traitors in your bosoms? protest what ye will; your sins break the peace, and conspire against the sacred crown and dignity of your Sovereign. What care we, that you draw your sword, and vow your blood, and drink your healths to your Governors, when, in the mean while, you provoke God to anger, and set quarrels betwixt your Country and Heaven.

That I may wind up this clew; it were folly to commend to you, the worth of peace. We know that the excellency of Princes is expressed by "Serenity." What good hath the earth, which God doth not couch under the name of peace? Blessed be God, and his Anointed, we have long and comfortably tasted the sweetness of this blessing. The Lilies and Lions of our Solomon have been justly worded with Beati pacifici.

Would we have this happiness perpetuated to us; to posterity? Oh, let prince and people meet in the ambition to be Gens justa, A righteous nation: righteous every way.

First, let God have his own; his own days, his own services, his fear, his love, his all. Let religion lead all our projects, not follow them. Let our lives be led in a conscionable obedience to all the laws of our Maker. Far be all blasphemies, curses, and obscenities from our tongues; all outrages and violences from our hands; all presumptuous and rebellious thoughts from our hearts. Let our hearts, and hands, tongues, lives, bodies and souls, be sincerely devoted to him.

Then, for men: Let us give Cæsar his own tribute, fear, subjection, loyalty; and, if he need, our Lives. Let the Nobility have honour, obeisance, observation. Let the Clergy have their dues, and our reverence. Let the Commons have truth, love, fidelity in all their transactions. Let there be Trutinæ justæ, pondera justa, Just balances, just weights; Lev. xix. 36. Let there be no grinding of faces, no trampling on the poor (Amos v. 11.), no swallowing of widows' houses, no force, no fraud, no perjury, no perfidiousness.

Finally, for ourselves: Let every man possess his vessel in holiness and honour; framing himself to all Christian and Heavenly temper, in all wisdom, sobriety, chastity, meekness, constancy, moderation, patience, and sweet contentation.

So shall the work of our Righteousness be Peace of Heart, Peace of State; private and public peace; peace with ourselves, peace with the world, peace with God; temporal peace here, eternal peace and glory above: unto the fruition whereof, he, who hath ordained us, mercifully bring us, for the sake of him, who is the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ the Righteous.

SERMON XIV.

WICKEDNESS MAKING A FRUITFUL LAND BARREN :

A SERMON PREACHED TO HIS MAJESTY, AT THE COURT OF WHITEHALL, AUGUST 8.

PSALM CVII. 34.

[He turneth] a fruitful land into barrenness, for the wickedness of

them that dwell therein.

:

YE have here in my text, as in much of the world, a woeful change; wrought by a powerful author, and upon a just merit the change of a fruitful land into barrenness; the author, God, the almighty arbiter of the world, He turneth; the merit, the wickedness of the inhabitants.

These three then must be the measure of my tongue and your ears; the CHANGE, the AUTHOR, the MERIT.

I. In the CHANGE you shall see the ACT and the SUBJECT. 1. For the ACT: All these earthly things have their turns : the whole world is the proper region of mutability.

I know not whether I should exempt heaven itself. Even there, I find a change, of Motion, of Face, of Quality.

Motion: whether by consistence, or retrogradation; Sun, stand thou still in Gibeon; and thou, moon, in the valley of Ajalon; Jos. x. 12: there was a change, in not moving: and, for retrogradation, The shadow went back ten degrees in the dial of Ahaz; Isaiah xxxviii. 8.

A change of Face: The sun was darkened; Luke xxiii. 45; when the Sun of Righteousness was eclipsed, and shall be so again ere he break forth in full glory: Then shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall lose her light; the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven shall be shaken; Matth. xxiv. 29.

A change of Quality: what need I fear to ascribe that to this glorious frame, when the Spirit of God can tell us, They shall wax old as a garment; as a vesture thou shalt change them, and they shall be changed?

In the mean time, our eyes can tell us, that the second of these greater lights, the Moon, is the very emblem of mutability; never looking upon us twice with the same face: there is no month passeth over us, wherein she is not both new and old; to the making up of a just and common riddle, that not exceeding the age of twenty-eight days, she is yet no less old than the world; ever filling and waning, and, like the true image of all mutability, never so blotted as in her greatest brightness.

Yea, what need we doubt to ascribe some change to these material heavens, when, if we look to the inside of them, we shall find, that there hath been the greatest change in the very Angels? and, for their present condition, that though the essence of the glorious spirits there be immutable from within, having nothing in them that may work their dissolution or change, yet that we cannot say they are immutable from without; since, if that power which gave them being should withdraw his hand, they could not be.

It is the perfection of God only, to be absolutely inalterable; and, as to work freely, so to be necessarily: so as our subtle Bradwardine maintains, that ens necessarium is the first attribute of God, that can fall under our notion. And, even of this most Glorious, Infinite, and only Perfect and Absolute Being, we may safely, though in all awful reverence say, with Gregory, Mutat sententiam, non mutat consilium; "He changeth his threatened doom, but never his decree." But, how high are we flown, ere we are aware! Methinks I hear the angel speak to me, as to Esdras, Thy heart hath gone too far in this world; and thinkest thou to comprehend the ways of the Most High?

Cast we our eyes rather down to the lower orbs of elementary mixture here is nothing to be seen, but in a perpetual gyre of mutation. The elements, that are partners in quality, interchange with each other in substance. The mixed bodies can no more stand still, than the heaven, whereby they are governed : for, as the sun never holds one minute in one place, never day walks the same round, no more do these inferior bodies continue one moment in the same estate, but ever altering; either growing up to their dun, the "vertical point" of their being, or declining towards their corruption: insomuch as physicians observe, that, every seven years, this body of ours is quite another from itself; and in a continual renewing of supplies, or degrees of decays.

