inexperienced believing souls, who have more honesty than wit, think themselves wrapped up into the third heaven, and actually possessed of some notable preferment, when they can say, "I have such a great person's promise for such or such a thing." Have they so? Let them see if such a promise will pay rent, buy land, and maintain them like gentlemen. It is at the best but a future contingent; for either the man may die, or his interest may fail, or his mind may change, or ten thousand accidents may intervene. Promises are a diet which none ever yet thrived by, and a man may feed upon them heartily, and never break his fast. In a word, I may say of human promises, what expositors say of divine prophecies, "that they are never understood till they come to be fulfilled."

But how speaks the Scripture of these matters? Why, (Rom. xii. 20,) "If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink." It is not, Promise him meat and drink a week hence, that is perhaps two days after he is dead with thirst and hunger. He who lives only upon reversions, and maintains himself with hope, and has nothing to cover him but the clothes of dead men, and the promises of the living, will find just as much relief from them, as a man in the depth of winter feels the heat of the following summer.

But bare promises are so far from answering Christ's precept of loving our enemies, that if they are not realized in deeds, they become a plague and a great calamity. For they raise an expectation, which, unsatisfied or defeated, is the greatest of torments; they betray a man to a fallacious dependence, which bereaves him of the succours of his other endeavours, and in the issue leaves him to inherit the shame and miseryof a disappointment, and unable to say any thing else for himself, but that he was credulous, and the promise false.

3. But thirdly and lastly, to advance a degree yet higher, To do one or two kind offices for an enemy, is not to fulfil the precept of loving him. He who clothes a naked man with a pair of gloves, and administers to one perishing with thirst a drop or two of water, reaches not the measure of his necessity, but, instead of relieving, only upbraids his want, and passes a jest upon his condition. It is like pardoning a man the debt of a penny, and in the meantime suing him fiercely for a talent. Love is then only of reality and value when it deals forth benefits in a full proportion to one's need; and when it shews itself both in universality and constancy. Otherwise it is only a trick to serve a turn and carry on a design.

For he who would take a cleanly, unsusected way to ruiu his adversary, must pave he way to his destruction with some courtesies of a lighter sort, the sense of which shall take him off from his guard, his wariness, and

suspicion, and so lay him open to such a blow as shall destroy him at once. The skilful rider strokes and pleases the unruly horse, only that he may come so near him, as to get the bit into his mouth, and then he rides, and rules, and domineers over him at his pleasure. So he who hates his enemy with a cunning equal to his malice, will not strain to do this or that good turn for him, so long as it does not thwart, but rather promote the main design of his utter subversion. For all this is but like the helping a man over the stile, whe is going to be hanged, which surely is no very great or difficult piece of civility.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, we read of one whom the grandees of the court procured to be made secretary of state, only to break his back in the business of the Queen of Scots, whose death they were then projecting; like true courtiers, they first engage him in that fatal scene, and then desert him in it, using him only as a tool to do a present state job, and then to be reproached and ruined for what he had done. And a little observation of the world may shew us, that there is not only a course of beheading, or hanging, but also of preferring men out of the way. But this is not to love an enemy, but to hate him more artificially. He is ruined more speciously indeed, but not less efficaciously, than if he had been laid fast in a dungeon, or banished his country, or, by a packed jury, despatched into another world.

2. And thus having done with the negative, I come now to the second general thing proposed; namely, to shew positively what is included in the duty of loving our enemies. It includes these three things,

1. A discharging the mind of all rancour and virulence towards an adversary. The Scripture most significantly calls it the "leaven of malice," and we know that is of a spreading and fermenting nature, and will in time diffuse a sourness upon a man's whole behaviour; but we will suppose (which is yet seldom found) that a man has such an absolute empire and command over his heart, as for ever to stifle his disgusts, and to manage his actions in a constant contradiction to his affections, and to maintain a friendly converse, while he is hot with the rancour of an enemy; yet all this is but the mystery of dissimulation, and to act a part, instead of acting a friend.

Besides the trouble and anxiety to the very person who thus behaves himself. For enmity is a restless thing, and not to be dissembled without some torment to the mind that entertains it. It is more easily removed than covered. It is as if a man should endeavour to keep the sparks from flying out of a furnace, or as if a birth should be stopped when it is ripe and ready for delivery, which surely would be a pain greater than that of bringing forth.

