Of Christian Religion — Faith, Hope, Charity, and the Exercises of Devotion
RELIGION, in a large sense, does signify the whole duty of man, v comprehending in it justice, charity, and sobriety; because all these being commanded by God, they become a part of that honor and worship which we are bound to pay to him. And thus the word is used in St. James, " Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world." l But, in a more restrained sense, v it is taken for that part of duty which particularly relates to God in our worshippings and adoration of him, in confessing his excellences, loving his person, admiring his goodness, believing his word, and doing all that which may, in a proper
and direct manner, do him honor. It contains the duties of.
the first table only, and so it is called godliness,2 and is by St. Paul distinguished from justice and sobriety. In this sense I am now to explicate the parts of it.
Of the internal Actions of Religion.
Those I call the internal actions of religion, in which the soul only is employed, and ministers to God in the special actions of faith, hope, and charity. Faith believes the revelations of God; hope expects his promises; and charity loves his excellences and mercies. Faith gives our understanding to God; hope gives up all the passions and affections to hea ven and heavenly things; and charity gives the will to the service of God. Faith is opposed to infidelity, hope to despair, charity to enmity and hostility: and these three sanctify the whole man, and make our duty to God and obedience to his commandments to be chosen, reasonable, and delightful, and therefore to be entire, persevering, and universal.
Section I — Of Faith.
The Acts and Offices of Faith are,
1. To believe every thing which God has revealed to us; * and, when once we are convinced that God has spoken it, to make no further inquiry, but humbly to submit; ever remembering that there are some things which our understanding cannot fathom, nor search out their depth.
2. To believe nothing concerning God but what is honorable and excellent, as knowing that belief to be no honoring of God which entertains of him any dishonourable thoughts. Faith is the parent of charity; and whatsoever faith enter tains must be apt to produce love to God: but he that believes God to be cruel or unmerciful, or a rejoicer in the unavoidable damnation of the greatest part of mankind, or that he speaks one thing and privately means another, thinks evil thoughts concerning God, and such as for which we should hate a man, and therefore are great enemies of faith, being apt to destroy charity. Our faith concerning God must be as himself has revealed and described his own excellences; and, in our discourses, we must remove from him all imperfection, and attribute to him all excellency.
3. To give ourselves wholly up to Christ, in heart and desire, to become disciples of his doctrine with choice, (besides conviction,) being in the presence of God but as idiots, that is,
without any principles of our own to hinder the truth of God; but sucking in greedily all that God has taught us, believing it infinitely, and loving to believe it. For this is an act of love, reflected upon faith; or an act of faith, leaning upon love.
4. To believe all God's promises, and that whatsoever is promised in Scripture shall, on God's part, be as surely performed as if we had it in possession. This act makes us to rely upon God with the same confidence as we did on our parents when we were children, when we made no doubt but whatso ever we needed we should have it, if it were in their power.
0. To believe, also, the conditions of the promise, or that part of the revelation which concerns our duty. Many are apt to believe the article of remission of sins, but they believe it without the condition of repentance, or the fruits of holy life; and that is to believe the article otherwise than God intended it. For the covenant of the gospel is the great object of faith, and that supposes our duty to answer his grace; that God will be our God, so long as we are his people. The other is not faith, but flattery.
6. To profess publicly the doctrine of Jesus Christ, openly owning whatsoever he has revealed and commanded, not being ashamed of the word of God, or of any practices en joined by it; and this without complying with any man's interest, not regarding favor, nor being moved with good words, not fearing disgrace, or loss, or inconvenience, or death itself.
7. To pray without doubting, without weariness, without faintness; entertaining no jealousies or suspicions of God, but being confident of God's hearing us, and of his returns to us, whatsoever the manner or the instance be, that, if we do our duty, it will be gracious and merciful.
These acts of faith are in several degrees in the servants of Jesus; some have it but as a grain of mustard-seed; some grow up to a plant; some have the fulness of faith: but the least faith that is must be a persuasion so strong as to make us undertake the doing of all that duty which Christ built upon the foundation of believing. But we shall best discern the truth of our faith by these following signs. St. Jerome reckons three.2
Signs of true Faith.
1. An earnest and vehement prayer: for it is impossible
we should heartily believe the things of God and the glories of the gospel, and not most importunately desire them. For every thing is desired according to our belief of its excellency and possibility.
2. To do nothing for vain-glory, but wholly for the interests of religion and these articles we believe; valuing not at all the rumours of men, but the praise of God, to whom, by faith, we have given up all our intellectual faculties.
3. To be content with God for our judge, for our patron, for our Lord, for our friend; desiring God to be all in all to us, as we are, in our understanding and affections, wholly his.
Add to these:
4. To be a stranger upon earth in our affections, and to have all our thoughts and principal desires fixed upon the matters of faith, the things of heaven. For, if a man were adopted heir to Caesar, he would (if he believed it real and effective ) despise the present, and wholly be at court in his father's eye; and his desires would outrun his swiftest speed, and all his thoughts would spend themselves in creating ideas and little fantastic images of his future condition. Now, God has made us heirs of his kingdom, and co-heirs with Jesus: if we believed this, we would think, and affect, and study accordingly. But he that rejoices in gain, and his heart dwells in the world, and is espoused to a fair estate, and transported with a light momentary joy, and is afflicted with losses, and amazed with temporal persecutions, and esteems disgrace or poverty in a good cause to be intolerable — this man either has no inheritance in heaven, or believes none; and believes not that he is adopted to be the son of God, the heir of eternal glory.
o. St. James's sign is the best: " Show me your faith by your works." Faith makes the merchant diligent and venturous, and that makes him rich. Ferdinando of Arragon believed the story told him by Columbus, and therefore "he furnished him with ships, and got the West Indies by his faith in the undertaker. But Henry the Seventh of England believed him not; and therefore trusted him not with shipping, and lost all the purchase of that faith. It is told us by Christ, " He that forgives shall be forgiven: " if we believe this, it is certain we shall forgive our enemies; for none of us
all but need and desire to be forgiven. No man can possibly despise, or refuse to desire, such excellent glories as are revealed to them that are servants of Christ; and yet we do no thing that is commanded us as a condition to obtain them. No man could work a day's labor without faith; but because he believes he shall have his wages at the day's or week's end, he does his duty. But he only believes who does that thing which other men, in like cases, do when they do believe. He that believes money gotten with danger is better than poverty with safety, will venture for it in unknown lands or seas; and so will he that believes it better to get to heaven with labor, than to go to hell with pleasure.
6. He that believes, does not make haste, but waits patiently till the times of refreshment come, and dares trust God for the morrow, and is no more solicitous for the next year than he is for that which is past; and it is certain that man wants faith who dares be more confident of being supplied when he has money in his purse, than when he has it only in bills of exchange from God; or that relies more upon his own industry than upon God's providence when his own industry fails him. If you dare trust to God when the case, to human reason, seems impossible, and trust to God then also out of choice, not because you have nothing else to trust to, but because he is the only support of a just confidence, then you give a good testimony of your faith.
7. True faith is confident, and will venture all the world upon the strength of its persuasion. Will you lay your life on it, your estate, your reputation, that the doctrine of Jesus Christ is true in every article? Then you have true faith. But he that fears men more than God, believes men more than he believes in God.
8. Faith, if it be true, living, and justifying, cannot be separated from a good life; it works miracles, makes a drunk ard become sober, a lascivious person become chaste, a covetous man become liberal; " it overcomes the world," it " works righteousness,"3 and makes us diligently to do, and cheerfully to suffer, whatsoever God has placed in our way to heaven.
The Means and Instruments to obtain Faith are,
1. A humble, willing, and docile mind, or desire to be instructed in the way of God; for persuasion enters like a sun-
beam, gently, and without violence; and open but the window, and draw the curtain, and the Sun of righteousness will en lighten your darkness.
2. Remove all prejudice and love to every thing which may be contradicted by faith. " How can you believe (said Christ) that receive praise one of another?" An unchaste man can not easily be brought to believe that, without purity, he shall never see God. He that loves riches can hardly, believe the doctrine of poverty and renunciation of the world; and alms and martyrdom, and the doctrine of the cross, is folly to him that loves his ease and pleasures. He that has within him any principle contrary to the doctrines of faith cannot easily become a disciple.
3. Prayer, which is instrumental to every thing, has a particular promise in this thing. " He that lacks wisdom, let him ask it of God:" and, " If you give good things to your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give his Spirit to them that ask him! "
4. The consideration of the Divine omnipotence and infinite wisdom, and our own ignorance, are great instruments of curing all doubting, and silencing the murmurs of infidelity.4
5. Avoid all curiosity of inquiry into particulars and circumstances and mysteries: for true faith is full of ingenuity and hearty simplicity, free from suspicion, wise and confident, trusting upon generals, without watching and prying into unnecessary or indiscernible particulars. No man carries his bed into his field, to watch how his corn grows, but believes upon the general order of Providence and nature; and at har vest finds himself not deceived.
6. In time of temptation be not busy to dispute, but rely upon the conclusion, and throw yourself upon God; and con tend not with him but in prayer, and in the presence, and with the help, of a prudent untempted guide; and be sure to esteem all changes of belief which offer themselves in the time of your greatest weakness (contrary to the persuasions of your best understanding ) to be temptations, and reject them accordingly.
7. It is a prudent course that, in our health and best advantages, we lay up particular arguments and instruments of persuasion and confidence, to be brought forth and used in the great day of expense; and that especially in such things in
4 In rebus in iris summa credcndi ratio est omnipotentia Creatoris —
which we use to be most tempted, and in which we are least confident, and which are most necessary, and which commonly the devil uses to assault us withal in the days of our visitation. 8. The wisdom of the church of God is very remarkable in appointing festivals or holy days, whose solemnity and offices have no other special business but to record the article of the day; such as Trinity Sunday, Ascension, Easter, Christmasday; and to those persons who can only believe, not prove or dispute, there is no better instrument to cause the remembrance and plain notion, and to endear the affection and hearty assent to the article, than the proclaiming and recommending it by the festivity and joy of a holy day.
Section II — Of the Hope of a Christian.
FAITH differs from hope in the extension of its object, and v in the intention of degree. St. Austin thus accounts their differences.1 Faith is of all things revealed, good and bad, rewards and punishments, of things past, present, and to come, of things that concern us, of things that concern us not; but hope has for its object things only that are good, and fit to be hoped for, future, and concerning ourselves; and because these things are offered to us upon conditions of which we may so fail as we may change our will, therefore our certainty is less than the adherences of faith; which (because faith relies only upon one proposition, that is, the truth of the word of God) cannot be made uncertain in themselves, though the object of our hope may become uncertain to us, and to our pos session. For it is infallibly certain that there is heaven for all the godly, and for me among them all, if I do my duty. But that I shall enter into heaven is the object of my hope, not of my faith; and is so sure as it is certain I shall persevere in the ways of God.
The Acts of Hope are,
1. To rely upon God with a confident expectation of his promises: ever esteeming that every promise of God is a magazine of all that grace and relief which we can need in that instance for which the promise is made. Every degree of hope is a degree of confidence.
2. To esteem all the danger of an action, and the possibili-
1 Enchirid. c. 8.
ties of miscarriage, and every cross accident that can intervene, to be no defect on God's part, but either a mercy on his part or a fault on ours; for then we shall be sure to trust in God when we see him to be our confidence, and ourselves the cause of all mischances. The hope of a Christian is prudent and religious.
3. To rejoice in the midst of a misfortune or seeming sadness, knowing that this may work for good, and will, if we be not wanting to our souls. This is a direct act of hope, to look through the cloud, and look for a beam of the light from God; and this is called in Scripture " rejoicing in tribulation, when the God of hope fills us with all joy in believing." Every degree of hope brings a degree of joy.
4. To desire, to pray, and to long for the great object of our hope, the mighty price of our high calling; and to desire the other things of this life as they are promised; that is, so far as they are made necessary and useful to us, in order to God's glory and the great end of souls. Hope and fasting are said to be the two wings of prayer. Fasting is but as the wing of a bird; but hope is like the wing of an angel, soaring up to heaven, and bears our prayers to the throne of grace. Without hope, it is impossible to pray; but hope makes our prayers reasonable, passionate, and religious; for it relies upon God's promise, or experience, or providence, and story. Prayer is always in proportion to our hope, zealous and affectionate.
5. Perseverance is the perfection of the duty of hope, and its last act; and so long as our hope continues, so long we go on in duty and diligence; but he that is to raise a castle in an hour, sits down and does nothing towards it; and Herod, the sophister, left off to teach his son, when he saw that twentyfour pages, appointed to wait on him, and called by the several letters of the alphabet, could not make him to understand his letters perfectly.
Rules to govern our Hope.
1. Let your hope be moderate; proportioned to your state, person, and condition, whether it be for gifts or graces, or temporal favors. It is an ambitious hope for persons, whose di ligence is like them that are least in the kingdom of heaven, to believe themselves endeared to God as the greatest saints; or that they shall have a throne equal to St. Paul, or the blessed
Virgin Mary. A stammerer cannot, with moderation, hope for the gift of tongues; or a peasant to become learned as Origen; or if a beggar desires, or hopes, to become a king, or asks for a thousand pound a-year, we call him impudent, not passionate, much less reasonable. Hope that God will crown your endeavors with equal measures of that reward which he indeed freely gives, but yet gives according to our proportions. Hope for good success according to, or not much beyond, the efficacy of the causes and the instrument; and let the husband man hope for a good harvest, not for a rich kingdom, or a victorious army.
