flourishing and renowned; yielding, besides Dukes, eight Kings of his line; while poor Israel was toiling and sweating in the Egyptian furnaces: yet we know the word to stand inviolable, The elder shall serve the younger; and, Jacob have I loved, Esau have I hated.

What if that great and wise God, who works ofttimes by contraries and brings light out of darkness, have purposed to fetch honour and happiness to his Church out of this sad affliction? Metals are never so bright, as when they are scoured; perfumes and spices never so redolent, as when they have felt the fire and the pestle. Wilt thou not give the physician leave to make use of his mithridate, because there are vipers in the composition? How unworthy art thou of health, if thou wilt not trust the fidelity and skill of the artist, in mixing so wholesome a cordial!

SECT. 4.

The justice of God's proceedings.

THOU art troubled with the public miseries:-Take heed that thy grief be clear of all impiety. Wouldst thou not have God to be just, that is, himself? Wouldst thou not allow it an act of his justice, to punish sins? Canst thou deny that our sins have reached up to heaven, and called for judgment? Why is the living man sorrowful? man suffereth for his sins; Lam. iii. 39.

I read of a devout man, that was instant with God in his prayers, for a nation not far off; and was answered, "Suffer the proud to be humbled." Whether we will suffer it or no, the just God will humble the proud, and punish the sinful.

The wonderful patience, and infinite justice of the Almighty, hath set a stint to the wickedness of every people: The iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full, saith God to Abraham; Gen. xv. 16. when the measure is once made up, it is time for God to strike: we shall then complain in vain, and too late.

Wouldst thou know then, what is to be done for the preventing of a destructive vengeance? There is no way under heaven, but this, to break off our sins by a seasonable and serious repentance: by the united forces of our holy resolutions and endeavours, to make a head against the overbearing wickedness of the time; and not to suffer it to fill up towards the brim of that fatal ephah; till which time the long-suffering God only threatens and corrects a people, but then he plagues them, and stands upon the necessity of his inviolable justice: Shall I not visit for these things? saith the Lord: and shall not my soul be avenged on such a nation as this? Jer. v. 9.

SECT. 5.

The remedy, our particular repentance.

THOU mournest for the common sufferings:-Thou dost well: our tears can never be better bestowed. But, the while, is not thy hand in them? have not thy sins helped to make up this irritating heap? hast not thou cast in thy symbol, into the common shot? May not the times justly challenge thee in part, as accessary to their misery? Begin at home, my son, if thou wish well to the public; and make thine own peace with thy God, for thy particular offences. Renew thy covenant with God, of a more holy and strict obedience; and then pour out thy prayers and tears, for a universal mercy: so shalt thou not only pull away one brand from this consuming fire, but help effectually to quench the common conflagration.

SECT. 6.

The unspeakable miseries of a civil war.

THY heart bleeds to see the woeful vastation of civil discord; and the deadly fury of home-bred enemies :

Certainly, there is nothing under heaven more ghastly and dreadful, than the face of an intestine war; nothing, that doth so nearly resemble hell. Woe is me! here is altogether killing, and dying, and torturing, and burning, and shrieks, and cries, and ejulations, and fearful sounds, and furious violences, and whatsoever may either cause or increase horror. The present calamity oppresses one; another, fear: one is quivering in death; another trembles to expect it: one begs for life; another will sell it dearer: here, one would rescue one life, and loseth two; there, another would hide himself, where he finds a merciless death: here lies one bleeding, and groaning, and gasping, parting with his soul in extremity of anguish; there, another, of stronger spirits kills and dies, at once: here, one wrings her hands, and tears her hair, and seeks for some instrument of a self-inflicted death, rather than yield her chaste body to the lust of a bloody ravisher; there, another clings inseparably to a dear husband, and will rather take part of the murderer's sword, than let go her last embraces: here, one, tortured for the discovery of hid treasure; there, another, dying upon the rack, out of jealousy.

Oh, that one man, one Christian should be so bloodily cruel to another! Oh, that he, who bears the image of the merciful God, should thus turn fiend to his own flesh and blood! These

are terrible things, my son, and worthy of our bitterest lamentations and just fears.

I love the speculation of Seneca's resolutely-wise man, that could look upon the glittering sword of an executioner, with erected and undazzled eyes; that makes it no matter of difference, whether his soul pass out at his mouth or at his throat: but I should more admire the practice. While we carry this clay about us, nature cannot but, in the holiest men, shrink in at the sight and sense of these tyrannous and tragical acts of death.

Yet even these are the due revenges of the Almighty's punitive justice; so provoked by our sins, as that it may not take up with an easier judgment. Dost thou not see it ordinary with our physicians when they find the body highly distempered, and the blood foul and enflamed, to order the opening of a vein; and the drawing out of so many ounces, as may leave the rest meet for correction? Why art thou over-troubled, to see the Great Physician of the World take this course with sinful mankind? Certainly, had not this great body, by mis-dieting and wilful disorder, contracted these spiritual diseases under which we languish; had it not impured the blood, that runs in these common veins, with riot and surfeits; we had never been so miserable, as to see these torrents of Christian blood running down our channels. Now yet, as it is, could we bewail and abandon our former wickedness, we might live in hope, that, at last, this deadly issue might stop and dry up; and that there might be yet left a possibility of a blessed recovery.