He who is resolved to hate his enemy, and yet resolves not to shew it, has turned the edge of his hatred inwards, and becomes a tyrant and an enemy to himself: he could not wish his mortal adversary a greater misery, than thus to carry a mind always big and swelling, and ever ready to burst, and yet never to give it vent.

But, on the other side, it is no pain for a man to appear what he is, and to declare a real principle of love in sensible demonstrations. Does a man therefore find that both his duty and his interest require, that he should deport himself with all signs of love to his enemies? let him but take this easy course, as to entertain the thing in his heart which he would manifest in his converse, and then he will find that his work is as natural and easy, as it is for fire to cast abroad a flame. Art is difficult, but whatsoever is natural is

easy too.

2. To love an enemy is to do him all the real offices of kindness, that opportunity shall lay in our way. Love is of too substantial a nature to be made up of mere negatives, and withal too operative to terminate in bare desires. Does Providence cast any of my enemy's concernments under my power; as his health, his estate, preferment, or any thing conducing to the conveniences of his life? Why, in all this it gives me an opportunity to manifest, whether or no I can reach the sublimity of this precept of loving my enemies. Is my enemy sick and languishing, and is it in my power to cure him as easily, or to kill him as safely, as if I were his physician? Christianity here commands me to be concerned for his weakness, to shew him a remedy, and to rescue him from the grave; and, in a word, to preserve that life which perhaps would have once destroyed mine.

Do I see my enemy defrauded and circumvented, and like to be undone in his estate? I must not sit still and see him ruined, and tell him I wish him well; which is a contradiction in practice, and an impudent, ill-natured sarcasm but I must contribute my hearty assistance to discover the fraud, and to repel the force and as readily keep him from being poor, as relieve him if he were. I must be as forward in the pursuit of the thief who stole his goods who once plundered mine, as if the injury had light upon my friend, my kinsman, or myself.

:

And lastly, does it lie in my way to put in a word to dash or promote my enemy's business or interest? to give him a secret blow, such a one as shall strike his interest to the ground for ever, and he never know the hand from whence it came? Can I, by my power, obstruct his lawful advantage and preferments, and so reap the diabolical satisfaction of a close revenge? Can I do him all the mischief imaginable, and that easily, safely,

and successfully; and so applaud myself in my power, my wit, and my subtile contrivances, for which the world shall court me as formidable and considerable? Yet all these wretched practices and accursed methods of growing great, and rising by the fall of an enemy, are to be detested, as infinitely opposite to that innocence and clearness of spirit, that openness and freedom from design, that becomes a professor of Christianity.

On the contrary, amidst all these opportunities of doing mischief, I must espouse my enemy's just cause, as his advocate or solicitor. I must help it forward by favourable speeches of his person, acknowledgment of his worth and merit, by a fair construction of doubtful passages and all this, if need be, in secret, where my enemy neither sees nor hears me do him these services, and consequently where I have all the advantages and temptations to do otherwise. In short, the gospel enjoins a greater love to our enemies, than men, for the most part, now-a-days shew their friends.

For

3. The last and crowning instance of our love to our enemies is to pray for them. For by this a man, as it were, acknowledges himself unable to do enough for his enemy; and therefore he calls in the assistance of Heaven, and engages omnipotence to complete the kindness. He would fain outdo himself, and therefore, finding his own stores short and dry, he repairs to infinity. Prayer for a man's self is indeed a choice duty, yet it is but a kind of lawful and pious selfishness. who would not solicit for his own happiness, and be importunate for his own concerns? But when I pray as heartily for my enemy as I do for my daily bread; when I strive with prayers and tears to make God his friend, who himself will not be mine; when I reckon his felicity amongst my own necessities; surely this is such a love as, in a literal sense, may be said to reach up to heaven. For nobody judges that a small and a trivial thing, for which he dares to pray: no man comes into the presence of a king to beg pins. And therefore, if a man did not look upon the good of his enemy, as a thing that nearly affected himself, he could not own it as a matter of a petition, and endeavour to concern God about that with which he will not concern himself. And upon the same ground also is inferred the necessity of a man's personal endeavouring the good and happiness of his enemy: for prayer without endeavour is but an affront to the throne of grace, and a lazy throwing that which is our own duty upon God, as if a man should say, God forgive you, God relieve and comfort you, for I will not. But if to pray for an enemy be a duty, surely the manner in which we do it ought to be so too, and not such as shall turn a supplication for him into a satire against him, by representing him in our

