whelmed and carried all before it? Nothing being indeed more usual, than for such as venture to displease God, only that they may gratify and please men, in the issue to have God their enemy and man too. And therefore that worthy prelate a, who in the face of all this danger still plied the king with this counsel; "Sir, you know the judgment of your own conscience, I beseech you follow that, and "trust God with the rest;" gave him an advice not more becoming the piety of a bishop, than the wisdom of a privy-counsellor; and so deep and lasting an impression did it leave upon his royal and truly tender conscience, that in his last meditations upon this sad subject he observes, that he only, who of all his counsellors advised him to adhere to his conscience against the popular rage, was the person who was the least harassed and pursued by that popular rage, when it was at its greatest height of power and tyranny. To which we may add our own further observation of the same pious and wise bishop, that he survived all that tyranny and oppression; and, after he had so fully and worthily served the father, lived to attain to the highest dignity in this church, and, as the complement of all, to set the crown upon the head of his miraculously restored son. And may that Providence that governs the world always signalize such peculiar merits with such peculiar rewards. But,

2. We gather also, from the foregoing discourse, the absolute necessity of an entire, total, unreserved dependence upon Providence in the most hopeful and promising condition of our affairs. The natural cause or ground of all dependence is men's cona Bishop Juxon, then bishop of London, and privy-counsellor.

sciousness to themselves of their own ignorance or weakness, compared with the sufficiency of others, whereby they expect that relief from others, which they find they cannot have from themselves. This, I conceive, is the true account and philosophy of this matter. And we have already sufficiently demonstrated man's utter inability either to understand the reasons or to control the issues of Providence; so that in all the passages of it, an implicit faith in God's wisdom is man's greatest knowledge, and a dependence upon his power, his surest strength. For when all the faculties of man's body and mind have done their utmost, still the success of all is at the mercy of Providence; the ways of which are intricate and various, the grounds upon which it proceeds unintelligible, and the ends it drives at unsearchable. But in a word, to make our reliance upon Providence both pious and rational, we should, in every great enterprise we take in hand, prepare all things with that care, diligence, and activity, as if there were no such thing as Providence for us to depend upon; and again, when we have done all this, we should as wholly and humbly depend upon it, as if we had made no such preparations at all. And this is a rule of practice which will never fail or shame any who shall venture all that they have or are upon it for as a man, by exerting his utmost force in any action or business, has all that an human strength can do for him therein; so, in the next place, by quitting his confidence in the same, and placing it only in God, he is sure also of all that omnipotence can do in his behalf. It is enough that God has put a man's actions into his own power; but the success of them, I am sure, he has not. And

therefore all trust in man about things not within the power of man, (according to the account of 'Heaven,) is virtually a distrust of God: for let but our trust in him be measured out by our whole heart, soul, and strength, (the only measure of it which the scripture knows,) and we shall find but a poor overplus to bestow upon any thing besides. But,

3. And lastly, as we have from the premised particulars evinced the necessity of a dependence upon Providence, so from the same we may learn the impossibility of a rational dependence upon it with any comfort, but in the way of lawful, honest, and religious courses. This is certain, that in all our undertakings God will be either our friend or our enemy; for Providence never stands neuter; and if so, is it not a sad thing for a man to make a mighty potentate his enemy, and then to put himself under his protection? And yet this is directly the case of every presuming sinner, and these the terms upon which he stands with Almighty God. But can that man with any confidence rest himself upon God's power, whose conscience shall in the mean time proclaim him a traitor to his laws? Or can any people, nation, or government whatsoever, in the doubtful engagements of war, cast itself upon God's mercy, while by its crying sins of profaneness, atheism, and irreligion, (or, which is worse, a countenance of all religions,) it knows itself so deeply in arrears to his justice? No man persisting in any known wicked course can rationally hope that God should succeed or prosper him in any thing that he goes about; and if success should chance to accompany him in it, it is a thousand to one but it is intended him only

as a curse, as the very greatest of curses, and the readiest way, by hardening him in his sin, to ascertain his destruction. He who will venture his life in a duel, should not choose to have his mortal enemy for his second.

On the contrary, the same innocence which makes all quiet within a man, makes all peaceable and serene above him. And that person cannot but have a certain boldness, and a kind of claim to the favours of Providence, whose heart is continually telling him that he does as he should do; and that his conscience, having been all along his director, cannot in the issue prove his accuser: but that all things, whether he looks forwards or backwards, upon what is past or what is to come, shall concur in assuring him, that his great Judge has no other sentence to pass upon him, but to set a crown of glory upon his head, and receive him with an Euge, bone serve! enter thou into the joy of thy Lord. And if, being thus inspired and anointed with such supporting expectations, he should yet chance utterly to sink, as to all his concerns and interests here below, yet, having thus broke through them all to discharge his duty, the very sense of his having done so shall strengthen his heart and bear up his spirits, though the whole world were in arms against him or in a flame about him; so that he shall be able, from his own experience, to seal to the truth of that seeming paradox of the apostle in Rom. viii. 35, 36, 37, that persons thus assisted from above, even in tribulations, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, (the known badges of primitive Christianity,) nay, in their being killed all the day long, and accounted as sheep for the slaughter, shall yet, under these very massacres,

become more than conquerors, through that God who makes those who fight under his banners triumph more gloriously in losing their blood for him, than their mightiest and most insulting enemies do or can in their shedding of it. For if a man falls a sacrifice to God, his conscience, or his country, it is not material by what hand he falls: God accepts the martyr, whosoever is the executioner. And so long as there is another world to reward and punish, no man's doom can be certainly pronounced from any thing that befalls him in this.

And now at length, to come to a close of what we have been hitherto discoursing of, we have shewn the darkness and intricacy of the ways of Providence; and we have shewn also what incompetent judges, and yet what confident interpreters men are generally of them; from all which what can so naturally result, and so justly be inferred, as the severest reprimands of the blindness and boldness: (qualities seldom found asunder) of the saucy descants of the world concerning these matters? For what do they else, but, in effect, arraign even Providence itself? summon omniscience before the bar of ignorance? and, in a word, put a pitiful mortal to sit in judgment upon his Maker? The text, I am sure, positively declares, that the works of God are past finding out; and if so, is it not the height of absurdity, as well as arrogance, to presume, either from divinity or philosophy, to assign any other reason of the works themselves, but the sole will of the agent? or to pretend to give an account of that which we ourselves own to be unaccountable? Common sense certainly must needs see and explode the grossness of the contradiction, and convince us, that