most perfect and impetrative, are they by which our weak and unworthy prayers receive both life and favour. And now how assiduous should we be in our supplications, who are empty of grace, full of wants; when thou, who wert a God of all power, prayedst for that which thou couldst command! Therefore do we pray, because thou prayedst: therefore do we expect to be graciously answered in our prayers, because thou didst pray for us here on earth, and now intercedest for us in heaven.

The evening was come; the disciples looked long for their Master, and loth they were to have stirred without him: but his command is more than the strongest wind to fill their sails, and they are now gone. Their expectation made not the evening seem so long, as our Saviour's devotion made it seem short to him; he is in the mount, they on the sea; yet while he was in the mount praying, and lifting up his eyes to his Father, he fails not to cast them about upon his disciples tossed on the waves. Those allseeing eyes admit of no limits: at once he sees the highest heavens, and the midst of the sea, the glory of his Father, and the misery of his disciples. Whatever prospects present themselves to his view, the distress of his followers is ever most noted.

How much more dost thou now, O Saviour, from the height of thy glorious advancement, behold us, thy wretched servants, tossed on the unquiet sea of this world, and beaten with the troublesome and threatening billows of affliction ! Thou foresawest their toil and danger ere thou dismissedst them, and purposely sentest them away that they might be tossed. Thou, that couldest prevent our sufferings by thy power, wilt permit them in thy wisdom, that thou mayest glorify thy mercy in our deliverance, and confirm our faith by the issue of our distresses.

How do all things now seem to conspire to the vexing of the poor disciples! The night was sullen and dark, their Master was absent, the sea was bois

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terous, the winds were high and contrary. Had their Master been with them, howsoever the elements had raged, they had been secure: had their Master been away, yet if the sea had been quiet, or the winds fair, the passage might have been endured. Now both season, and sea, and wind, and their Master's desertion, had agreed to render them perfectly miserable. Sometimes the Providence of God hath thought good so to order it, that to his best servants there appeareth no glimpse of comfort, but so absolute vexation, as if heaven and earth had plotted their full affliction. Yea, O Saviour, what a dead night, what a fearful tempest, what an astonishing dereliction was that, wherein thou thyself criedst out in the bitterness of thine anguished soul, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Yet, in all these extremities of misery, our gracious God intends nothing but his greater glory and ours; the triumph of our faith, the crown of our victory.

All that longsome and tempestuous night must the disciples wear out in danger and horror, as given over to the winds and waves; but in the fourth watch of the night, when they were wearied out with toils and fears, comes deliverance.

At their entrance into the ship, at the rising of the tempest, at the shutting in of the evening, there was no news of Christ: but when they have been all the night long beaten, not so much with storms and waves, as with their own thoughts, now in the fourth watch, which was near to the morning, Jesus came unto them, and purposely not till then, that he might exercise their patience; that he might inure them to wait upon divine providence in cases of extremity, that their devotions might be more whetted by delay; that they might give gladder welcome to their deliverance. O God, thus thou thinkest fit to do still. We are by turns in our sea; the winds bluster, the billows swell, the night and thy absence heighten our discomfort; thy time and ours is set; as yet it is but

midnight with us; can we but hold out patiently till the fourth watch, thou wilt surely come and rescue us. Oh, let us not faint under our sorrows, but wear out our three watches of tribulation with undaunted patience and holy resolution!

O Saviour, our extremities are the seasons of thine aid. Thou camest at last, but yet so as that there was more dread than joy in thy presence: thy coming was both miraculous and frightful.