2. Let your hope be well founded, relying upon just confidences; that is, upon God, according to his revelations and promises. For it is possible for a man to have a vain hope upon God; and, in matters of religion, it is presumption to hope that God's mercies will be poured forth upon lazy persons, that do nothing towards holy and strict walking, nothing (I say) but trust and long for an event besides and against all disposition of the means. Every false principle in religion is a reed of Egypt, false and dangerous. Rely not in temporal things upon uncertain prophecies and astrology, not upon our own wit and industry, not upon gold or friends, not upon armies and princes; expect not health from physicians, that cannot cure their own breath, much less their mortality: use all lawful instruments, but expect nothing from them above their natural or ordinary efficacy, and, in the use of them, from God expect a blessing. A hope that is easy and credulous is an arm of flesh, an ill supporter without a bone.2
3. Let your hope be without vanity, or garishness of spirit; but sober, grave, and silent, fixed in the heart, not borne upon the lip, apt to support our spirits within, but not to provoke envy abroad.
4. Let your hope be of things possible, safe, and useful.3 He that hopes for an opportunity of acting his revenge, or lust, or rapine, watches to do himself a mischief. All evils of our selves or brethren are objects of our fear, not hope; and, when it is truly understood, things useless and unsafe can no more be wished for than things impossible can be obtained.
5. Let your hope be patient, without tediousness of spirit, or hastiness of prefixing time. Make no limits or prescriptions
to God; but let your prayers and endeavors go on still with a constant attendance on the periods of God's providence. The men of Bethulia resolved to wait upon God but five days longer; but deliverance stayed seven days, and yet came at last. And take not every accident for an argument of despair; but go on still in hoping; and begin again to work if any ill accident have interrupted you.
Means of Hope, and Remedies against Despair.
The means to cure despair, and to continue or increase hope, are, partly by consideration, partly by exercise.
1. Apply your mind to the cure of all the proper causes of despair: and they are, weakness of spirit or violence of passion. He that greedily covets is impatient of delay, and desperate in contrary accidents; and he that is little of heart is also little of hope, and apt to sorrow and suspicion.4
2. Despise the things of the world, and be indifferent to all changes and events of Providence: and for the things of God, the promises are certain to be performed in kind; and where there is less variety of chance, there is less possibility of being mocked;5 but he that creates to himself thousands of little hopes, uncertain in the promise, fallible in the event, and depending upon ten thousand circumstances, (as are all the things of this world,) shall often fail in his expectations, and be used to arguments of distrust in such hopes.
3. So long as your hopes are regular and reasonable, though in temporal affairs, such as are deliverance from enemies, escaping a storm or shipwreck, recovery from a sickness, ability to to pay your debts, &c., remember that there are some things ordinary, and some things extraordinary, to prevent despair. In ordinary, remember, 1. that the very hoping in God is an en dearment of him, and a means to obtain the blessing; " I will deliver him, because he has put his trust in me." 2. There
Pallad. Brunck. Anthol. t. ii. p. 437.
are in God all those glorious attributes and excellences which in the nature of things can possibly create or confirm hope. God is, 1. strong; 2. wise; 3. true; 4. loving. There can not be added another capacity to create a confidence; for upon these premises we cannot fail of receiving what is fit for us. 3. God has obliged himself by promise that we shall have the good of every thing we desire; for even losses and denials shall work for the good of them that fear God. And, if we will trust the truth of God for performance of the general, we may well trust his wisdom to choose for us the particular. But the extraordinaries of God are apt to supply the defect of all natural and human possibilities. 1. God has, in many instances, given extraordinary virtue to the active causes and instruments — to a jaw-bone, to kill a multitude; to three hundred men, to destroy a great army; to Jonathan and his armour-bearer, to rout a whole garrison. 2. He has given excellent sufferance and vigorousness to the sufferers, arming them with strange courage, heroical fortitude, invincible resolution, and glorious patience: and thus he lays no more upon us than we are able to bear; for when he increases our sufferings, he lessens them by increasing our patience. 3. His providence is extra-regular, and produces strange things beyond common rules; and he that led Israel through a sea, and made a rock pour forth waters, and the heavens to give them bread and flesh, and whole armies to be destroyed with fantastic noises, and the fortune of all France to be re covered and entirely revolved by the arms and conduct of a girl, against the torrent of the English fortune and chivalry, can do what he please, and still retain the same affections to his people, and the same providence over mankind as ever. And it is impossible for that man to despair who remembers that his helper is omnipotent, and can do what he please.6 Let us rest there a while; he can if he please: and he is infinitely loving, willing enough: and he is infinitely wise, choosing better for us than we can do for ourselves. This, in all ages and chances, has supported the afflicted people of God, and carried them on dry ground through a Red Sea. God invites and cherishes the hopes of men by all the variety of his providence.
4. If your case be brought to the last extremity, and that
you are at the pit's brink, even the very margin of the grave, yet then despair not; at least put it off a little longer: and remember that whatsoever final accident takes away all hope from you, if you stay a little longer, and, in the mean while, bear it sweetly, it will also take away all despair too. For, when you enter into the regions of death, you rest from all your labors and your fears.
5. Let them who are tempted to despair of their salvation consider how much Christ suffered to redeem us from sin and its eternal punishment; and he that considers this must needs believe that the desires which God had to save us were not less than infinite, and therefore not easily to be satisfied without it.
6. Let no man despair of God's mercies to forgive him, un less he be sure that his sins are greater than God's mercies. If they be not, we have much reason to hope that the stronger ingredient will prevail, so long as we are in the time and state of repentance, and within the possibilities and latitude of the covenant; and as long as any promise can but reflect upon him with an oblique beam of comfort. Possibly the man may err in his judgment of circumstances; and therefore let him fear: but, because it is not certain he is mistaken, let him not despair.
7. Consider that God, who knows all the events of men, and what their final condition shall be, who shall be saved and who will perish; yet he treats them as his own, calls them to be his own, offers fair conditions as to his own, gives them blessings, arguments of mercy, and instances of fear, to call them off from death, and to call them home to life; and, in all this, shows no despair of happiness to them; and therefore much less should any man despair for himself, since he never was able to read the scrolls of the eternal predestination.
8. Remember that despair belongs only to passionate fools or villains, such as were Achitophel arid Judas, or else to devils and damned persons; and as the hope of salvation is a good disposition towards it, so is despair a certain consignation to eternal ruin. A man may be damned for despairing to be saved. Despair is the proper passion of damnation. " God has placed truth and felicity in heaven, curiosity and repentance uj>on earth, but misery and despair are the portions of hell." ^
7 Yen. Bede.
9. Gather together into your spirit and its treasure-house, the memory, not only all the promises of God, but also the remembrances of experience and the former senses of the Divine favors, that from thence you may argue from times past to the present, and enlarge to the future and to greater blessings. For although the conjectures and expectations of hope are not like the conclusions of faith, yet they are a hel met against the scorchings of despair in temporal things, and an anchor of the soul, sure and stedfast, against the fluctuations of the spirit in matters of the soul. St. Bernard reckons divers principles of hope by enumerating the instances of the Divine mercy; and we may by them reduce this rule to practice, in the following manner: 1. God has preserved me from many sins; his mercies are infinite; I hope he will still preserve me from more, and for ever. 2. I have sinned, and God smote me not; his mercies are still over the peni tent: I hope he will deliver me from all the evils I have de served. He has forgiven me many sins of malice, and there fore surely he will pity my infirmities. 3. God visited my heart, and changed it; he loves the work of his own hands, and so my heart is now become; I hope he will love this too.
4. When I repented, he received me graciously; and there fore I hope, if I do my endeavor, he will totally forgive me.
5. He helped my slow and beginning endeavors; and there fore I hope he will lead me to perfection. 6. When he had given me something first, then he gave me more: I hope, therefore, he will keep me from falling, and give me the grace of perseverance. 7. He has chosen me to be a disciple of Christ's institution; he has elected me to his kingdom of grace; and therefore I hope, also, to the kingdom of his glory. 8. He died for me when I was his enemy; and therefore I hope he will save me when he has reconciled me to him and is become my friend. 9. " God has given us his Son: how should not he with him give us all things else? " All these St. Bernard reduces to these three heads, as the instruments of all our hopes: 1. The charity of God adopting us; 2. The truth of his promises; 3. The power of his performance: which if any truly weighs, no infirmity or accident can break his hopes into indiscernible fragments, but some good planks will remain after the greatest storm and shipwreck. This was St. Paul's instrument: "Experience begets hope, and hope makes not ashamed."
10. Do you take care only of your duty, of the means and proper instruments of your purpose, and leave the end to God: lay that up with him, and he will take care of all that is intrusted to him: and this, being an act of confidence in God, is also a means of security to you.
11. By special arts of spiritual prudence and arguments, secure the confident belief of the resurrection; and you can not but hope for every thing else which you may reasonably expect or lawfully desire upon the stock of the Divine mercies and promises.
12. If a despair seizes you in a particular temporal instance, let it not defile your spirit with impure mixture, or mingle in spiritual considerations; but rather let it make you fortify your soul in matters of religion, that, by being thrown out of your earthly dwelling and confidence, you may retire into the strengths of grace, and hope the more strongly in that by how much you are the more defeated in this, that despair of a fortune or a success may become the necessity of all virtue.
Section III — Of Charity, or the Love of God.
LOVE is the greatest thing that God can give us; for himself is love: and it is the greatest thing we can give to God; for it will also give ourselves, and carry with it all that is ours. The apostle calls it the band of perfection: it is the old, and it is the new, and it is the great commandment, and it is all the commandments; for it is the fulfilling of the law. It does the work of all other graces without any instrument but.-its own immediate virtue. For, as the love to sin makes a man sin against all his own reason, and all the discourses of wisdom, and all the advices of his friends, and without temptation, and without opportunity, so does the love of God; it makes a man chaste without the laborious arts of fasting and exterior disciplines, temperate in the midst of feasts, and is active enough to choose it without any intermedial appetites, and reaches at glory through the very heart of grace, without any other arms but those of love. It is a grace that loves God for himself, and our neighbors for God. The consider ation of God's goodness and bounty, the experience of those profitable and excellent emanations from him, may be, and most commonly are, the first motive of our love; but when we are once entered, and have tasted the goodness of God, we
love the spring for its own excellency, passing from passion to reason, from thanking to adoring, from sense to spirit, from considering ourselves to an union with God: and this is the image and little representation of heaven; it is beatitude in picture, or rather the infancy and beginnings of glory.
We need no incentives by way of special enumeration to move us to the love of God; for we cannot love any thing for any reason, real or imaginary, but that excellence is infinitely more eminent in God. There can but two things create love — perfection and usefulness: to which answer on our part, 1. Admiration; and, 2. Desire; and both these are centred in love. For the entertainment of the first, there is in God an infinite nature, immensity or vastness without extension or limit, immutability, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, holiness, dominion, providence, bounty, mercy, justice, perfection in himself, and the end to which all things and all actions must be directed, and will at last arrive. The consideration of which may be heightened, if we consider our distance from all these glories; our smallness and limited nature, our no thing, our inconstancy, our age like a span, our weakness and ignorance, our poverty, our inadvertency and inconsideration, our disabilities and disaffections to do good, our harsh natures and unmerciful inclinations, our universal iniquity, and our necessities and dependencies, not only on God originally and essentially, but even our need of the meanest of God's creatures, and our being obnoxious to the weakest and most con temptible. But, for the entertainment of the second, we may consider that in him is a torrent of pleasure for the voluptuous; he is the fountain of honor for the ambitious, an in exhaustible treasure for the covetous. Our vices are in love with fantastic pleasures and images of perfection, which are truly and really to be found no where but in God. And there fore our virtues have such proper objects that it is but reasonable they should all turn into love; for certain it is that this love will turn all into virtue. For in the scrutinies for right eousness and judgment, when it is inquired whether such a person be a good man or no, the meaning is not, What does he believe? or what does he hope? but what he loves.1
The Acts of Love to God are,
1. Love does all things which may please the beloved per-
son; it performs all his commandments: and this is one of the greatest instances and arguments of our love that God requires of us — "this is love, that we keep his commandments." Love is obedient.
2. It does all the intimations and secret significations of his pleasure whom we love; and this is an argument of a great degree of it. The first instance is, it makes the love accepted: but this gives a greatness and singularity to it. The first is the least, and less than it cannot do our duty; but, without this second, we cannot come to perfection. Great love is also pliant and inquisitive in the instances of its expression.
3. Love gives away all things, that so he may advance the interest of the beloved person: it relieves all that he would have relieved, and spends itself in such real significations as it is enabled withal. He never loved God that will quit any thing of his religion to save his money. Love is always liberal and communicative.
4. It suffers all things that are imposed by its beloved, or that can happen for his sake, or that intervene in his service, cheerfully, sweetly, willingly; expecting that God should turn them into good, and instruments of felicity. " Charity hopes all things, endures all things."2 Love is patient and content with any thing, so it be together with its beloved.
5. Love is also impatient of any thing that may displease the beloved person, hating all sin as the enemy of its friend; for love contracts all the same relations, and marries the same friendships and the same hatreds; and all affection to a sin is perfectly inconsistent with the love of God. Love is not divided between God and God's enemy: we must love God with all our heart; that is, give him a whole and undivided affection, having love for nothing else but such things which he allows, and which he commands or loves himself.
6. Love endeavors for ever to be present, to converse with, to enjoy, to be united with its object; loves to be talking of him, reciting his praises, telling his stories, repeating his words, imitating his gestures, transcribing his copy in every thing; and every degree of union and every degree of likeness is a degree of love; and it can endure any thing but the dis pleasure and the absence of its beloved. For we are not to use God and religion as men use perfumes, with which they are delighted when they have them, but can very well be without
them. True charity is restless till it enjoys God in such instances in which it wants him: it is like hunger and thirst, it must be fed, or it cannot be answered: 3 and nothing can sup ply the presence, or make recompence for the absence of God, or of the effects of his favor and the light of his countenance.
