of such perfections.

Yet even this strange, high, inimitable fasting of Christ may be stripped of the miracle, and, by due, qualified proportions, found a moral duty : for though to fast forty days were miraculous, and so not at all concerning us, yet the ends of Christ's fasting, which were to enjoy a more immediate converse with God, the better to fortify himself against the temptation of the Devil, and to fit himself for the execution of a great work laid upon him by the Father; these are all common to us, according to the due abatement of degrees; and therefore, where there is some proportion in the duty, there ought to be the same in the use of the means.

Nay, we may advance the argument further, and dispute thus: That if he who had no corruption or disorder in his nature, to weaken or betray the motions of the spirit, found it yet fit to undergo these austerities and violences to the flesh; how much more ought we, who find a continual rebellion in all our appetites against the spiritual inclinations of the mind, to endeavour, by such religious arts, to subdue those luxuriancies to the obedience of reason and the dictates of the spirit?

Let us therefore follow Christ, though at a distance; for if we may but touch the hem of our great exemplar by the small beginnings of a faithful imitation, we shall find a virtue coming out from him, to the curing of the flux of sin, and the bloody issue of the most deadly, threatening corruption.

We are commanded to be like Christ; but in every likeness philosophy teaches that there are some degrees of dissimilitude, because no likeness amounts to an identity; and when he bids us be perfect, he still intends it according to that economy of perfection that is incident to an imperfect nature. Wherefore let us not distinguish ourselves out of duty, nor make our ease our religion, but suspect that those arguments are very likely to proceed from the flesh, that tend to the flesh's gratification. Though we cannot reach Christ in the miracle of the performance, yet we may follow him in the sincerity of the attempt.

Certain it is, from the united testimony of many of the most experienced followers of Christ, that these abstinencies and sour rudiments of self-denial have a signal influence, both to the procuring of mercies, and to the removal of impending judgments.

He that thus hungers is sure to he filled. Fasting may prevent starving, and wearing sackcloth for a while keep us from wearing it all our days. It is able to reverse a decree, and to remand the word out of God's mouth. Ahab himself found it so; and what rewards may we hope for to a true, when so great did attend even the forced abstinencies of an unsound repentance?

As for the words: it is much doubted by expositors, what kind of evil spirit is here intended by our Saviour, which he affirms not to be dispossessed but by prayer and fasting.

Some understand it generally of all evil spirits, contrary to the express letter and sense of the place. Others, of an evil spirit of a peculiar and extraordinary fierceness. But others, more appositely and judiciously, interpret it of an evil spirit having had long and inveterate possession of the party out of whom it was cast; which appears from the ninth of Mark, where the spirit is said to have possessed him raidióDev, even from a child.

I shall now, by a parallel application, improve the words beyond this particular occasion, to their general reason, and extend what was here spoke of, the casting out the Devil as to his person, to an ejection of him as to his works. And whereas the duty of fasting is extraordinary, and a proper instrument to advance the heights and fervours of prayer, the sense of the words, as improvable into a standing, perpetual precept, is this:

That there are some corruptions and vices, which, partly by reason of a strong situation in our temper and constitution, partly by habit, custom, and inveterate continuance, grow so sturdy, and have so firm

an hold of us, that they cannot be subdued and conquered, and throughly dispossessed, but with the greatest ardour and constancy of prayer, joined with the harshest severities of mortification.

This, therefore, is the genuine sense of the words; in which there are these two parts:

First, An intimation of a peculiar duty; prayer and fasting.

Secondly, The end and design of it; which is, to eject and dispossess the unclean spirit.

These are the parts of the text, the entire discussion of which I shall manage in these three particulars.

I. To take a survey of the extent of this text.

II. To shew the due qualifications of it, that render it both acceptable to God, and efficacious to ourselves.

III. To shew how it comes to have such an influence in dispossessing the evil spirit, and subduing our corruptions.

I. For the first of these: this duty of fasting admits of several kinds and degrees; for in fasting as well as feasting we may find variety.

1st, The first kind is of constant, universal exercise; universal, both because it obliges at all times, and extends to all persons. And this is nothing but a temperate, sober, and restrained use of the creature ; in abridging the appetites of nature for the designs of religion; in bringing liberty to the love of reason, and contracting the latitude of things lawful into the narrower compass of expedients.

He that ventures to the utmost verge of his Christian liberty stands upon a precipice; the utmost bounds of lawful are the borders and immediate con

fines of unlawful. And when the Devil thus sets a man upon the pinnacle, he may be sure that he hath designed him for a temptation. To dwell near the sin, without sometimes stepping into it, is very hard. Neighbourhood is still the occasion of visits.

Upon this cause Christ has placed the spirit and soul of his religion in self-denial and a renouncing the pleasures, softnesses, and caresses of worldly delights; as knowing, though pleasure and a full enjoyment is in itself not evil, yet such is the weakness of our nature, that it fails and melts under the encounter, and by its very enjoyments is betrayed into the snares of sin and the regions of death.

It is lawful for us to feast with Job's sons, yet feasting may sometimes pull the house about our ears. When Amnon's heart is merry with wine, then the ambush is ready to rise and strike him. Fulness of bread was the occasion of Sodom's sin, and Sodom's sin was the occasion of its destruction. Temperance, therefore, the only easy and constant fast, is the great duty of a Christian life; a sure and sovereign instrument of mortification.

And whosoever struggles with any unruly corruption will perhaps find, that the constant turn of a well-guided abstinence will, in the issue, give a surer despatch to it than those extraordinary instances of total abstinence and higher severities, only undertook for a time. As a landflood, it carries a bigger stream, and comes with a mightier force and noise, yet presently dries up and disappears; but the emissions of a fountain, though gentle and silent, yet are constant and perpetual; and whereas the other, being gone, leaves nothing behind it but slime and