SECT. 7.

The woeful miseries of Pestilence, allayed by consideration of the hand that smites us.

THOU art confounded with grief, to see the pestilence raging in our streets; in so frequent a mortality, as breeds a question concerning the number of the living and the dead: that, which is wont to abate other miseries, heightens this; the company of participants :

It was certainly a very hard and sad option, that God gave to King David, after his sin of numbering the people: Choose thee, whether seven years' famine shall come unto thee in thy land, or three months' flight before thine enemies, or three days' pestilence; 2 Sam. xxiv. 13. We may believe the good King, when we hear him say, I am in a great strait. Doubtless, so he was: but his wise resolutions have soon brought him out; Let us fall now into the hand of the Lord, for his mercies are great; and let me not fall into the hand of

Sen. Ep. 76.

He, that was to send these evils, knew their value; and the difference of their malignity: yet he opposes three days' pestilence, to seven years' famine, and three months' vanquishment: so much odds he knew there was, betwixt the dull activity of man and the quick dispatch of an angel.

It was a favour, that the angel of death, who in one night destroyed a hundred fourscore and five thousand Assyrians (2 Kings xix. 35.), should, in three days, cut off but seventy thousand Israelites: it was a great mercy it was no worse. We read of one, city shall I call it, or region, of Cairo, wherein eighteen hundred thousand were swept away in one year's pestilence; enow, one would think, to have peopled the whole earth: and, in our own Chronicles, of so general a mortality, that the living were hardly sufficient to bury the dead.

These are dreadful demonstrations of God's heavy displeasure; but yet there is this alleviation of our misery, that we suffer more immediately from a holy, just, merciful God. The Kingly Prophet had never made that distinction in his woeful choice, if he had not known a notable difference, betwixt the sword of an angel and an enemy; betwixt God's more direct and immediate infliction, and that which is derived to us through the malice of men. It was but a poor consolation, that is given by a victorious enemy to dying Lausus, in the Poet; "Comfort thyself in thy death with this, that thou fallest by the hand of great Æneas:" but, surely, we have just reason to raise comfort to our souls, when the pains of a pestilential death compass us about, from the thought and intuition of that holy and gracious hand, under which we suffer; so as we can say, with good Eli, It is the Lord. It is not amiss, that we call those marks of deadly infection "God's Tokens:" such, sure, they are; and ought, therefore, to call up our eyes and hearts to that Almighty power that sends them, with the faithful resolution of holy Job, Though thou kill me, yet will I trust in thee.

It is none of the least miseries of contagious sickness, that it bars us from the comfortable society and attendance of friends; or, if otherwise, repays their love and kind visitation with death. Be not dismayed, my son, with this sad solitude: thou hast company with thee, whom none infection can endanger or exclude: there is an invisible friend, that will be sure to stick by thee so much more closely, by how much thou art more avoided by neighbours; and will make all thy bed in thy sickness; and supply thee with those cordials, which thou shouldest in vain expect from earthly visitants.

Indeed, justly do we style this, "The Sickness;" eminently grievous, both for the deadliness and generality of the dispersion yet there is a remedy, that can both cure and confine it. Let but every man look well to the plague of his own heart, and the land is healed. Can we, with David, but see the angel

that smites us; and erect an altar; and offer to God the sacrifices of our prayers, penitence, obedience? we shall hear him say, It is enough; 2 Sam. xxiv. 16. The time was, and that time may not be forgotten, when, in the days of our late Sovereign, our Mother City was almost desolated with this mortal infection; when thousands fell at our side, and ten thousands at our right-hand; Ps. xci. 7. Upon the public humiliation of our souls, the mercy of the Almighty was pleased to command that raging disease, in the height of its fury, like some headstrong horse in the midst of his career, to stop on the sudden; and to leave us at once, ere we could think of it, both safe and healthful. This was the Lord's doing, and it was marvellous in our eyes. Behold, the Lord's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy, that it cannot hear; Is. lix. 1. The same mercy is everlasting; the same remedy certain: be we but penitent, and we cannot be miserable.

CHAP. VII.

COMFORTS AGAINST LOSS OF FRIENDS.

SECT. 1.

The true value of a friend; and the fault of over-prizing him. THOU hast lost thy friend:-The sorrow is just; the earth hath nothing more precious, than that, which thou hast parted with for what is a friend, but a man's self in another skin; a soul divided into two bodies, both which are animated by the same spirit? It is somewhat worse with thee therefore, than with a palsied man, whose one half is stricken with a dead kind of numbness: he hath lost but the use of one side of his body; thou, the one half of thy soul. Or, may I not with better warrant say, that a true friend hath, as it were, two souls in one body; his own, and his friend's? Sure I am, so it was with Jonathan and David: The soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David; and Jonathan loved him as his own soul; 1 Sam. xviii. 1.

Still the more goodness, the stronger union. Mere nature can never be so fast a cement of souls, as grace: for here the union is wrought by a better spirit than our own; even that Blessed Spirit, who styles himself by the name of Love; 1 John

iv. 16.

By how much greater thine affection was, so much heavier is thy loss.