prayers under the character of one void of all grace and goodness, and consequently a much fitter object for God's vengeance than his mercy. And yet there was a time in which this way of praying was in no small vogue with a certain sort of men, who would allow neither the gift nor spirit of prayer to any but themselves. For if at any time they prayed for those whom they accounted their enemies, (and that only because they had done so much to make them so,) it could not be properly called an interceding with God for them, but a downright indicting and arraigning them before God, as a pack of graceless wretches and villains, and avowed enemies to the power and purity of the gospel. This and the like, I say, was the devout language of their prayers, sometimes by intimation, and sometimes by direct expression: and thus, under the colour and cover of some plausible artificial words, it was but for them to call those whom they inaligned Antichrist, and themselves the kingdom of Christ, and then they might very laudably pray for the pulling down of the one, and the setting up of the other, and thereby no doubt answer all the measures of sanctified, self-denying petition. * But as those days are at an end, so it were to be wished that such kind of praying were so too; especially since our church, I am sure, has so much charity, as to teach all of her communion to pray for those who are not only enemies to our persons, but also to our very prayers.

For

And thus I have endeavoured to shew what it is "to love our enemies;" though I will not say that I have recounted all the instances in which this duty may exert itself. love is infinite, and the methods of its acting various and innumerable. But I suppose that I have marked out those generals which all particulars may be fairly reduced to.

And now, before I proceed to the motives and arguments to enforce the duty, I shall, to prevent some abuses of this doctrine, shew what is not inconsistent with this loving our enemies and that is, to defend and secure ourselves against them. I am to love my enemy, but not so as to hate myself: if my love to him be a copy, I am sure the love to myself ought to be the original. Charity is indeed to diffuse itself abroad, but yet it may lawfully begin at home: for the precept surely is not unnatural and irrational; nor can it state the duty of Christians in opposition to the privileges of men, and command us tamely to surrender up our lives and estates as often as the hands of violence would wrest them from us. We may love our enemies, but we are not therefore to be fond of their enmity. And though I am commanded, when my enemy thirsts, to give him drink, yet it is not when he thirsts for my blood. It is my duty

* See something upon the like subject, Serm. XV. p. 128.

to give him an alms, but not to let him take my estate. Princes and governors may very well secure themselves with laws and arms against implacable enemies, for all this precept: they are not bound to leave the state defenceless, against the projects, plots, and insurrections of those who are pleased to think themselves persecuted, if they are not permitted to reign. We may, with a very fair comportment with this precept, love our enemies' persons, while we hate their principles, and counterplot their designs.

I come now to the third and last thing, namely, to assign motives and arguments to enforce this love to our enemy; and they shall be taken,

1. From the condition of our enemy's person.

2. From the excellency of the duty. 3. From the great examples that recommend it. And,

For the first of these, if we consider our enemy, we shall find that he sustains several capacities, which may give him a just claim to our charitable affection.

1. As, first, he is joined with us in the society and community of the same nature. He is a man; and so far bears the image and superscription of our heavenly Father. He may cease to be our friend, but he cannot cease to be our brother. For we all descended from the same loins, and though Esau hates Jacob, and Jacob supplants Esau, yet they once lay in the same womb: and therefore the saying of Moses may be extended to all men at variance; "Why do ye wrong one to another, for ye are brethren?" enemy were a snake or a viper, I could do no more than hate and trample upon him: but shall I hate the seed of the woman as much as I do that of the serpent? We hold that God loves the most sinful of his creatures, so far as they are his creatures; and the very devils could not sin themselves out of an excellent nature, though out of a happy condition.

If my

Even war, which is the rage of mankind, and observes no laws but its own, yet offers quarter to an enemy; I suppose, because enmity does not obliterate humanity, nor wholly cancel the sympathies of nature. For every man does, or, I am sure, he may see something of himself in his enemy, and a transcript of those perfections for which he values himself.

And therefore those inhuman butcheries which some men have acted upon others, stand upon record, not only as the crimes of persons, but also as the reproach of cur very nature, and excusable upon no other colour or account whatsoever, but that the persons who acted such cruelties upon other men first ceased to be men themselves; and were indeed to be reckoned as so many anomalies and exceptions from mankind-persons of another make or

mould from the rest of the sons of Adam, and deriving their original, not from the dust, but rather from the stones of the earth.