And, if you look upon the greater bodies, the sea and the earth, ye shall see, that the sea is ever ebbing and flowing, and will want waves, ere it want motion: the earth, which of all visible things hath the style of constancy, terra quæ nunquam movebitur, yet sometimes feels the motion of trepidation in her vast body; The earth shook and trembled, and the foundations of the hills moved, and were shaken; Psalm xviii. 7; and always, in the surface of it, feels the motion of sensible mutation: the domestics whereof, as all vegetative and some sensitive creatures; and the lords thereof, rational creatures; are ever as moving as the earth is still: ever breeding, born, growing, declining, dying. And, if ye match these two together, ye shall see how the sea and the earth win of each other: it is full tide now, where there was a goodly crop; and where the ox grazed, there the whale swims. How have we seen steeples to stand in those liquid

cemeteries, instead of masts; and, again, the plough to go, where the ship lately sailed!

And, as it is thus in the frame of Nature, so of Policy too. Those great and famous Monarchies of the world, whatever precious metal their head, shoulders, waist, have been of; yet their feet have been of clay, and are gone into dust. Civility, arts, sovereignty, have, in an imitation of the sun's course, gone from East to West; and will no where be fixed, till they be overtaken with the last revolution.

In vain therefore shall we look for constancy upon earth. Look how possible it is, for a man that stands, fortune-like, upon a round rolling stone in a smooth floor, to be steady in his posture; so possible it is, for us to be settled in an unchangeable condition, while we are upon this sphere of variableness. Can we think, that the world shall move, and we stand still? Were the sun the centre of motion, and the earth whirled about in this vast circumference, could we make account of rest? and, if, in our own particular, we could either stay our foot or shift it at pleasure, notwithstanding that insensible rapture, as the ant may creep the contrary way to the violent circumvolution of the wheel; yet we must necessarily be swayed with that universal swing of mutability, wherewith all creatures are carried forcibly about. The most lasting kingdoms, therefore, have had their periods; and of the most settled government, God's hand-writing upon the wall goes so far as to say, Mene, mene: Thy days are numbered.

Oh the fickleness of this earthly glory and prosperity! Oh the glassy splendor of all human greatness; cracked with a touch, with a fall broken! who would set his heart upon these unstable felicities? Do you not smile at the child, which, when he hath raised a large bubble out of his walnut-shell, joys in that airy globe, and wonders at the goodly colours he sees in it? which, while he is shewing his own face and his play-fellows' in that slight reflection, vanishes away, and leaves nothing but a little frothy spittle behind it? so ridiculous are we, while we doat upon these fugitive contentments. The Captive Prince in the Story noted well, when he looked back upon the chariot of his proud victor, that still one spoke of the wheel went down as another rose.

Think of the world as it is, O ye Great Ones: it turns round; and so do all things in it. Great Saladin caused it to be proclaimed, That he had nothing left him but his winding-sheet. The famous General, that thrice rescued Rome, came to Date obolum Belisario; "One single halfpenny to Belisarius." Take your turns then, for these earthly pre-eminences; but look at them still as perishing: and if you aim at rest, look for it above all these whirling orbs of the visible heavens. Say of that empyreal heaven, as God said of the Holy of Holies, which was the

figure of it, Hic requies mea in æternum; Here shall be my rest for ever. "There," as Bernard well, "is the true day that never sets;" yea, there is the perpetual high-noon of that day, which admits no shadow. Oh, then, overlook all these sublunary vanities: Set your affections on things above, not on things on the earth; seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth at the. right hand of God. There only shall you find true rest, and constant glory.

2. This for the Act of the Turning: the TERMS or SUBJECT of it follows; A fruitful land into barrenness.

Philosophy hath wont to teach us, that every change is to the contrary: here it is so, plainly; fruitful into barren, yea into the abstract, barrenness itself.

Small alterations are not noted. The growing of the grass, the daily declining into age, though not without a kind of change, are insensible but for Aaron's dry rod to be budded, blossomed, almoned in a night; for the vigorous and curled prisoner to besome grey-headed by morning; for the flourishing Pentapolis to be turned suddenly into sulphurous heaps and salt-pits; these things fill the eye, not without an astonishment of the heart. The best beauty decays by leisure; but for a fleshy idol at the Court to become suddenly a leprous Miriam, is a plain judgment. Thus, when the fair face of the earth shall be turned from a youthful and flourishing greenness into a parched and withered deformity; the leaves, which are the hairs, fall off, and give way to a loathsome baldness; the towered cities, which are the chaplets and dresses of that head, are torn down, and turned to rubbish ; the fountains and rivers, which are the crystalline humours of those eyes, are dried up; the surface, which is the skin of that great body, is chopped and chinked with drought, and burnt up with heat; those sweet waters of heaven, and those balmy drops of fatness wherewith it was wont to be besprinkled, are restrained, and have given place to unwholesome sereness, and killing vapours; shortly, that pampered plenty, wherewith it was glutted, is turned into a pinching want: this change is not more sensible, than woeful.

It is a great judgment this of barrenness. The curse of the disappointing fig tree was but this; Never fruit grow on thee: as, contrarily, the creature was blessed in no other terms, than Crescite et multiplicamini; Increase and multiply. A barren womb was Michal's plague, for her scoffing at devotion. It was held by Abimelech no small judgment, that God inflicted on him, in closing up all the wombs of the house of Abimelech; Gen. xx. 18: and therefore it is said, Abraham prayed, and God healed Abimelech, and his wife, and his maid-servants; verse 17. And surely, as the Jews held this as the reproach among women, though ours have not the same opinion, nor the same reason, Luke i. 25; insomuch as canta, sterilis, had been a strange word,