7. True love in all accidents looks upon the beloved person, and observes his countenance, and how he approves or disap proves, and accordingly looks sad or cheerful. He that loves God is not displeased at those accidents which God chooses; nor murmurs at those changes which he makes in his family; nor envies at those gifts he bestows; but chooses as he likes, and is ruled by his judgment, and is perfectly of his persuasion; loving to learn where God is the teacher, and being content to be ignorant or silent where he is not pleased to open himself.
8. Love is curious of little things, of circumstances and measures, and little accidents; not allowing to itself any in firmity which it strives not to master, aiming at what it cannot yet reach, desiring to be of an angelical purity, and of a perfect innocence, and a seraphical fervor, and fears every image of offense; is as much afflicted at an idle word as some at an act of adultery, and will not allow to itself so much anger as will disturb a child, nor endure the impurity of a dream.4 And this is the curiosity and niceness of divine love; this is the fear of God, and is the daughter and production of Love.
The Measures and Rules of Divine Love.
But, because this passion is pure as the brightest and smoothest mirror, and, therefore, is apt to be sullied with every impurer breath, we must be careful that our love to God be governed by these measures.
1. That our love to God be sweet, even, and full of tranquillity; having in it no violences or transportations, but going on in a course of holy actions and duties, which are proportionable to our condition and present state; not to satisfy all the desire, but all the probabilities and measures of our strength. A new beginner in religion has passionate and violent desires; but they must not be the measure of his actions: but he must consider his strength, his late sickness
men de suo Apolline, adjicit ex Hcrodoto quasi de suo, De eo os meum continens esto
N
and state of death, the proper temptations of his condition, and stand at first upon his defense; not go to storm a strong i'ort, or attack a potent enemy, or do heroical actions, and fitter for giants in religion. Indiscreet violences and untimely forwardness are the rocks of religion, against which tender spirits often suffer shipwreck.
2. Let our love be prudent and without illusion: that is, that it express itself in such instances which God has chosen, or which we choose ourselves by proportion to his rules and measures. Love turns into doting when religion turns into superstition. No degree of love can be imprudent, but the expressions may: we cannot love God too much, but we may proclaim it in indecent manners.
3. Let our love be firm, constant, and inseparable; not coming and returning like the tide, but descending like a neverfailing river, ever running into the ocean of Divine excellency, passing on in the channels of duty and a constant obedience, and never ceasing to be what it is, till it comes to be what it desires to be; still being a river till it be turned into sea and vastness, even the immensity of a blessed eternity.
Although the consideration of the Divine excellences and mercies be infinitely sufficient to produce in us love to God (who is invisible, and yet not distant from us, but we feel him in his blessings, he dwells in our hearts by faith, we feed on him in the sacrament, and are made all one with him in the incarnation and glorifications of Jesus); yet, that we may the better enkindle and increase our love to God, the following advices are not useless.
Helps to increase our Love to God, by way of Exercise.
1. Cut off all earthly and sensual loves, for they pollute and unhallow the pure and spiritual love. Every degree of inordinate affection to the things of this world, and every act of love to a sin, is a perfect enemy to the love of God; and it is a great shame to take any part of our affection from the eternal God, to bestow it upon his creature in defiance of the Creator; or to give it to the devil, our open enemy, in dis paragement of him, who is the fountain of all excellences and celestial amities.
2. Lay letters and restraints upon the imaginative and fantastic part; because our fancy, being an imperfect and higher
faculty, is usually pleased with the entertainment of shadows and gauds; and, because the things of the world fill it with such beauties and fantastic imagery, the fancy presents such objects as are amiable to the affections and elective powers. Persons of fancy, such as are women and children, have always the most violent loves; but, therefore, if we be careful with what representments we fill our fancy, we may the sooner rectify our love. To this purpose it is good that we transplant the instruments of fancy into religion; and for this reason music was brought into churches, and ornaments, and perfumes, and comely garments, and solemnities, and decent ceremonies, that the busy and less discerning fancy, being bribed with its proper objects, may be instrumental to a more celestial and spiritual love.
3. Remove solicitude or worldly cares, and multitudes of secular businesses; for, if these take up the intention and actual application of our thoughts and our employments, they will also possess our passions; which, if they be filled with oneobject, though ignoble, cannot attend another, though more excellent. We always contract a friendship and relation with those with whom we converse; our very country is dear to us for our being in it; and the neighbors of the same village, and those that buy and sell with us, have seized upon some portions of our love; and, therefore, if we dwell in the affairs of the world we shall also grow in love with them; and all our love or all our hatred, all our hopes or all our fears, which the eternal God would willingly secure to himself, and esteem among his treasures and precious things, shall be spent upon trifles and vanities.
4. Do not only choose the things of God, but secure your inclinations and aptnesses for God and for religion. For it will be a hard thing for a man to do such a personal violence to his first desires as to choose whatsoever he has no mind to. A man will many times satisfy the importunity and daily soli citations of his first longings; and, therefore, there is nothing can secure our loves to God, but stopping the natural fountains, and making religion to grow near the first desires of the soul.
5. Converse with God by frequent prayer. In particular, desire that your desires may be right, and love to have your affections regular and holy. To which purpose make very frequent addresses to God by ejaculations and communions,
and an assiduous daily devotion; discover to him all your wants; complain to him of all your affronts; do as Hezekiah did, lay your misfortunes and your ill news before him, spread them before the Lord; call to him for health, run to him for counsel, beg of him for pardon; and it is as natural to k>ve him to whom we make such addresses, and of whom we have such dependencies, as it is for children to love their parents.
6. Consider the immensity and vastness of the Divine love to us, expressed in all the emanations of his providence: 1. In his creation; 2. In his conservation of us. For it is not my prince, or my patron, or my friend, that supports me, or re lieves my needs; but God, who made the corn that my friend sends me; who created the grapes, and supported him, who has as many dependencies, and as many natural necessities, and as perfect disabilities, as myself. God, indeed, made him the instrument of his providence to me, as he has made his own land or his own cattle to him — with this only difference, that God, by his ministration to me, intends to do him a favor and a reward, which to natural instruments he does not. 3. In giving his Son; 4. In forgiving our sins; 5. In adopting us to glory; and ten thousand times ten thousand little accidents and instances happening in the doing every of these: — and it is not possible but for so great love we should give love again; for God, we should give man; for felicity, we should part with our misery. No, so great is the love of the holy Jesus, God incarnate, that he would leave all his triumph ant glories, and die once more for man, if it were necessary for procuring felicity to him.5
In the use of these instruments, love will grow in several knots and steps, like the sugar-canes of India, according to a thousand varieties in the persons loving; and it will be great or less, in several persons, and in the same, according to his growth in Christianity. But, in general discoursing, there are but two states of love; and those are, labor of love, and the zeal of love: the first is duty; the second is perfection.
The two States of Love to God.
1. The least love that is must be obedient, pure, simple, and communicative; that is, it must exclude all affection to sin, and all inordinate affection to the world, and must be expressive, * Sic Jesus dixit S. Carpo apud Dionysium epist. ad Demophilum.
according to our power, in the instances of duty, and must be love for love's sake; and of this love martyrdom is the highest instance — that is, a readiness of mind rather to suffer any evil than to do any. Of this our blessed Savior affirmed that no man had greater love than this; that is, this is the highest point of duty, the greatest love that God requires of man. And yet lie that is the most imperfect must have this love, also, in preparation of mind, and must differ from another in nothing, except in the degrees of promptness and alacrity. And, in this sense, he that loves God truly, though but with a beginning and tender love, yet he loves God with all his heart, that is, with that degree of love which is the highest point of our duty and of God's charge upon us; and he that loves God with all his heart may yet increase with the increase of God; just as there are degrees of love to God among the saints, and yet each of them love him with all their powers and capacities.
2. But the greater state of love is the zeal of love, which runs out into excrescences and suckers, like a fruitful and pleasant tree; or bursting into gums, and producing fruits, not of a monstrous, but of an extraordinary and heroical, greatness. Concerning which these cautions are to be observed:
Cautions and Rules concerning Zeal,
1. If zeal be in the beginnings of our spiritual birth, or be short, sudden, and transient, or be a consequent of a man's natural temper, or come upon any cause but after a long growtli of a temperate and well-regulated love — it is to be suspected for passion and frowardness, rather than the vertical point of love.6
2. That zeal only is good which, in a fervent love, has temperate expressions. For, let the affection boil as high as it can, yet if it boil over into irregular and strange actions, it will have but few, but will need many, excuses. Elijah was zealous for the Lord of hosts; and yet he was so transported with it, that he could not receive answer from God till by music he was recomposed and tamed; and Moses broke both the tables of the law by being passionately zealous against them that brake the first.
3. Zeal must spend its greatest heat principally in those
things that concern ourselves; but with great care and restraint in those that concern others.
4. Remember that zeal, being an excrescence of Divine love, must in no sense contradict any action of love. Love to God includes love to our neighbor; and therefore no pretence of zeal7 for God's glory must make us uncharitable to our brother; for that is just so pleasing to God as hatred is an act of love.
5. That zeal that concerns others can spend itself in nothing but arts, and actions, and charitable instruments, for their good; and when it concerns the good of many that one should suffer, it must be done by persons of a competent authority, and in great necessity, in seldom instances, according to the law of God or man; but never by private right, or for trifling accidents, or in mistaken propositions. The Zelots, in the old law, had authority to transfix and stab some certain persons, but God gave them warrant; it was in the case of idolatry, or such notorious huge crimes, the danger of which was in supportable, and the cognisance of which was infallible; and yet that warrant expired with the synagogue.
6. Zeal in the instances of our own duty and personal de portment, is more safe than in matters of counsel, and actions besides our just duty, and tending towards perfection. Though in these instances there is not a direct sin, even where the zeal is less wary, yet there is much trouble and some danger; as, if it be spent in the too forward vows of chastity, and restraints of natural arid innocent liberties.
7. Zeal may be let loose in the instances of internal, personal, and spiritual actions, that are matters of direct duty; as in prayers, and acts of adoration, and thanksgiving, and frequent addresses, provided that no indirect act pass upon them to defile them; such as complacency, and opinions of sanctity, censuring others, scruples and opinions of necessity, unnecessary fears, superstitious numberings of times and hours: but let the zeal be as forward as it will, as devout as it will, as seraphical as it will, in the direct address and intercourse with God, there is no danger, no transgression. Do all the parts of your duty as earnestly as if the salvation of all the world, and the whole glory of God, and the confusion of all devils, and all that you hope or desire, did depend upon every one action.8
Phil. iii. 6. 8 Lavora, come se tu avessi a carapar ogni hora:
Adora, come se tu avessi a morir allora.
8. Let zeal be seated in the will and choice, and regulated with prudence and sober understanding, not in the fancies and affections;9 for these will make it full of noise and empty of profit; but that will make it deep and smooth, material and devout.
The sum is this: that zeal is not a direct duty, no where commanded for itself, and is nothing but a forwardness and circumstance of another duty, and therefore is then only acceptable when it advances the love of God and our neighbors, whose circumstance it is.10 That zeal is only safe, only acceptable, which increases charity directly; and because love to our neighbor and obedience to God are the two great portions of charity, we must never account our zeal to be good but as it advances both these, if it be in a matter that relates to both; or severally, if it relates severally. St. Paul's zeal was expressed in preaching without any offerings or stipend, in travelling, in spending and being spent for his flock, in suffering, in being willing to be accursed for love of the people of God and his countrymen. Let our zeal be as great as his was, so it be in affections to others, but not at all in an gers against them: in the first there is no danger; in the se cond there is no safety. In brief, let your zeal (if it must be expressed in anger) be always more severe against yourself than against others.11
5!" The other part of love to God is love to our neighbor, for which I have reserved the paragraph of alms.
Of the external Actions of Religion.
Religion teaches us to present to God our bodies as well as our souls, for God is the Lord of both; and if the body serves the soul in actions natural, and civil, and intellectual, it must not be eased in the only offices of religion, unless the body shall expect no portion of the rewards of religion, such as are resurrection, reunion, and glorification. Our bodies are to God a living sacrifice; and to present them to God is holy and acceptable.12
The actions of the body as it serves to religion, and as it is distinguished from sobriety and justice, either relate to the word of God, or to prayer, or to repentance, and make these
kinds of external actions of religion: 1. Reading and hearing the word of God; 2. Fasting and corporal austerities, called by St. Paul bodily exercise; 3. Feasting, or keeping days of public joy and thanksgiving.
