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wondered, and indeed think it a just matter of wonder, how some persons are able to reconcile their high and loud pretences of piety, and a more than ordinary purity, with that insolence and spiritual pride, which breaks forth in every part of their conversation. For how do some, as it were, monopolize the covenant of grace wholly to themselves, calling themselves the only people of God, the saints, the godly; looking upon all round about them as heathens and reprobates; and upon that account separating themselves into little companies and congregations, as not being willing to join (forsooth) in a less refined way of God's worship. Which persons, though they have the good fortune to find friends to countenance them upon a supposed political account, such as call compliance prudence, and cowardice moderation; yet upon what grounds of true piety and religion can these pharisaical separatists acquit themselves? I am sure not upon this, which recommends poorness in spirit: for did ever any one yet, endued with this excellent grace, say to his brother, Stand off, for I am holier than thou? or bid defiance to a whole church, and spit in the face of all church-governors, as every conventicler certainly does, upon a supposal of his own transcendent purity and perfection; which neither upon clear evidence of scripture, the practice of former ages, nor the judgment of many thousands more knowing than himself, (as they may very easily be,) he is at all able to make out or demonstrate? Such persons may flatter themselves as they please; but the gospel must alter its voice, and say, Blessed are the proud in spirit, the censorious, the insolent, and self-opinioned, before they can either have

any solid ground of comfort, or real title to a blessing.

Where true poverty of spirit dwells, a man thinks of nothing less than his own perfection, which he utterly disowns. There is no beggar and forlorn, distressed person that more keenly feels the afflicting hardships of hunger, cold, and nakedness, than such an one feels and groans under his spiritual wants he laments the hardness of his heart, his want of life and activity in the performance of duty; he complains of the weakness of his faith, the instability of his hope, the dispersion and wanderings of his affections; he cannot pray with that fervour, hear with that attention, and practise with that steadiness and perseverance, which, he is sensible, becomes the excellent and exact measures of Christianity.

These blots and flaws in his Christian course his eye is constantly upon and as they are the objects of his thoughts, so they are the continual matter of his sorrow. Let this therefore be the first thing, in which consists this poorness in spirit here recommended by our Saviour in the text; namely, a sense of that deplorable want of holiness, which we are in by nature.

2. The second thing in which it consists, is a sense of our wretched and miserable condition by reason of such want; the wretchedness of which appears from these two considerations.

(1.) That we are utterly unable, by any natural strength of our own, to recover and bring ourselves out of this condition.

(2.) That during our continuance under it, we are exposed and stand obnoxious to all the curses of the law.

1. And first of all, this evangelical poverty of spirit makes a man sensible in how wretched a condition he is, by reason of his own utter inability to redeem himself from it. He finds his understanding much darkened, so that he cannot perceive and judge of the things of God; and his will full of weakness and impotence, as to its choosing of them: it sees no beauty in holiness, why it should desire it; but the stream of all its appetites and inclinations wholly runs out after other things, things evil and pernicious, and tending to the direct ruin of him that does embrace them. All this does a person so qualified find and feel in himself; but, for all this, is still unable to enlighten his own understanding, to sanctify his will, or correct his inclinations : but, like a man bound hand and foot, and thrown into a quagmire, there is he like to lie and sink, for any succour that he can give himself, unless such as pass by have compassion on him, and relieve him.

And therefore, as the assertion of Pelagius of the freedom of the will, and its full power to choose things spiritually good, even since the fall, is indeed a great piece of nonsense in itself; so those that maintain and insist upon it sufficiently declare themselves to have little or no experience of their own hearts: nor can all the rhetoric of men and angels persuade a person truly poor in spirit, and fully studied in his own spiritual wants and defects, that he is able to repent when he pleases, to believe when he pleases, and to perform all the divine commands. For he looks upon it as a contradiction, and a defiance to his experience, which he will believe and subscribe to, in spite of all the world, as he has good reason.

And therefore, in his use of all the outward means of grace, he depends upon them no more than if he used them not; but upon the Spirit of God only working in them: for he knows it is he alone that can change his heart; and that must be changed, or a man cannot be saved. It is in his power indeed to hear and read the word, and to say his prayers, but this will not do his work; and for this cause it is, that God often suffers a man to wait upon him for many years in the use of these duties, and yet gives him not his desired success, in the change of his heart, and the conquest of his corruptions, merely to convince him of the emptiness and inefficacy of all means considered in themselves; and to shew him, that when these great things come to be wrought for him, it is the sole grace of God to which he is a debtor for all.

It would be long enough before we should hear a person, endued with this evangelical quality, to talk of his merits and his supererogations, of his fulfilling and even outdoing the law for these are whimsies, framed and minted in the heads of those, whose hearts never served them to be experimentally pious. That poverty of spirit that has a claim to the kingdom of heaven, neither discourses nor thinks after this manner; but vents itself in that doleful, passionate exclamation of St. Paul, Who shall deliver me from this body of death? It convinces a man that he is carnal and sold under sin, and sold to a more than Egyptian bondage, to the yoke of Satan, and the tyranny of his own base, domineering affections.

But surely none is ever heard to cry out with so much vehemence, Who shall deliver me? who

thinks that he is able to deliver himself. None calls in for auxiliaries from abroad, who finds a sufficiency of strength to secure him at home. Let this therefore be one part of the misery of that wretched condition that this poorness in spirit makes a man sensible of, namely, that he is utterly unable by any strength of his own to get out of this condition.

2. The other part of its misery, which this evangelical poorness makes a man also sensible of, is, that during his continuance under this woful condition, he stands liable and obnoxious to all the curses of the law. A sad consideration certainly, that a man should be in a condition, from which he is not able to rid himself, and in which, if he remains, he is infallibly ruined. Yet this is the state of every man by nature. He is born in sin, and the wages of sin is death; death in its utmost compass and latitude, considered with all its retinue of miseries and calamities, which, as its harbingers, make way for it, and by degrees usher on the last and fatal blow, which from temporal sufferings translates a man to eternal.

Whosoever has a right spiritual sense of sin, knows the terror of the law, and the dreadfulness of the curse; what it is to live under the sentence of damnation; every day, every hour, every minute expecting its fearful execution. And he knows also, that till the Spirit of regeneration puts him within the verge of the second covenant, he is responsible for the breach of the first, which makes all that his portion, that the law awards, and the wrath of God inflicts upon transgressors.

Now surely he that lives with these apprehensions

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