Thou, God of elements, passedst through the air, walkedst upon the waters. Whether thou meantest to terminate this miracle in thy body, or in the waves which thou trodest upon; whether so lightening the one that it should make no impression in the liquid waters, or whether so consolidating the other, that the pavemented waves yielded a firm causeway to thy sacred feet to walk on, I neither determine nor inquire; thy silence ruleth mine; thy power was in either miraculous; neither know I in whether to adore it more. But withal give me leave to wonder more at thy passage than at thy coming. Wherefore camest thou but to comfort them? And wherefore

then wouldest thou pass by them, as if thou hadst intended nothing but their dismay? Thine absence could not be so grievous as thy preterition; that might seem justly occasioned, this could not but seem willingly neglective. Our last conflicts have wont ever to be the sorest; as when after some dripping rain it pours most vehemently, we think the weather is changing to serenity.

O Saviour, we may not always measure thy meaning by thy semblance: sometimes what thou most intendest, thou showest least. In our afflictions thou turnest thy back upon us, and hidest thy face from us, when thou most mindest our distresses. So Jonathan shot the arrows beyond David, when he meant them to him. So Joseph calls for Benjamin into bonds, when his heart was bound to him in the strongest affection. So the tender mother makes as if she

would give away her crying child, whom she hugs so much closer in her bosom.

If thou pass by us while we are struggling with the tempest, we know it is not for want of mercy. Thou canst not neglect us; oh, let us not distrust thee!

What object should have been so pleasing to the eyes of the disciples as their Master, and so much the more as he showed his divine power in this miraculous walk? But lo, contrarily, "they are troubled;" not with his presence, but with this form of presence.

The supernatural works of God, when we look upon them with our eyes, are subject to dangerous misprision. The very sun-beams, to whom we are beholden for our sight, if we eye them directly, blind us. Miserable men! We are ready to suspect truths, to run away from our safety, to be afraid of our comforts, to mis-know our best friends.

And why are they thus troubled? "They had thought they had seen a spirit." That there have been such apparitions of spirits, both good and evil, hath ever been a truth undoubtedly received of Pagans, Jews, Christians; although in the blind times of superstition, there was much collusion mixed with some verities; crafty men and lying spirits agreed to abuse the credulous world: but even where there was

not truth, yet there was horror. The very good angels were not seen without much fear, their sight was construed to bode death; how much more the evil, which in their very nature are harmful and pernicious? We see not a snake or a toad, without some recoiling of blood, and sensible reluctation, although those creatures run away from us: how much more must our hairs stand upright, and our senses boil at the sight of a spirit, whose both nature and will is contrary to ours, and professedly bent to our hurt!

But say it had been what they mistook it for, a spirit, why should they fear? Had they well considered, they had soon found, that evil spirits are nevertheless present when they are not seen, and

nevertheless harmful or malicious when they are present unseen. Visibility adds nothing to their spite or mischief; and could their eyes have been opened, they had, with Elisha's servant, seen "more with them than against them;" a sure, though invisible guard of more powerful spirits, and themselves under the protection of the God of spirits; so as they might have bidden a bold defiance to all the powers of darkBut partly, their faith was yet but in the bud, and partly the presentation of this dreadful object was sudden, and without the respite of a recollection, and settlement of their thoughts.

ness.

Oh the weakness of our frail nature, who in the want of faith are affrighted with the visible appearance of those adversaries whom we profess daily to resist and vanquish, and with whom we know the decree of God hath matched us in an everlasting conflict! Are not these they that ejected devils by their command? Are not these of them that could say, Master, the evil spirits are subdued to us?" Yet now, when they see but an imagined spirit, they fear. What power there is in the eye to betray the heart!

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While Goliath was mingled with the rest of the Philistine host, Israel camped boldly against them; but when that giant stalks out single between the two armies, and fills and amazes their eyes with his hideous stature, now they run away for fear. Behold, we are committed with legions of evil spirits, and complain not; let but one of them give us some visible token of his presence, we shriek and tremble, and are not ourselves.

Neither is our weakness more conspicuous than thy mercy, O God, in restraining these spiritual enemies from these dreadful and ghastly representations of themselves to our eyes. Might those infernal spirits have liberty to appear, how, and when, and to whom they would, certainly not many would be left in their wits, or in their lives. It is thy power and goodness to frail mankind, that they are kept in their