Section IV — Of reading or hearing the Word of God.
i READING and hearing the word of God are but the several circumstances of the same duty; instrumental especially to faith, but consequently to all other graces of the Spirit. It is all one to us whether by the eye or by the ear the Spirit conveys his precepts to us. If we hear St. Paul saying to us, that " whoremongers and adulterers God will judge," or read it in one of his epistles, in either of them we are equally and sufficiently instructed. The Scriptures read are the same thing to us which the same doctrine was when it was preached by the disciples of our blessed Lord; and we are to learn of either with the same dispositions. There are many that can not read the word, and they must take it in by the ear; and they that can read find the same word of God by the eye. It is necessary that all men learn it in some way or other, and it is sufficient in order to their practice that they learn it any way. The word of God is all those commandments and revelations, those promises and threatenings, the stories and sermons, recorded in the Bible: nothing else is the word of God that we know of by any certain instrument. The good books and spiritual discourses, the sermons or homilies, writ ten or spoken by men, are but the word of men, or rather ex plications of, and exhortations according to, the word of God; but of themselves they are not the word of God. In a ser mon, the text only is in a proper sense to be called God's word; and yet good sermons are of great use and convenience for the advantages of religion. He that preaches an hour together against drunkenness, with the tongue of men or angels, has spoke no other word of God but this, " Be not drunk with wine, in which is excess;" and he that writes that sermon in a book, and publishes that book, has preached to all that read it a louder sermon than could be spoken in a church. This 1 say to this purpose, that we may separate truth from error, popular opinions from substantial truths. For God preaches to us in the Scripture, and by his secret assistances and spi ritual thoughts and holy motions: good men preach to us when
they, by popular arguments and human arts and compliances, expound and press any of those doctrines which God has preached to us in his holy word. But,
1. The Holy Ghost is certainly the best preacher in the world, and the words of Scripture the best sermons.
• 2. All the doctrine of salvation is plainly set down there, that the most unlearned person, by hearing it read, may understand all his duty. What can be plainer spoken than this, " You shall not kill; Be not drunk with Avine; Husbands, love your wives; Whatsoever you would that men should do to you, do you so to them "? The wit of man cannot more plainly tell us our duty, or more fully, than the Holy Ghost has done already.
3. Good sermons and good books are of excellent use; but yet they can serve no other end but that we practice the plain doctrines of Scripture.
4. What Abraham, in the parable, said concerning the brethren of the rich man, is here very proper; " They have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them; but if they refuse to hear these, neither will they believe though one should arise from the dead to preach to them." 1
5. Reading the Holy Scriptures is a duty expressly commanded us,2 and is called in Scripture " preaching:" all other preaching is the effect of human skill and industry; and al though of great benefit, yet it is but an ecclesiastical ordinance; the law of God concerning preaching being expressed in the matter of reading the Scriptures, and hearing that word of God which is, and as it is, there described.
But this duty is reduced to practice in the following rules
Rules for hearing or reading the Word of God.
1. Set apart some portion of your time, according to the opportunities of your calling and necessary employment, for the reading of Holy Scripture; and, if it be possible, every day read or hear some of it read: you are sure that book teaches all truth, commands all holiness, and promises all happiness.
2. When it is in your power to choose, accustom yourself to such portions which are most plain and certain duty, and which contain the story of the life and death of our blessed
1 Luke xvi. 29, 31. 2 Deut. xxxi. 11; Luke xxiv. 45; Matt,
Savior. Read the Gospels, the Psalms of David, and especially those portions of Scripture which, by the wisdom of the church, are appointed to be publicly read upon Sundays and holidays, viz. the Epistles and Gospels. In the choice of any other portions, you may advise with a spiritual guide, that you may spend your time with most profit.
3. Fail not diligently to attend to the reading of Holy Scriptures upon those days in which it is most publicly and solemnly read in churches: for at such times, besides the learning our duty, we obtain a blessing along with it; it becoming to us, upon those days, a part of the solemn Divine worship.
4. When the word of God is read or preached to you, be sure you be of a ready heart and mind, free from worldly cares and thoughts, diligent to hear, careful to mark, studious to remember, and desirous to practice all that is commanded, and to live according to it: do not hear for any other end but to become better in your life and to be instructed in every good work, and to increase in the love and service of God.
o. Beg of God, by prayer, that he would give you the spirit of obedience and profit, and that he would, by his Spirit, write the word in your heart, and that you describe it in your life. To which purpose serve yourself of some affectionate ejacu lations to that purpose before and after this duty.
Concerning Spiritual Books and Ordinary Sermons, take in these Advices also.
6. Let not a prejudice to any man's person hinder you from receiving good by his doctrine, if it be according to godliness; but (if occasion offer it, or especially if duty present it to you — that is, if it be preached in that assembly where you are bound to be present) accept the word preached as a message from God, and the minister as his angel in that ministration.
7. Consider and remark the doctrine that is represented to you in any discourse; and if the preacher adds accidental advantages, any thing to comply with your weakness, or to put your spirit into action or holy resolution, remember it and make use of it. But if the preacher be a weak person, yet the text is the doctrine you are to remember, that contains all your duty; it is worth your attendance to hear that spoken often and renewed upon your thoughts: and though you are a learned man, yet the same thing which you know already,
if spoken by another, may be made active by that application. I can better be comforted by my own considerations if another hand applies them than if I do it myself; because the word of God does not work as a natural agent, but as a Divine instrument; it does not prevail by the force of deduction and artificial disconrsings only, but chiefly by way of blessing in the ordinance and in the ministry of an appointed person. At least, obey the public order, and reverence the constitution, and give good example of humility, charity, and obedience.
8. When Scriptures are read, you are only to inquire, with diligence and modesty, into the meaning of the Spirit: but if homilies or sermons be made upon the words of Scripture, you are to consider, whether all that be spoken be conformable to the Scriptures: for, although you may practice for human reasons, and human arguments, ministered from the preacher's art; yet you must practice nothing but the command of God, nothing but the doctrine of Scripture, that is, the text.
9. Use the advice of some spiritual or other prudent men for the choice of such spiritual books, which may be of use and benefit for the edification of your spirit in the ways of holy living; and esteem that time well accounted; for that is prudently and affectionately employed in hearing or reading good books and pious discourses; ever remembering, that God, by hearing us speak to him in prayer, obliges us to hear him speak to us in his word, by what instrument soever it be conveyed.
Section V — Of Fasting.
FASTING, if it be considered in itself, without relation to spiritual ends, is a duty no where enjoined or counselled. But Christianity has to do with it as it may be made an instrument of the Spirit, by subduing the lusts of the flesh, or re moving any hinderances of religion. And it has been prac^_ tised by all ages of the church, and advised in order to three ministries; 1. To prayer; 2. To mortification of bodily lusts; 3. To repentance: and it is to be practiced according to the following measures.
Rules for Christian Fasting.
1. Fasting, in order to prayer, is to be measured by the proportions of the times of prayer; that is, it ought to be a
total fast from all things, during the solemnity, unless a probable necessity intervene. Thus the Jews ate nothing upon the sabbath days till their great offices were performed; that is, about the sixth hour: and St. Peter used it as an argument, that the apostles in Pentecost were not drunk, because it was but the third hour of the day; of such a day in which it was not lawful to eat or drink till the sixth hour: and the Jews were offended at the disciples for plucking the ears of corn on the sabbath, early in the morning, because it was before the time in which, by their customs, they esteemed it ^ lawful to break their fast. In imitation of this custom, and in prosecution of the reason of it, the Christian church has religiously observed fasting before the holy communion; and the more devout persons (though without any obligation at all) refused to eat or drink till they had finished their morning devotions: and further yet, upon days of public humiliation, which are designed to be spent wholly in devotion, and for the averting God's judgments, (if they were imminent,) fasting is commanded together with prayer: commanded (I say) by the church to this end — that the spirit might be clearer and more angelical, when it is quitted in some proportions from the loads of flesh.
2. Fasting, when it is in order to prayer, must be a total abstinence from all meat, or else an abatement of the quantity: for the help which fasting does to prayer cannot be served by changing flesh into fish, or milk-meats into dry diet; but by turning much into little, or little into none at all, during the time of solemn and extraordinary prayer.
3. Fasting, as it is instrumental to prayer, must be attended with other aids of the like virtue and efficacy; such as are removing for the time all worldly cares and secular businesses; and therefore our blessed Savior enfolds these parts within the same caution; " Take heed, lest your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting, and drunkenness, and the cares of this world, and that day overtake you unawares." To which add alms; for upon the wings of fasting and alms holy prayer infallibly mounts up to heaven.1
4. When fasting is intended to serve the duty of repentance, it is then best chosen when it is short, sharp, and afflic tive; that is, either a total abstinence from all nourishment,
1 Jejunium sine eleemosyna, lampas sine oleo. — St. Aug.
according as we shall appoint or be appointed, during such a time as is separate for the solemnity and attendance upon the employment; or, if we shall extend our severity beyond the solemn days, and keep our anger against our sin, as we are to keep our sorrow, that is, always in a readiness, and often to be called upon; then, to refuse a pleasant morsel, to ab stain from the bread of our desires, and only to take wholesome and less pleasing nourishment, vexing our appetite by the refusing a lawful satisfaction, since, in its petulancy and luxury, it preyed upon an unlawful.
5. Fasting designed for repentance must be ever joined with an extreme care that we fast from sin; for there is no greater folly or indecency in the world than to commit that for which I am now judging and condemning myself. This is the best fast; and the other may serve to promote the interest of this, by increasing the disaffection to it, and multi plying arguments against it.
6. He that fasts for repentance must, during that solemnity, abstain from all bodily delights, and the sensuality of all his senses and his appetites: for a man must not, when he mourns in his fast, be merry in his sport; weep at dinner, and laugh all day after; have a silence in his kitchen, and music in his chamber; judge the stomach, and feast the other senses. I deny not but a man may, in a single instance, punish a particular sin with a proper instrument. If a man have offended in his palate, he may choose to fast only; if he have sinned in softness and in his touch, he may choose to lie hard, or work hard, and use sharp inflictions; but although this discipline be proper and particular, yet because the sorrow is of the whole man, no sense must rejoice, or be with any study or purpose feasted and entertained softly. This rule is intended to relate to the solemn days appointed for repentance publicly or privately; besides which, in the whole course of our life, even in the midst of our most festival and freer joys, we may sprinkle some single instances and acts of self-condemning, or punishing; as to refuse a pleasant morsel or a delicious draught with a tacit remembrance of the sin that now returns to dis please my spirit. And, though these actions be single, there is no indecency in them; because a man may abate of his or dinary liberty and bold freedom with great prudence, so he does it without singularity in himself or trouble to others;
but he may not abate of his solemn sorrow: that may be caution; but this would be softness, effeminacy, and indecency.
7. When fasting is an act of mortification, that is, is intended to subdue a bodily lust, as the spirit of fornication, or the fondness of strong and impatient appetites, it must not be a sudden, sharp, and violent fast, but a state of fasting, a diet of fasting, a daily lessening our portion of meat and drink, and a choosing suck a coarse diet,2 which may make the least preparation for the lusts of the body. Pie that fasts three days without food will weaken other parts more than the ministers of fornication; and when the meals return as usually, they also will be served as soon as any. In the mean time, they will be supplied and made active by the accidental heat that comes with such violent fastings; for this is a kind of aerial devil — the prince that rules in the air is the devil of fornication; and he will be as tempting with the windiness of a violent fast as with the flesh of an ordinary meal.3 But a daily subtraction of the nourishment will introduce a less busy habit of body; and that will prove the more effectual remedy.
8. Fasting alone will not cure this devil, though it helps much towards it; but it must not therefore be neglected, but assisted by all the proper instruments of remedy against this unclean spirit; and what it is unable to do alone, in company with other instruments, and God's blessing upon them, it may effect.
9. All fasting, for whatsoever end it be undertaken, must be done without any opinion of the necessity of the thing it self, without censuring others, with all humility, in order to the proper end; and just as a man takes physic, of which no man has reason to be proud, and no man thinks it necessary, but because he is in sickness, or in danger and disposition to it.
1 0. All fasts ordained by lawful authority are to be observed in order to the same purposes to which they are enjoined, and to be accompanied with actions of the same nature, just as it is in private fasts; for there is no other difference, but that in public our superiors choose for us what in private we do for ourselves.
Sparagna il pane, ed al inferno va. — See chap. u. sect. ii. 2.
1 1. Fasts ordained by lawful authority are not to be neglect* ed; because alone they cannot do the thing in order to which they were enjoined. It may be, one day of humiliation will not obtain the blessing, or alone kill the.lust; yet it must not be despised if it can do any thing towards it. An act of fasting is an act of self-denial; and, though it do not produce the habit, yet it is a good act.
12. When the principal end why a fast is publicly prescribed is obtained by some other instrument, in a particular person — as if the spirit of fornication be cured by the rite of marriage, or by a gift of chastity — yet that person so eased is not freed from the fasts of the church by that alone, if those fasts can prudently serve any other end of religion, as that of prayer, or repentance, or mortification of some other appetite: for when it is instrumental to any end of the Spirit, it is freed from superstition; and then we must have some other rea son to quit us from the obligation, or that alone will not do it.
13. When the fast publicly commanded, by reason of some indisposition in the particular person, cannot operate to the end of the commandment, yet the avoiding offense, and the complying with public order, is reason enough to make the obedience to be necessary. For he that is otherwise disobliged, as when the reason of the law ceases as to his particular, yet remains still obliged if he cannot do otherwise without scandal: but this is an obligation of charity, not of justice.
14. All fasting is to be used with prudence and charity: for there is no end to which fasting serves but may be obtained by other instruments; and, therefore, it must at no hand be made an instrument of scruple; or become an enemy to our health; or be imposed upon persons that are sick or aged, or to whom it is, in any sense, uncharitable, such as are wearied travellers; or to whom, in the whole kind of it, it is useless, such as are women with child, poor people, arid little children. But in these cases the church has made provision and inserted caution into her laws; and they are to be reduced to practice according to custom, and the sentence of prudent persons, with great latitude, and without niceness and curiosity: having this in our first care, that we secure our virtue; and, next, that we secure our health, that we may the better exercise the labors of virtue; lest, out of too much austerity,
we bring ourselves to that condition that it be necessary to be indulgent to softness, ease, and extreme tenderness.4
15. Let not intemperance be the prologue or the epilogue to your fast; lest the fast be so far from taking off any thing of the sin, that it be an occasion to increase it: and, therefore, when the fast is done, be careful that no supervening act of gluttony or excessive drinking unhallow the religion of the past day; but eat temperately according to the proportion of other meals, lest gluttony keep either of the gates to abstinence.5
The Benefits of Fasting.
lie that undertakes to enumerate the benefits of fasting may, in the next page, also reckon all the benefits of physic; for fasting is not to be commended as a duty, but as an instrument; and in that sense no man can reprove it, or undervalue it, but he that knoAVS neither spiritual arts nor spiritual ne cessities. But by the doctors of the church it is called the nourishment of prayer, the restraint of lust, the wings of the soul, the diet of angels, the instrument of humility and selfdenial, the purification of the spirit; and the paleness and meagreness of visage, which is consequent to the daily fast of great mortifiers, is by St. Basil said to be the mark in the forehead which the angel observed when he signed the saints in the forehead to escape the wrath of God. " The soul that is greatly vexed, which goes stooping and feeble, and the eyes that fail, and the hungry soul, shall give you praise and righteousness, O Lord! " G
Section VI — Of keeping Festivals, and Days holy to the Lord
particularly the Lord's Day.