2. An enemy, notwithstanding his enmity, may be yet the proper object of our love, because it sometimes so falls out, that he is of the same religion with us, and the very business and design of religion is to unite, and to put, as it were, a spiritual cognation and kindred between souls. I am sure this is the great purpose of the Christian religion; which never joins men to Christ but by first joining them amongst themselves; and making them members one of another, as well as knitting them all to the same head. By how much the more intolerable were our late zealots, in their pretences to a more refined strain of purity and converse with God, while in the meantime their hearts could serve them to plunder, worry, and undo their poor brethren, only for their loyal adherence to their sovereign; sequestering and casting whole families out of their houses and livings, to starve abroad in the wide world, against all the laws of God and man; and who to this day breathe the same rage towards all dissenters from them, should they once more get the reforming sword into their hands. What these men's religion may teach them, I know not, but I am sure it is so far from teaching them to love their enemies, that they found their bitterest enmities and most inveterate hatreds only upon religion; which has taught them first to call their malice zeal, and then to think it their duty to be malicious and implacable.

3. An enemy may be the proper object of our love, because, though perhaps he is not capable of being changed, and made a friend by it, (which, for any thing I know, is next to impossible,) yet he is capable of being shamed, and rendered inexcusable. And shame may smooth over his behaviour, though no kindness can change his disposition: upon which account it is, that, so far as a man shames his enemy, so far he also disarms him. For he leaves him stripped of the assistance and good opinion of the world round about him; without which it is impossible for any man living to be considerable, either in his friendships or his enmities.

Love is the fire that must both heap and kindle "those coals upon our enemy's head," that shall either melt or consume him. For that man I account as good as consumed and ruined, whom all people, even upon the common concern of mankind, abhor for his ingratitude, as a pest and a public enemy. So that if my enemy is resolved to treat me spitefully, notwithstanding all my endeavours to befriend and oblige him; and if he will still revile and rail at me, after I have employed both tongue and hand to serve and promote him, surely I shall by this means at

least make his virulent words recoil upon his bold face and his foul mouth; and so turn that stream of public hatred and detestation justly upon himself, which he was endeavouring to bring upon me. And if I do no more, it is yet worth while, even upon a temporal account, to obey this precept of Christ, of "loving my enemy." And thus much for the first general argument to enforce this duty, grounded upon the condition of my enemy's person.

2. A second motive or argument to the same shall be taken from the excellency of the duty itself. It is the highest perfection that human nature can reach unto. It is an imitation of the divine goodness, which shines upon the heads, and rains upon the fields of the sinful and unjust; and heaps blessings upon those who are busy only to heap up wrath to themselves. To "love an enemy" is to stretch humanity as far as it will go. It is an heroic action, and such an one as grows not upon an ordinary plebeian spirit.

The excellency of the duty is sufficiently proclaimed by the difficulty of its practice. For how hard is it, when the passions are high, and the sense of an injury quick, and power ready, for a man to deny himself in that luscious morsel of revenge! to do violence to himself, instead of doing it to his enemy! and to command down the strongest principles and the greatest heats, that usually act the soul when it exerts itself upon such objects.

And the difficulty of such a behaviour is no less declared by its being so rarely and seldom observed in men. For whom almost can we see, who opens his arms to his enemies, or puts any other bounds to his hatred of him but satiety or disability; either because it is even glutted with having done so much against him already, or wants power to do more? Indeed, where such a pitch of love is found, it appears glorious aud glistering to the eyes of all, and much admired and commended it is; but yet for the most part no otherwise than as we see men admiring and commending some rare piece of art which they never intend to imitate, nor so much as to attempt an imitation of. Nothing certainly but an excellent disposition, improved by a mighty grace, can bear a man up to this perfection.

3. The third motive or argument shall be drawn from the great examples which recommend this duty to us. And first of all from that of our blessed Saviour, whose footsteps in the paths of love we may trace out and follow by his own blood. He gave his life for sinners; that is, for enemies, yea, and enemies with the highest aggravation, for nothing can make one man so much an enemy to another, as sin makes him an enemy to God.

