richer, the giving of which makes me not one penny the poorer. It is indeed the fashion of the world thus to amuse men with empty caresses, and to feast them with words and air, looks and legs; nay, and it has this peculiar privilege above all other fashions, that it never alters: but certainly no man ever yet quenched his thirst with looking upon a golden cup, nor made a meal with the outside of a lordly dish.

But we are not to rest here; fair speeches and looks are not only very insignificant as to the real effects of love, but are for the most part the instruments of hatred in the execution of the greatest mischiefs. Few men are to be ruined till they are made confident of the contrary: and this can not be done by threats and roughness, and owning the mischief that a man designs; but the pitfall must be covered, to invite the man to venture over it; all things must be sweetened with professions of love, friendly looks, and embraces. For it is oil that whets the razor, and the smoothest edge is still the sharpest; they are the complacencies of an enemy that kill, the closest hugs that stifle, and love must be pretended before malice can be effectually practiced. In a word, he must get into his heart with fair speeches and promises, before he can come at it with his dagger. For surely no man fishes with a bare hook, or thinks that the net itself can be any enticement to the bird.

But now, if these outward shows of fairness are short of the love which we owe to our enemies, what can we say of those who have not arrived so far as these, and yet pretend to be friends? Disdain and distance, sour looks and sharp words, are all the expressions of friendship that some natures can manifest. I confess, where real kindnesses are done, these circumstantial garnitures of love (as I may so call them) may be dispensed with; and it is better to have a rough friend than a fawning enemy: but those who neither do good turns, nor give good looks, nor speak good words, have a love strangely subtile and metaphysical: for other poor mortals of an ordinary capacity are forced to be ignorant of that which they can neither see, hear, feel, nor understand. And thus much for the first negative. The love that we are to show to enemies is not a fair external courtly deportment; it is not

such a thing as may be learnt in a dancing-school, nor in those shops of fallacy and dissimulation, the courts and palaces of great men, where men's thoughts and words stand at an infinite distance, and their tongues and minds hold no correspondence or intercourse with one another.

2. Fair promises are not the love that our Saviour here commands us to show our enemies. And yet these are one step and advance above the former: for many fair speeches may be given, many courteous harangues uttered, and yet no promise made. And it is worth observing how some great ones often delude, and simple ones suffer themselves to be deluded, by general discourses and expressions of courtesy. As, "Take you no care, I will provide for you. I will never see you want. Leave your business in my hands, and I will manage it with as much or more concern than you could yourself. What need you insist so much upon this or that in particular? I design better things for you." But all this while there is no particular determinate thing promised, so as to hold such an one by any real, solid engagement, (supposing that his promise were such,) but perhaps, when the next advantage comes in the way, the man is forgot and balked: yet still those general speeches hold as true as ever they did, and so will continue, notwithstanding all particular defeats; as indeed being never calculated for any thing else but to keep up the expectation of easy persons; to feed them for the present, and to fail them in the issue.

But now, as these empty glossing words are short of promises, so promises are equally short of performances. Concerning both which I shall say this, that there is no wise man but had rather have had one promise than a thousand fair words, and one performance than ten thousand promises. For what trouble is it to promise, what charge is it to spend a little breath, for a man to give one his word, who never intends to give him any thing else? And yet, according to the measures of the world, this must sometimes pass for an high piece of love; and many poor unexperienced 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, in 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 succors of his other endeavors, and in the issue leaves him to inherit the shame and misery of a disappointment, and unable to say any thing else for himself, but that he was credulous, and the promiser 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 fulfill 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 mean time 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 shows 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, unsuspected way to ruin his adversary, must pave the 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 skillful 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, who 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 show 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 dispatched into another world.

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

1. A discharging the mind of all rancor 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 behavior; but we will suppose (which is yet seldom found) that a man has such an absolute empire and command over his heart, as forever 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 rancor 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 endeavor 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 show 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 enemies' 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 show him a remedy, and to rescue him