TRUE natural religion, that which was common to all nations and ages, did principally rely upon four great propositions: 1. That there is one God; 2. That God is nothing of those tilings which we see; 3. That God takes care of all things below, and governs all the world; 4. That he is the great Creator of all things, without himself: and according to these were framed the four first precepts of the decalogue. In the first, the unity of the Godhead is expressly affirmed; in the second, his invisibility and immateriality; in the third, is
affirmed God's government and providence, by avenging them that swear falsely by his name; by which also his omniscience is declared: in the fourth commandment, he proclaims himself the Maker of heaven and earth; for, in memory of God's rest from the work of six days, the seventh was hal lowed into a sabbath; and the keeping it was confessing God to be the great Maker of heaven and earth; and consequently to this, it also was a confession of his goodness, his omnipotence, and his wisdom: all which were written with a sun beam in the great book of the creature.
So long as the law of the sabbath was bound upon God's people, so long God would have that to be the solemn manner of confessing these attributes; but when, the priesthood being changed, there was a change also of the law, the great duty remained unalterable in changed circumstances. We are eternally bound to confess God Almighty to be the Maker of heaven and earth: but the manner of confessing it is changed from a rest, or a doing nothing, to a speaking something; from a day to a symbol; from a ceremony to a substance; from a Jewish rite to a Christian duty: we profess it in our creed, we confess it in our lives; we describe it by every line of our life, by every action of duty, by faith, and trust, and obedience: and we do also, upon great reason, comply with the Jewish manner of confessing the creation, so far as it is instru mental to a real duty. We keep one day in seven, and so confess the manner and circumstance of the creation; and we rest also, that we may tend holy duties: so imitating God's rest better than the Jew in Synesius, who lay upon his face from evening to evening, and could not, by stripes or wounds, be raised up to steer the ship in a great storm. God's rest was not a natural cessation; he who could not labor could not be said to rest: but God's rest is to be understood to be a beholding and a rejoicing in his work finished: and therefore we truly represent God's rest when we confess and rejoice in God's works and God's glory.
This the Christian church does upon every day; but especially upon the Lord's day, which she has set apart for this and all other offices of religion, being determined to this day by the resurrection of her dearest Lord, it being the first day of joy the church ever had. And now, upon the Lord's day, we are not tied to the rest of the sabbath, but to all the
work of the sabbath; and we are to abstain from bodily labor, not because it is a direct duty to us, as it was to the Jews, but because it is necessary, in order to our duty, that we attend to the offices of religion.
The observation of the Lord's day differs nothing from the observation of the sabbath in the matter of religion, but in the manner. They differ in the ceremony and external rite: rest, with them, was the principal; with us, it is the accessory. They differ in the office or forms of worship; for they were then to worship God as a Creator and a gentle Father; we are to add to that, our Redeemer, and all his other excellences and mercies. And, though we have more natural and proper reason to keep the Lord's day than the sabbath, yet the Jews had a Divine commandment for their day, which we have not for ours: but we have many commandments to do all that honor to God which was intended in the fourth commandment; and the apostles appointed the first day of the week for doing it in solemn assemblies. And the manner of worship ping God, and doing him solemn honor and service upon this day, we may best observe in the following measures.
Rules for keeping the Lord's Day and other Christian Festivals.
1. When you go about to distinguish festival days from common, do it not by lessening the devotions of ordinary days, that the common devotion may seem bigger upon festivals; but, on every day, keep your ordinary devotions entire, and enlarge upon the holy day.
2. Upon the Lord's day we must abstain from all servile and laborious works, except such which are matters of necessity, of common life, or of great charity; for these are permitted by that authority which has separated the day for holy uses. The sabbath of the Jews, though consisting principally in rest, and established by God, did yield to these. The labor of love and the labors of religion were not against the reason and the spirit of the commandment, for which the letter was decreed, and to which it ought to minister. And, therefore, much more is it so on the Lord's day, where the letter is wholly turned into spirit, and there is no commandment of God but of spiritual and holy actions. The priests might kill their beasts, and dress them for sacrifice; and Christ, though born under the law, might heal a sick man; and the sick man might
carry his bed to witness his recovery, and confess the mercy, and leap and dance to God for joy; and an ox might be led to water, and an ass be haled out of a ditch; and a man may take physic, and he may eat meat, and therefore there were of necessity some to prepare and administer it: and the performing these labors did not consist in minutes and just deter mining stages; but they had, even then, a reasonable latitude; so only as to exclude unnecessary labor, or such as did not minister to charity or religion. And, therefore, this is to be enlarged in the gospel, whose sabbath or rest is but a circumstance, and accessory to the principal and spiritual duties. Upon the Christian sabbath necessity is to be served first; then charity; and then religion — for this is to give place to charity, in great instances, and the second to the first, in all; and in all cases God is to be worshipped in spirit and in truth.
3. The Lord's day, being the remembrance of a great blessing, must be a day of joy, festivity, spiritual rejoicing, and thanksgiving: and therefore it is a proper work of the day to let your devotions spend themselves in singing or reading psalms; in recounting the great works of God; in remembering his mercies; in worshipping his excellences; in celebrating his attributes; in admiring his person; in sending portions of pleasant meat to them for whom nothing is provided; and in all the arts and instruments of advancing God's glory, and the reputation of religion: in which it were a great decency that the memorial of the resurrection should be inserted, that the particular religion of the day be not swallowed up in the general. And of this we may the more easily serve ourselves, by rising seasonably in the morning to private devotion, and by retiring at the leisures and spaces of the day not employed in public offices.
4. Fail not to be present at the public hours and places of prayer, entering early and cheerfully, attending reverently and devoutly, abiding patiently during the whole office, piously assisting at the prayers, and gladly also hearing the sermon; and, at no hand, omitting to receive the holy communion, when it is offered, (unless some great reason excuse it,) this being the great solemnity of thanksgiving, and a proper work of the day.
5. After the solemnities are past, and in the intervals between the morning and evening devotion, (as you shall find opportunity,) visit sick persons, -reconcile differences, do offices
of neighborhood, inquire into the needs of the poor, especially housekeepers, relieve them, as they shall need, and as you are able; for then we truly rejoice in God, when we make our neighbors, the poor members of Christ, rejoice together with us.
6. Whatsoever you are to do yourself, as necessary, you are to take care that others also, who are under your charge, do in their station and manner. Let your servants be called to church, and all your family that can be spared from necessary and great household ministries; those that cannot, let them go by turns, and be supplied otherwise, as well as they may; and provide, on these days especially, that they be instructed in the articles of faith and necessary parts of their duty.
7. Those who labor hard in the week must be eased upon the Lord's day; such ease being a great charity and alms: but, at no hand, must they be permitted to use any unlawful games, any thing forbidden by the laws, any thing that is scandalous, or any thing that is dangerous and apt to mingle sin with it; no games prompting to wantonness, to drunkenness, to quarrelling, to ridiculous and superstitious customs; but let their refreshments be innocent, and charitable, and of good report, and not exclusive of the duties of religion.
8. Beyond these bounds, because neither God nor man has passed any obligation upon us, we must preserve our Christian liberty, and not suffer ourselves to be entangled with a yoke of bondage; for even a good action may become a snare to us, if we make it an occasion of scruple by a pretence of necessity, binding loads upon the conscience, not with the bands of God, but of men, and of fancy, or of opinion, or of tyranny. What soever is laid upon us by the hands of man must be acted and accounted of by the measures of a man: but our best measure is this; he keeps the Lord's day best that keeps it with most religion and with most charity.
9. What the church has done in the article of the resurrection, she has in some measure done in the other articles of the nativity, of the ascension, and of the descent of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost: and so great blessings deserve an anniversary solemnity; since he is a very unthankful person that does not often record them in the whole year, and esteem them the ground of his hopes, the object of his faith, the comfort of his troubles, and the great effluxes of the Divine mercy, greater than all the victories over our temporal enemies, for which all
glad persons usually give thanks. And if, with great reason, the memory of the resurrection does return solemnly every week, it is but reason the other should return once a year. To which I add, that the commemoration of the articles of our Creed in solemn days and offices is a very excellent instrument to convey and imprint the sense and memory of it upon the spirits of the most ignorant persons. For, as a picture may with more fancy convey a story to a man than a plain narrative either in word or writing, so a real representment, and an office of remembrance, and a day to declare it, is far more impressive than a picture, or any other art of making and fixing imagery.
10. The memories of the saints are precious to God, and therefore they ought also to be so to us; and such persons who serve God by holy living, industrious preaching, and religious dying, ought to have their names preserved in honor, and God be glorified in them, and their holy doctrines and lives published and imitated: and we, by so doing, give testimony to the article of the communion of saints. But, in these cases, as every church is to be sparing in the number of days, so also should she be temperate in her injunctions, not imposing them but upon voluntary and unbusied persons, without snare or burden. But the holy day is best kept by giving God thanks for the excellent persons, apostles, or martyrs, we then remember, and by imitating their lives: this all may do; and they that can also keep the solemnity must do that too, when it is publicly enjoined.
The mixed Actions of Religion are., 1. Prayer, 2. Alms, 3. Repentance, 4. Receiving the blessed Sacrament.
Section VII — Of Prayer.
THERE is no greater argument in the world of our spiritual danger and unwillingness to religion, than the backwardness which most men have always, and all men have sometimes, to say their prayers — so weary of their length, so glad when they are done, so witty to excuse and frustrate an opportunity: and yet all is nothing but a desiring of God to give us the greatest and the best things we can need, and which can make us happy: it is a work so easy, so honorable, and to so great purpose, that in all the instances of religion and providence, (except only the incarnation of his Son,) God has not given
us a greater argument of his willingness to have us saved, and of our unwillingness to accept it, his goodness and our gracelessness, his infinite condescension and our carelessness and folly, than by rewarding so easy a duty with so great blessings.
Motives to Prayer.
I cannot say any thing beyond this very consideration and its appendages to invite Christian people to pray often. But we may consider that, 1. It is a duty commanded by God and his holy Son. 2. It is an act of grace and highest honor, that we, dust and ashes, are admitted to speak to the eternal God, to run to him as to a father, to lay open our wants, to complain of our burdens, to explicate our scruples, to beg remedy and ease, support and counsel, health and safety, deliverance and salvation. And, 3. God has invited us to it by many gracious promises of hearing us. 4. He has appointed his most glorious Son to be the precedent of prayer, and to make continual intercession for us to the throne of grace. 5. He has appointed an angel to present the prayers of his servants. And, 6. Christ unites them to his own, and sanctifies them, and makes them effective and prevalent: and. 7. has put it into the hands of men to rescind, or alter, all the decrees of God, which are of one kind, (that is, conditional, and concerning ourselves and our final estate, and many instances of our intermedial or temporal,) by the power of prayers. 8. And the prayers of men have saved cities and kingdoms from ruin: prayer has raised dead men to life, has stopped the violence of fire, shut the mouths of wild beasts, has altered the course of nature, caused rain in Egypt, and drought in the sea: it made the sun to go from west to east, and the moon to stand still, and rocks and mountains to walk; and it cures diseases without physic, and makes physic to do the work of nature, and nature to do the work of grace, and grace to do the work of God; and it does miracles of accident and event: and yet prayer, that does all this, is, of itself, nothing but an ascent of the mind to God, a desiring things fit to be desired, and an expression of this desire to God as we can, and as becomes us. And our unwillingness to pray is nothing else but a not desiring what we ought passionately to long for; or, if we do desire it, it is a choosing rather to miss our satisfaction and felicity than to ask for it.
There is no more to be said in this affair, but that we reduce it to practice, according to the following rules: —
Rules for the Practice of Prayer.
1. We must be careful that we never ask any thing of God that is sinful, or that directly ministers to sin; for that is to ask God to dishonour himself, and to undo us. We had need consider what we pray; for before it returns in blessing it must be joined with Christ's intercession, and presented to God. Let us principally ask of God power and assistance to do our duty, to glorify God, to do good works, to live a good life, to die in the fear and favor of God and eternal life: these things God delights to give, and commands that we shall ask, and we may with confidence expect to be answered graciously; for these things are promised without any reservation of a secret condition: if we ask them, and do our duty towards the obtaining them, we are sure never to miss them.
2. We may lawfully pray to God for the gifts of the Spirit that minister to holy ends; such as are the gift of preaching, the spirit of prayer, good expression, a ready and un loosed tongue, good understanding, learning, opportunities to publish them, &c., with these only restraints: 1. That we can not be so confident of the event of those prayers as of the former. 2. That we must be curious to secure our intention in these desires, that we may not ask them to serve our own ends, but only for God's glory; and then we shall have them, or a blessing for desiring them. In order to such purposes our intentions in the first desires cannot be amiss; because they are able to sanctify other things, and therefore cannot be unhallowed themselves. 3. We must submit to God's will, desiring him to choose our employment, and to furnish our persons as he shall see expedient.