"I say unto you, Love your enemies," says Christ, that is, I emphatically, I who say it

by my example as much as by my precept. For Christ "went about doing good," (Acts, x. 38.) Yea, and he did it still in a miracle. Every work that he did was equally beneficial and miraculous. And the place where he did such wonders of charity was Jerusalem, a city red with the blood of God's messengers, and paved with the skulls of prophets; a city, which he knew would shortly complete all its cruelty and impiety in his own murder, though he was the promised and long-expected Messias. And in the prologue to this murder, his violent attachment, when one of his enemies was wounded, he bestowed a miracle upon his cure: so tender was he of his mortal enemies. Like a lamb, that affords wherewithal both to feed and clothe its very butcher; nay, and while he was actually hanging upon the cross, he uttered a passionate prayer for the forgiveness of his murderers: so desirous was he, that though they had the sole acting, yet that he himself should have the whole feeling of the sin. In fine, now that he sits at the right hand of his Father, triumphant, and governing the world, from whence he could with much more ease confound his most daring enemies, than the most potent grandee can crush his meanest and most servile dependants; yet he treats them with all the methods of patience and arts of reconcilement, and, in a word, endures with much long-suffering those vessels of wrath who seem even resolved to perish, and obstinately set to fit themselves for destruction.

And now, though, after such an example, this sort of argument for the loving our enemies can be carried no higher, yet, blessed be God, that is not so wholly exhausted by any one example, but that it may be carried farther; and that by several instances, which, though they do by no means come up to a just comparison with it, yet ought to be owned for noble imitations of it. And such an one this happy day affords us, a day consecrated to the solemn commemoration of the nativity and return of a prince, who having been most barbarously driven out of his kingdoms, and afterwards as miraculously restored to them, brought with him the greatest, the brightest, and most stupendous instance of this virtue, that, next to what has been ob served of our Saviour himself, was ever yet shewn by man; Providence seeming to have raised up this prince, as it had done his father before him, to give the world a glorious demonstration, that the most injured of men might be the most merciful of men too. For after the highest of wrongs and contumelies that a sovereign could suffer from his subjects, scorning all revenge, as more below him than the very persons whom he might have been revenged upon, he gloried in nothing so much as in giving mercy the upper hand of majesty itself, making amnesty his

symbol or motto, and forgiveness the peculiar signalizing character of his reign; herein resembling the Almighty himself, (as far as mortality can,) who seems to claim a greater glory for sparing and redeeming man, than for creating him. So that, in a word, as our Saviour has made "Love to our enemies" one of the chiefest badges of our religion, so our king has almost made it the very mark of our allegiance.

Thus, even to a prodigy, merciful has he shewn himself; merciful by inclination, and merciful by extraction: merciful in his example, merciful in his laws, and thereby expressing the utmost dutifulness of a son, as well as the highest magnanimity and clemency of a prince; while he is still making that good upon the throne which the royal martyr his father had enjoined upon the scaffold, where he died pardoning and praying for those whose malice he was then falling a victim to; and this with a charity so unparalleled, and a devotion so fervent, that the voice of his prayers, it is to be hoped, drowned the very cry of his blood. But ĺ love not to dwell upon such tragedies, save only to illustrate the height of one contrary by the height of another; and therefore, as an humble follower of the princely pattern here set before us, I shall draw a veil of silence overall; especially since it surpasses the power of words sufficiently to set forth, either the greatness of the crimes forgiven, or of the mercy that forgave them.

But to draw to a close; we have here had the highest and the hardest duty perhaps belonging to a Christian, both recommended to our judgment by argument, and to our practice by example; and what remains, but that we submit our judgment to the one, and govern our practice by the other? And for that purpose, that we beg of God an assistance equal to the difficulty of the duty enjoined; for certainly it is not an ordinary measure of grace that can conquer the opposition that flesh and blood, and corrupt reason itself, after all its convictions, will be sure to make to it. The greatest miseries that befall us in this world are from enemies; and so long as men naturally desire to be happy, it will be naturally as hard to them to love those who they know are the grand obstacles to their being so. The light of nature will convince a man of many duties which it will never enable him to perform. And if we should look no farther than bare nature, this seems to be one cut out rather for our admiration than our practice,—it being not more difficult (where grace does not interpose)" to cut off a right hand," than to reach it heartily to the relief of an inveterate implacable adversary. And yet God expects this from us, and that so peremptorily, that he has made the pardon of our enemies the indispensable condition of our own. And there