3. Whatsoever we may lawfully desire of temporal things, we may lawfully ask of God in prayer, and we may expect them, as they are promised. 1. Whatsoever is necessary to our life and being is promised to us: and therefore we may, with certainty, expect food and raiment; food to keep us alive, clothing to keep us from nakedness and shame: so long as our life is permitted to us, so long all things necessary to our life shall be ministered. We may be secure of maintenance,
but not secure of our life; for that is promised, not this: only concerning food and raiment we are not to make accounts by the measure of our desires, but by the measure of our needs. 2. Whatsoever is convenient for us, pleasant, and modestly delectable, we may pray for, so we do it, 1. With submission to God's will. 2. Without impatient desires. 3. That it be not a trifle and inconsiderable, but a matter so grave and concerning, as to be a fit matter to be treated on between God and our souls. 4. That we ask it not to spend upon our lusts, but for ends of justice, or charity, or religion, and that they be employed with sobriety.
4. He that would pray with effect must live with care and piety.1 For although God gives to sinners and evil persons the common blessings of life and chance, yet either they want the comfort and blessing of those blessings, or they become occasions of sadder accidents to them, or serve to upbraid them in their ingratitude or irreligion: and, in all cases, they are not the effects of prayer, or the fruits of promise, or instances of a father's love; for they cannot be expected with confidence, or received without danger, or used without a curse and mischief in their company. But as all sin is an impediment to prayer, so some have a special indisposition towards acceptation; such are uncharitableness and wrath, hypocrisy in the present action, pride and lust: because these, by defiling the body or the spirit, or by contradicting some necessary ingredient in prayer, (such as are mercy, humility, purity, and sincerity,) do defile the prayer, and make it a direct sin, in the circumstances or formality of the action.
5. All prayer must be made with faith and hope; that is, we must certainly believe2 we shall receive the grace which God has commanded us to ask; and we must hope for such things, which he has permitted us to ask, and our hope shall not be vain, though we miss what is not absolutely promised; because we shall at least have an equal blessing in the denial as in the grant. And, therefore, the former conditions must first be secured: that is, that we ask things necessary, or at least good and innocent and profitable, and that our persons be gracious in the eyes of God: or else, what God has proii. 8; Paal. xxxiv. 15; Ixvi. 18. 2 Mark xi. 24; James i. 6, 7.
raised to our natural needs he may, in many degrees, deny to our personal incapacity; but the thing being secured, and the person disposed, there can be no fault at all; for whatsoever else remains is on God's part, and that cannot possibly fail. But because the things which are not commanded cannot possibly be secured, (for we are not sure they are good in all circumstances,) we can but hope for such things, even after we have secured our good intentions. We are sure of a blessing, but in what instance we are not yet assured.
6. Our prayers must be fervent, intense, earnest, and im portunate, when we pray for things of high concernment and necessity. " Continuing instant in prayer; striving in prayer; laboring fervently in prayer; night and day praying exceedingly; praying always with all prayer: " so St. Paul calls it.3 "Watching to prayer:" so St. Peter.4 "Praying earnestly:" so St. James.5 And this is not at all to be abated in matters spiritual and of duty: for, according as our desires are, so are our prayers; and as our prayers are, so shall be the grace; and as that is, so shall be the measure of glory. But this admits of degrees according to the perfection or im perfection of our state of life; but it has no other measures, but ought to be as great as it can; the bigger the better: we must make no positive restraints upon ourselves. In other things we are to use a bridle; and as we must limit our desires with submission to God's will, so also we must limit the importunity of our prayers by the moderation and term of our desires. Pray for it as earnestly as you may desire it.
7. Our desires must be lasting, and our prayers frequent, assiduous, and continual; not asking for a blessing once, and then leaving it, but daily renewing our suits, and exercising our hope, and faith, and patience, and long-suffering, and religion, and resignation, and self-denial, in all the degrees we shall be put to. This circumstance of duty our blessed Sa viour taught, saying, that "men ought always to pray, and not to faint."6 Always to pray, signifies the frequent doing of the duty in general; but, because we cannot always ask several things, and we also have frequent need of the same things, and those are such as concern our great interest, the precept comes home to this very circumstance; and St. Paul
calls it " praying without ceasing;"7 and himself in his own case gave a precedent — " For this cause I besought the Lord thrice." And so did our blessed Lord: he went thrice to God on the same errand, with the same words, in a short space — about half a night; for his time to solicit his suit was but short. And the Philippians were remembered by the apostle, their spiritual father, " always in every prayer of his."8 And thus we must always pray for the pardon of our sins, for the assistance of God's grace, for charity, for life eternal, never giving over till we die; and thus also we pray for supply of great temporal needs in their several proportions; in all cases being curious we do not give over out of weariness or impatience; for God often defers to grant our suit, because he loves to hear us beg it, and has a design to give us more than we ask, even a satisfaction of our desires, and a blessing for the very importunity.
8. Let the words of our prayers be pertinent, grave, material, not studiously many, but according to our need, sufficient to express our wants, and to signify our importunity. God hears us not the sooner for our many words, but much the sooner for an earnest desire; to which let apt and sufficient words minister, be they few or many, according as it happens. A long prayer and a short differ not in their capacities of be ing accepted, for both of them take their value according to the fervency of spirit, and the charity of the prayer. That prayer which is short by reason of an impatient spirit, or dulness, or despite of holy things, or indifferency of desires, is very often criminal, always imperfect: and that prayer which is long out of ostentation, or superstition, or a trifling spirit, is as criminal and imperfect as the other in their several instances. This rule relates to private prayer. In public, our devotion is to be measured by the appointed office, and we are to support our spirit with spiritual arts, that our private spirit may be a part of the public spirit, and be adopted into the society and blessings of the communion of saints.
9. In all forms of prayer mingle petition with thanksgiving, that you may endear the present prayer and the future blessing, by returning praise and thanks for what we have already received. This is St. Paul's advice — " Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanks giving let your requests be made known to God."9
10. Whatever we beg of God. let us also work for it, if the thing be matter of duty, or a consequent to industry; for God loves to bless labor and to reward it, but not to support idleness.10 And therefore our blessed Savior in his sermons joins watchfulness with prayer, for God's graces are but assistances, not new creations of the whole habit, in every instant or period of our life. Read Scriptures, and then pray to God for understanding. Pray against temptation; but you must also resist the devil, and then he will flee from you. Ask of God competency of living; but you must also work with your hands the things that are honest, that you may have to supply in time of need. We can but do our endeavor, and pray for blessing, and then leave the success with God; and beyond this we cannot deliberate, we cannot take care — but, so far, we must.
11. To this purpose let every man study his prayers and read his duty in his petitions. For the body of our prayer is the sum of our duty, and as we must ask of God whatsoever we need, so we must labor for all that we ask. Because it is our duty, therefore we must pray for God's grace; but because God's grace is necessary, and without it we can do nothing, we are sufficiently taught, that in the proper matter of our religious prayers is the just matter of our duty; and if we shall turn our prayers into precepts, we shall the easier turn our hearty desires into effective practices.
12. In all our prayers we must be careful to attend our present work,11 having a present mind, not wandering upon impertinent things, not distant from our words, much less contrary to them; and if our thoughts do at any time wander, and divert upon other objects, bring them back again with prudent and severe arts — by all means striving to obtain a diligent, a sober, an untroubled, and a composed spirit.
13. Let your posture and gesture of body in prayers be reverent, grave, and humble: according to public order, or the best examples, if it be in public: if it be in private, either stand or kneel, or lie flat upon the ground on your face, in your ordinary and more solemn prayers; but in extraordinary, casual, and ejaculatory prayers, the reverence and devotion of
the soul, and the lifting up the eyes and hands to God with any other posture not indecent, is usual and commendable; for we may pray in bed, on horseback, "every where,"12 and at all times, and in all circumstances; and it is well if we do so: and some servants have not opportunity to pray so often as they would, unless they supply the appetites of religion by such accidental devotions.
14. " Let prayers, and supplications, and giving of thanks be made for all men; for kings, and all that are in authority; for this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Sa viour."13 We, who must love our neighbors as ourselves, must also pray for them as for ourselves, with this only difference, that we may enlarge in our temporal desires for kings, and pray for secular prosperity to them with more importunity than for ourselves; because they need more to enable their duty and government, and for the interests of religion and justice. This part of prayer is by the apostle called intercession; in which, with special care, we are to remember our relatives, our family, our charge, our benefactors, our creditors, not forgetting to beg pardon and charity for our enemies, and protection against them.
15. Rely not on a single prayer in matters of great con cernment; but make it as public as you can, by obtaining of others to pray for you — this being the great blessing of the communion of saints, that a prayer united is strong, like a well-ordered army; and God loves to be tied fast with such cords of love, and constrained by a holy violence.
16. Every time that is not seized upon by some other duty is seasonable enough for prayer; but let it be performed as a solemn duty morning and evening, that God may begin and end all our business, that " the outgoing of the morning and evening may praise him,"— for so we bless God, and God blesses us. And yet fail not to find or make opportunities to worship God at some other times of the day, at least by ejaculations and short addresses, more or less, longer or shorter, solemnly or without solemnity, privately or publicly, as you can, or are permitted; always remembering, that as every sin is a degree of danger and unsafety, so every pious prayer and wellemployed opportunity is a degree of return to hope and pardon.
Cautions for making Vows.
17. A vow to God is an act of prayer, and a great degree and instance of opportunity, and an increase of duty by some new uncommanded instance, or some more eminent degree of duty, or frequency of action, or earnestness of spirit in the same. And because it has pleased God, in all ages of the world, to admit of intercourse with his servants in the matters of vows, it is not ill advice that we make vows to God in such cases in which we have great need or great danger. But let it be done according to these rules and by these cautions.
1. That the matter of the vow be lawful. 2. That it be useful in order to religion or charity. 3. That it be grave, not trifling or impertinent; but great in our proportion of duty towards the blessing. 4. That it be an uncommanded instance; that is, that it be of something, or in some manner, or in some degree, to which formerly we were not obliged, or which we might have omitted without sin. 5. That it be done with prudence; that is, that it be safe in all the circumstances of person, lest we beg a blessing and fall into a snare. 6. That every vow of a new action be also accompanied with a new degree and enforcement of our essential and unalterable duty — such as was Jacob's vow, that (besides the payment of a tithe) God should be his God; that so he might strengthen his duty to him, first in essentials and precepts, and then in additionals and accidentals. For it is but an ill tree that spends more in leaves, and suckers, and gums, than in fruit; and that thank fulness and religion is best that first secures duty and then en larges in counsels. Therefore let every great prayer, and great need, and great danger, draw us nearer to God by the approach of a pious purpose to live more strictly; and let every mercy of God answering that prayer produce a real performance of it. 7. Let not young beginners in religion enlarge their hearts and straiten their liberty by vows of long conti nuance; nor, indeed, any one else, without a great experience of himself and of all accidental dangers.14 Vows of single actions are safest, and proportionable to those single blessings
ever begged in such cases of sudden and transient importuni ties. 8. Let no action which is matter of question and dispute in religion ever become the matter of a vow. He vows foolishly that promises to God to live and die in such an opinion in an article not necessary nor certain; or that, upon confidence of his present guide, binds himself for ever to the profession of what he may afterwards more reasonably contradict, or may find not to be useful, or not profitable, but of some danger or of no necessity.
If we observe the former rules we shall pray piously and effectually; but because even this duty has in it some special temptations, it is necessary that we be armed by special reme dies against them. The dangers are, 1. Wandering thoughts; 2. Tediousness of spirit. Against the first these advices are profitable.
Remedies against Wandering Thoughts in Prayer.
If we feel our spirits apt to wander in our prayers, and to retire into the world, or to things unprofitable, or vain and impertinent;
1. Use prayer to be assisted in prayer; pray for the spirit of supplication, for a sober, fixed, and recollected spirit; and when to this you add a moral industry to be steady in your thoughts, whatsoever wanderings after this do return irreme diably are a misery of nature and an imperfection, but no sin, while it is not cherished and indulged to.
2. In private it is not amiss to attempt the cure by reducing your prayers into collects and short forms of prayer, making voluntary interruptions, and beginning again, that the want of spirit and breath may be supplied by the short stages and periods.
3. When you have observed any considerable wanderings of your thoughts, bind yourself to repeat that prayer again with actual attention, or else revolve the full sense of it in your spirit, and repeat it in all the effect and desires of it; and, possibly, the tempter may be driven away with his own art, and may cease to interpose his trifles when he perceives they do but vex the person into carefulness and piety; and yet he loses nothing of his devotion, but doubles the earnestness of his care.
4. If this be not seasonable or opportune, or apt to any
man's circumstances, yet be sure, with actual attention, to say a hearty Amen to the whole prayer with one united desire, earnestly begging the graces mentioned in the prayer; for that desire does the great work of the prayer, and secures the blessing, if the wandering thoughts were against our will, and disclaimed by contending against them.
5. Avoid multiplicity of businesses of the world; and in those that are unavoidable, labor for an evenness and tranquillity of spirit, that you may be untroubled and smooth in all tempests of fortune; for so we shall better tend religion when we are not torn in pieces with the cares of the world, and seized upon with low affections, passions, and interest.
6. It helps much to attention and actual advertisement in our prayers, if we say our prayers silently, without the voice, only by the spirit. For, in mental prayer, if our thoughts wander we only stand still; when our mind returns we go on again — there is none of the prayer lost, as it is if our mouths speak and our hearts wander.
7. To incite you to the use of these, or any other counsels you shall meet with, remember that it is a great indecency to desire of God to hear those prayers a great part of which we do not hear ourselves. If they be not worthy of our attention they are far more unworthy of God's.
Signs of Tediousness of Spirit in our Prayers and all Actions of Religion.
The second temptation in our prayer is a tediousness of spirit or a weariness of the employment; like that of the Jews, who complained that they were weary of the new moons, and their souls loathed the frequent return of their sabbaths: so do very many Christians, who first pray without fervor and earnestness of spirit; and, secondly, meditate but seldom, and that without fruit, or sense, or affection; or, thirdly, who seldom examine their consciences, and when they do it, they do it but sleepily, slightly, without compunction, or hearty purpose, or fruits of amendment. 4. They enlarge themselves in the thoughts and fruition of temporal things, running for comfort to them only in any sadness and misfortune. 5. They love not to frequent the sacraments, nor any the instruments of religion, as sermons, confessions, prayers in public, fastings; but love ease and a loose undisciplined
life. 6. They obey not their superiors, but follow their own judgment when their judgment follows their affections, and their affections follow sense and worldly pleasures. 7. They neglect, or dissemble, or defer, or do not attend to the mo tions and inclinations to virtue which the Spirit of God puts into their soul. 8. They repent them of their vows and holy purposes, not because they discover any.indiscretion in them, or intolerable inconvenience, but because they have within them labor, (as the case now stands,) to them displeasure. 9. They content themselves with the first degrees and necessary parts of virtue; and when they are arrived thither, they sit down as if they were come to the mountain of the Lord, and care not to proceed on toward perfection. 10. They inquire into all cases in which it may be lawful to omit a duty; and, though they will not do less than they are bound to, yet they will do no more than needs must; for they do out of fear and self-love, not out of the love of God, or the spirit of holiness and zeal. The event of which will be this: he that will do no more than needs must, will soon be brought to omit some thing of his duty, and will be apt to believe less to be neces* sary than is.
Remedies against Tediousness of Spirit. The remedies against this temptation are these.
1. Order your private devotions so that they become not arguments and causes of tediousness by their indiscreet length, but reduce your words into a narrow compass, still keeping all the matter; and what is cut off in the length of your prayers supply in the earnestness of your spirit; for so no thing is lost, while the words are changed into matter, and length of time into fervency of devotion. The forms are made not the less perfect, and the spirit is more, and the scruple is removed.
2. It is not imprudent, if we provide variety of forms of prayer to the same purposes, that the change, by consulting with the appetites of fancy, may better entertain the spirit; and, possibly, we may be pleased to recite a hymn when a collect seems flat to us and unpleasant; and we are willing to sing rather than to say, or to sing this rather than that: we are certain that variety is delightful; and whether that be natural to us, or an imperfection, yet if it be complied with, it may remove some part of the temptation.
3. Break your office and devotion into fragments, and make frequent relurnings by ejaculation and abrupt intercourses with God; for so no length can oppress your tenderness and sickliness of spirit: and, by often praying in such manner and in all circumstances, we shall habituate our souls to prayer by making it the business of many lesser portions of our time: and by thrusting in between all our other employments, it will make every thing relish of religion, and by degrees turn all into its nature.
4. Learn to abstract your thoughts and desires from pleasures and things of the world; for nothing is a direct cure to this evil but cutting off all other loves and adherences. Order your affairs so that religion may be propounded to you as a reward, and prayer as your defense, and holy actions as your security, and charity and good works as your treasure. Consider that all things else are satisfactions but to the brutish part of a man; and that these are the refreshments and re lishes of that noble part of us by which we are better than beasts; and whatsoever other instrument, exercise, or consideration, is of use to take our loves from the world, the same is apt to place them upon God.
5. Do not seek for deliciousness and sensible consolations in the actions of religion, but only regard the duty and the conscience of it; for although in the beginning of religion most frequently, and at some other times irregularly, God complies with our infirmity, and encourages our duty with little overflowings of spiritual joy, and sensible pleasure, and delicacies in prayer, so as we seem to feel some little beam of heaven and great refreshments from the spirit of consolation, yet this is not always safe for us to have, neither safe for us to expect and look for; and when we do, it is apt to make us cool in our inquiries and waitings upon Christ when we want them: it is a running after him, not for the miracles but for the loaves; not for the wonderful things of God, and the desires of pleasing him, but for the pleasures of pleasing our selves. And as we must not judge our devotion to be barren or unfruitful when we want the overflowings of joy running over, so neither must we cease for want of them. If our spirits can serve God choosingly and greedily out of pure conscience of our duty, it is better in itself and more safe to us.
6. Let him use to soften his spirit with frequent meditation
p
upon sad and dolorous objects, as of death, the terrors of the day of judgment, fearful judgments upon sinners, strange horrid accidents, fear of God's wrath, the pains of hell, the unspeakable amazements of the damned, the intolerable load of sad eternity: for whatsoever creates fear, or makes the spirit to dwell in a religious sadness, is apt to entender the spirit and make it devout and pliant to any part of duty; for a great fear, when it is ill managed, is the parent of superstition; but a discreet and well-guided fear produces religion.
7. Pray often, and you shall pray oftener; and when you are accustomed to a frequent devotion, it will so insensibly unite to your nature and affections, that it will become trouble to omit your usual or appointed prayers; and what you obtain at first by doing violence to your inclinations, at last will not be left without as great unwillingness as that by which at first it entered. This rule relies not only upon reason derived from the nature of habits, which turn into a second nature, and make their actions easy, frequent, and delightful: but it relies upon a reason depending upon the nature and constitution of grace, whose productions are of the same nature with the parent, and increases itself, naturally growing from grains to huge trees, from minutes to vast proportions, and from moments to eternity. But be sure not to omit your usual prayers without great reason, though without sin it may be done; because after you have omitted something, in a little while you will be past the scruple of that, and begin to be tempted to leave out more. Keep yourself up to your usual forms — you may enlarge when you will; but do not contract or lessen them without a very probable reason.
8. Let a man frequently and seriously, by imagination, place himself upon his death-bed, and consider what great joys he shall have for the remembrance of every day well spent, and what then he would give that he had so spent all his days. He may guess at it by proportions; for it is certain he shall have a joyful and prosperous night who has spent his day holily; and he resigns his soul with peace into the hands of God, who has lived in the peace of God and the works of religion in his life-time. This consideration is of a real event; it is of a thing that will certainly come to pass. " It is appointed for all men once to die; and after death" comes "judgment;" the apprehension of which is dreadful, and the pre-
sence of it is intolerable; unless, by religion and sanctity, we are disposed for so venerable an appearance.
9. To this may be useful that we consider the easiness of Christ's yoke,15 the excellences and sweetnesses that are in religion, the peace of conscience, the joy of the Holy Ghost, the rejoicing in God, the simplicity and pleasure of virtue, the intricacy, trouble, and business of sin; the blessings and health, and reward of that; the curses, the sicknesses, and sad consequences of this; and that, if we are weary of the la bours of religion, we must eternally sit still and do nothing; for whatsoever we do contrary to it is infinitely more full of labor, care, difficulty, and vexation.
10. Consider this also, that tediousness of spirit is the beginning of the most dangerous condition and estate in the whole world. For it is a great disposition to the sin against the Holy Ghost: it is apt to bring a man to backsliding and the state of unregeneration; to make him return to his vomit and his sink; and either to make the man impatient, or his condition scrupulous, unsatisfied, irksome, and desperate: and it is better that he had never known the way of godliness, than, after the knowledge of it, that he should fall away. There is not in the world a greater sign that the spirit of re probation is beginning upon a man, than when he is habitually and constantly, or very frequently, weary, and slights or loathes holy offices.
1 1. The last remedy that preserves the hope of such a man, and can reduce him to the state of zeal and the love of God, is a pungent, sad, and a heavy affliction; not desperate, but recreated with some intervals of kindness, or little comforts, or entertained with hopes of deliverance; which condition, if a man shall fall into, by the grace of God he is likely to recover; but, if this help him not, it is infinite odds but he will quench the Spirit.
Section VIII — Of Alms.
LOVE is as communicative as fire, as busy and as active, and it has four twin daughters, extreme like each other; and but that the doctors of the school have done, as Thamar's midwife did, who bound a scarlet thread, something to dis-
15 See the Great Exemplar, Part iii. Disc, xiv., of the Easiness of Christian Religion.
tinguish them, it would be very hard to call them asunder. Their names are, 1. Mercy; 2. Beneficence, or well-doing; 3. Liberality; and, 4. Alms; which, by a special privilege, has obtained to be called after the mother's name, and is commonly called Charity. The first,' or eldest, is seated in the affection: and it is that which all the other must attend; for mercy without alms is acceptable when the person is disabled to express outwardly what he heartily desires. But alms without mercy are like prayers without devotion, or religion without humility. 2. Beneficence, or well-doing, is a promptness and nobleness of mind, making us to do offices of courtesy and humanity to all sorts of persons in their need, or out of their need. 3. Liberality is a disposition of mind opposite to covetousness; and consists in the despite and neglect of money upon just occasions, and relates to our friends, children, kin dred, servants, and other relatives. 4. But alms is a relieving the poor and needy. — The first and the last only are duties of Christianity. The second and third are circumstances and adjuncts of these duties; for liberality increases the degree of alms, making our gift greater; and beneficence extends it to more persons and orders of men, spreading it wider. The former makes us sometimes to give more than we are able; and the latter gives to more than need by the necessity of beg gars, and serves the needs and conveniences of persons, and supplies circumstances; whereas, properly, alms are doles and largesses to the necessitous and calamitous people, supplying the necessities of nature, and giving remedies to their miseries. Mercy and alms are the body and soul of that charity which we must pay to our neighbor's need; and it is a precept which God therefore enjoined to the world, that the great in equality which he was pleased to suffer in the possessions and accidents of men might be reduced to some temper and evenness, and the most miserable person might be reconciled to some sense and participation of felicity.
Works of Mercy, or the several Kinds of corporal Alms.
The works of mercy are so many as the affections of mercy have objects, or as the world has kinds of misery. Men want meat, or drink, or clothes, or a house, or liberty, or attendance, or a grave. In proportion to these, seven works are usually assigned to mercy, and there are seven kinds of corporal alms
reckoned: 1. To feed the hungry;1 2. To give drink to the thirsty; 3. Or clothes to the naked; 4. To redeem captives; 5. To visit the sick; 6. To entertain strangers; 7. To bury the dead.2 But many more may be added. Such as are, 8. To give physic to sick persons; 9. To bring cold and starved people to warmth and to the fire — for sometimes clothing will not do it, or this may be done when we cannot do the other; 10. To lead the blind in right ways; 11. To lend money; 12. To forgive debts; 13. To remit forfeitures; 14. To mend highways and bridges; 15. To reduce or guide wandering travellers; 1 6. To ease their labors by accommodating their work with apt instruments, or their journey with beasts of carriage; 17. To deliver the poor from their oppressors; 18. To die for my brother;3 19. To pay maidens' dowries, and to procure for them honest and chaste marriages.
Works of Spiritual Alms and Mercy are —
1. To teach the ignorant; 2. To counsel doubting persons; 3. To admonish sinners diligently, prudently, seasonably, and charitably; to which also may be reduced, provoking and encouraging to good works;4 4. To comfort the afflicted; o. To pardon offenders; 6. To suffer and support the weak; 5 7. To pray for all estates of men, and for relief to all their necessities. To which may be added, 8. To punish or correct refrac toriness; 9. To be gentle and charitable in censuring the actions of others; 10. To establish the scrupulous, wavering, and inconstant spirits; 1 1. To confirm the strong; 12. Not to give scandal; 13. To quit a man of his fear; 14. To redeem maidens from prostitution and publication of their bodies.6
To both these kinds a third also may be added of a mixed nature, partly corporal, and partly spiritual: such are, 1. Re conciling enemies;7 2. Erecting public schools of learning; 3. Maintaining lectures of divinity; 4. Erecting colleges of religion and retirement from the noises and more frequent temptations of the world; 5. Finding employment for un-
Quod pro fratre mori vellet uterque prior. — Mart.
busied persons, and putting children to honest trades. For the particulars of mercy or alms cannot be narrower than men's needs are; and the old method of alms is too narrow to comprise them all; and yet the kinds are too many to be dis coursed of particularly; only our blessed Savior, in the pre cept of alms, uses the instances of relieving the poor, and forgiveness of injuries; and by proportion to these, the rest, whose duty is plain, simple, easy, and necessary, may be determined. But alms in general are to be disposed of according to the following rules: —
Rules for giving Alms.
1. Let no man do alms of that which is none of his own;8 for of that he is to make restitution; that is due to the owners, not to the poor: for every man has need of his own, and that is first to be provided for; and then you must think of the needs of the poor. He that gives the poor what is not his own, makes himself a thief, and the poor to be the receivers. This is not to be understood as if it were unlawful for a man that is not able to pay his debts to give smaller alms to the poor. He may not give such portions as can in any sense more disable him to do justice;9 but such which if they were saved could not advance the other duty, may retire to this, and do here what they may, since, in the other duty, they cannot do what they should. But, generally, cheaters and robbers cannot give alms of what they have cheated and robbed, unless they cannot tell the persons whom they have injured, or the proportions; and, in such cases, they are to give those unknown portions to the poor by way of restitution, for it is no alms; only God is the supreme Lord to whom those escheats devolve, and the poor are his receivers.
2. Of money unjustly taken, and yet voluntarily parted with, we may, and are bound, to give alms; such as is money given and taken for false witness, bribes, simoniacal contracts; because the receiver has no right to keep it, nor the giver any right to recall it; it is unjust money, and yet payable to none but the supreme Lord, (who is the person injured,) and to his delegates, that is, the poor. To which I insert these cautions: 1. If the person injured by the unjust sentence of
a bribed judge, or by false witness, be poor, he is the proper object and bosom to whom the restitution is to be made. 2. In the case of simony 10 the church, to whom the simony was injurious, is the lap into which the restitution is to be poured; and if it be poor and out of repair, the alms, or restitution, (shall I call it?) are to be paid to it.
3. There is some sort of gain that has in it no injustice, properly so called; but it is unlawful and filthy lucre; such as is money taken for work done unlawfully upon the Lord's day; hire taken for disfiguring oneself, and for being professed jesters; the wages of such as make unjust bargains, and of harlots. Of this money there is some preparation to be made before it be given in alms: the money is infected with the plague, and must pass through the fire or the water before it be fit for alms; the person must repent and leave the crime, and then minister to the poor.
4. He that gives alms must do it in mercy; that is, out of a true sense of the calamity of his brother, first feeling it in himself in some proportion, and then endeavoring to ease himself and the other of their common calamity.11 Against this rule they offend who give alms out of custom, or to up braid the poverty of the other, or to make him mercenary and obliged, or with any unhandsome circumstances.
5. He that gives alms must do it with a single eye and heart; that is, without designs to get the praise of men; and if he secures that, he may either give them publicly or privately: for Christ intended only to provide against pride and hypocrisy when he bade alms to be given in secret: it being otherwise one of his commandments, " that our light should shine before men:" this is more excellent; that is more safe.
6. To this also appertains that he who has done a good turn should so forget it as not to speak of it;12 but he that boasts it, or upbraids it, has paid himself, and lost the nobleness of the charity.
7. Give alms with a cheerful heart and countenance; " not grudgingly or of necessity, for God loves a cheerful giver;" 13 and therefore give quickly when the power is in your hand, and the need is in your neighbor, and your neighbor at the door. He gives twice that relieves speedily.
8. According to your ability give to all men that need; 14 and in equal needs, give first to good men rather than to bad men: and if the needs be unequal, do so too, provided that the need of the poorest be not violent or extreme; but, if an evil man be in extreme necessity, he is to be relieved rather than a good man who can wait longer, and may subsist without it; and if he be a good man, he will desire it should be so, because himself is bound to save the life of his brother with doing some inconvenience to himself; and no difference of virtue or vice can make the ease of one beggar equal with the life of another.
9. Give no alms to vicious persons, if such alms will sup port their sin: as if they will continue in idleness; " if they will not work, neither let them eat;" l5 or if they will spend it in drunkenness,16 or wantonness: such persons, when they are reduced to very great want, must be relieved in such proportions as may not relieve their dying lust, but may refresh their faint or dying bodies.
10. The best objects of charity are, poor housekeepers that labor hard, and are burdened with many children; or gentle men fallen into sad poverty, especially if by innocent misfortune (and if their crimes brought them into it, yet they are to be relieved according to the former rule); persecuted persons; widows, and fatherless children, putting them to honest trades or schools of learning. And search into the needs of numerous and meaner families,17 for there are many persons that have nothing left them but misery and modesty; and toAvards such we must add two circumstances of charity: 1. To inquire them out; 2. To convey our relief to them so as we do not make them ashamed.
11. Give, looking for nothing again; that is, without consideration of future advantages: give to children, to old men, to the unthankful, and the dying, and to those you shall never see again; for else your alms or courtesy is not charity, but traffic and merchandise; and be sure that you omit not to relieve the needs of your enemy and the injurious; for so, posnon porta sella, biada non si crivella.
Trin.
sibly, you may win him to yourself; but do you intend the winning him to God.
12. Trust not your alms to intermedial, uncertain, and under dispensers: by which rule is not only intended the securing your alms in the right channel, but the humility of your person, and that which the apostle calls " the labor of love." And if you converse in hospitals and alms-houses, and minis ter with your own hand what your heart has first decreed, you Avill find your heart endeared and made familiar with the needs and with the persons of the poor, those excellent images of Christ.
13. Whatsoever is superfluous in your estate is to be dis pensed in alms.18 " He that has two coats must give to him that has none;" that is, he that has beyond his need must give that which is beyond it. Only among needs, we are to reckon not only what will support our life, but also what will maintain the decency of our estate and person, not only in present needs, but in all future necessities, and very probable contingencies, but no further; we are not obliged beyond this, unless we see very great, public, and calamitous necessities. But yet, if Ave do extend beyond our measures, and give more than we are able, we have the Philippians and many holy persons for our precedent; we have St. Paul for our encouragement; we have Christ for our counsellor; we Have God for our rewarder; and a great treasure in heaven for our recompence and restitution. But I propound it to the consideration of all Christian people, that they be not nice and curious, fond and indulgent to themselves in taking accounts of their personal conveniences; and that they make their pro portions moderate and easy, according to the order and man ner of Christianity; and the consequent will be this, that the poor will more plentifully be relieved, themselves will be more able to do it, and the duty will be less chargeable, and the owners of estates charged with fewer accounts in the spending them. It cannot be denied, but in the expenses of all liberal and great personages, many things might be spared: some superfluous servants, some idle meetings, some unnecessary and imprudent feasts, some garments too costly, some unnecessary law-suits, some vain journeys; and when we are tempted
Praemonstro tibi
to such needless expenses, if we shall descend to moderation, and lay aside the surplusage, we shall find it with more profit to be laid out upon the poor members of Christ than upon our own with vanity. But this is only intended to be an advice in the manner of doing alms; for I am not ignorant that great variety of clothes always have been permitted to princes and nobility, and others in their proportion; and they usually give those clothes as rewards to servants, and other persons needful enough, and then they may serve their own fancy, and their duty too; but it is but reason and religion to be careful that they be given to such only where duty, or prudent liberality, or alms determine them; but, in no sense, let them do it so as to minister to vanity, to luxury, to prodigality. The like also is to be observed in other instances; and if we once give our minds to the study and arts of alms, we shall find ways enough to make this duty easy, profitable, and useful.
1. He that plays at any game must resolve beforehand to be indifferent to win or lose; but if he gives to the poor all that he wins, it is better than to keep it to himself; but it were better yet that he lay by so much as he is willing to lose, and let the game alone, and, by giving so much alms, traffic for eternity. That is one way.
2. Another is keeping the fasting-days of the church, which, if our condition be such as to be able to cast our accounts, and make abatements for our wanting so many meals in the whole year, (which by the old appointment did amount to one hundred and fifty-three, and since most of them are fallen into desuetude, we may make up as many of them as we please by voluntary fasts,) we may, from hence, find a considerable relief for the poor. But if we be not willing sometimes to fast, that our brother may eat, we should ill die for him. St. Martin had given all that he had in the world to the poor save one coat; and that also he divided between two beggars. A father in the mount of Nitria was reduced at last to the inventory of one Testament, and that book also was tempted from him by the needs of one whom he thought poorer than himself. Greater yet: St. Paulinus sold himself to slavery to redeem a young man for whose captivity his mother wept sadly; and it is said that St. Katherine sucked the envenomed wounds of a villain who had injured her most impudently. And I shall tell you of a greater charity than all these put together: Christ
gave himself to shame and death to redeem his enemies from bondage, and death, and hell.
3. Learn of the frugal man, and only avoid sordid actions, and turn good husband, and change your arts of getting into providence for the poor, and we shall soon become rich in good works: and why should we not do as much for charity, as for covetousness; for heaven, as for the fading world; for God and the holy Jesus, as for the needless superfluities of back and belly?
14. In giving alms to beggars and persons of that low rank, it is better to give little to each, that we may give to the more; so extending our alms to many persons: but in charities of religion, as building hospitals, colleges, and houses for devotion, and supplying the accidental wants of decayed persons, fallen from great plenty to great necessity, it is better to unite our alms than to disperse them; to make a noble relief or maintenance to one, and to restore him -to comfort, than to support only his natural needs, and keep him alive only, unrescued from sad discomforts.
lo. The precept of alms or charity binds not indefinitely to all the instances and kinds of charity: for he that delights to feed the poor, and spends all his portion that way, is not bound to enter into prisons and redeem captives; but we are obliged by the presence of circumstances, and the special disposition of Providence, and the pitiableness of an object, to this or that particular act of charity.' The eye is the sense of mercy, and the bowels are its organ; and that enkindles pity, and pity produces alms: when the eye sees what it never saw, the heart will think what it never thought; but when we have an object present to our eye, then we must pity; for there the providence of God has fitted our charity with circumstances. He that is in your sight, or in your neighborhood, is fallen into the lot of your charity.
16. If you have no money,19 yet you must have mercy, and art bound to pity the poor, and pray for them, and throw your holy desires and devotions into the treasure of the church; and if you do what you are able, be it little or great, corporal or spiritual, the charity of alms or the charity of prayers, a cup of wine or a cup of water, if it be but love to the brethren,20
or a desire to help all or any of Christ's poor, it shall be accepted according to that a man has, not according to that he has not.21 For love is all this, and all the other commandments; and it will express itself where it can; and where it cannot, yet it is love still; and it is also sorrow that it cannot.
Motives to Charity.
The motives to this duty are such, as Holy Scripture has propounded to us by way of consideration and proposition of its excellences and consequent reward. 1. There is no one duty which our blessed Savior did recommend to his disciples with so repeated an injunction as this of charity and alms.2'2 To which add the words spoken by our Lord, " It is better to give than to receive." And when we consider how great a blessing it is that we beg not from door to door, it is a ready instance of our thankfulness to God, for his sake to relieve them that do. 2. This duty is that alone whereby the future day of judgment shall be transacted. For nothing but charity and alms is that whereby Christ shall declare the justice and mercy of the eternal sentence. Martyrdom itself is not there expressed, and no otherwise involved, but as it is the greatest charity. 3. Christ made himself the greatest and daily example of alms or charity. He went up and down doing good, preaching the gospel, and healing all diseases: and God the Father is imitable by us in nothing but in purity and mercy. 4. Alms given to the poor redound to the emolument of the giver both temporal and eternal.23 5. They are instrumental to the re mission of sins; our forgiveness and mercy to others being made the very rule "and proportion of our confidence and hope, and our prayer to be forgiven ourselves.24 6. It is a treasure in heaven; it procures friends when we die. It is reckoned as done to Christ, whatsoever we do to our poor brother; and, therefore, when a poor man begs for Christ's sake, if he have reason to ask for Christ's sake, give it him if you can. Now every man has title to ask for Christ's sake whose need is great, and himself unable to cure it, and if the man be a Chris tian. Whatsoever charity Christ will reward, all that is given for Christ's sake, and therefore it may be asked in his name; but every man that uses that sacred name for an endearment
has not a title to it, neither he nor his need. 7. It is one of the wings of prayer, by which it flies to the throne of grace. 8. It crowns all the works of piety.25 9. It causes thanks giving to God on our behalf: 10. And the bowels of the poor bless us, and they pray for us. 11. And that portion of our estate out of which a tenth, or a fifth, or a twentieth, or some offering to God for religion and the poor goes forth, certainly re turns with a great blessing upon all the rest. It is like the effusion of oil by the Sidonian woman; as long as she pours into empty vessels it could never cease running; or like the widow's barrel of meal, it consumed not as long as she fed the prophet. 12. The sum of all is contained in the words of our blessed Savior: " Give alms of such things as you have, and behold all things are clean to you." 13. To which may be added, that charity or mercy is the peculiar character of God's elect, and a sign of predestination, which advantage we are taught by St. Paul: " Put on, therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercy, kindness, &c. Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any."26 The result of all which we may read in the words of St. Chrysostom: " To know the art of alms is greater than to be crowned with the diadem of kings. And yet to convert one soul is greater than to pour out ten thousand talents into the baskets of the poor."
But because giving alms is an act of the virtue of mercifulness, our endeavor must be, by proper arts, to mortify the parents of unmercifulness, which are, 1. Envy; 2. Anger; 3. Covetousness: in which we may be helped by the following rules or instruments: —
Remedies against Unmercifulness and Uncharitableness. 1. Against Envy, by way of consideration.
Against envy I shall use the same argument I would use to persuade a man from the fever or the dropsy. 1. Because it is a disease; it is so far from having pleasure in it or a temptation to it, that it is full of pain, a great instrument of vexation: it eats the flesh and dries up the marrow, and makes hollow eyes and lean cheeks and a pale face. 2. It is nothing but a direct resolution never to enter into heaven by the way
of noble pleasure taken in the good of others. 3. It is most contrary to God. 4. And a just contrary state to the felicities and actions of heaven, where every star increases the light of the other, and the multitudes of guests at the supper of the Lanib makes the eternal meal more festival. 5. It is perfectly the state of hell and the passion of devils; for they do nothing but despair in themselves,27 and envy others' quiet or safety, and yet cannot rejoice either in their good or in their evil, al though they endeavor to hinder that and procure this with all the devices and arts of malice and of a great understanding. 6. Envy can serve no end in the world: it cannot please any thing, nor do any thing, nor hinder any thing, but the content and felicity of him that has it. 7. Envy, can never pre tend to justice, as hatred and uncharitableness sometimes may: for there may be causes of hatred, and I may have wrong done me, and then hatred has some pretence, though no j ust argument. But no man is unjust or injurious for being prosperous or wise. 8. And therefore many men profess to hate another, but no man owns envy, as being an enmity and dis pleasure for no cause, but goodness or felicity: envious men being like cantharides and caterpillars, that delight most to devour ripe and most excellent fruits.28 9. It is of all crimes the basest: for malice and anger are appeased with benefits, but envy is exasperated, as envying to fortunate persons both their power and their will to do good, and never leaves murmuring till the envied person be levelled, and then only the vulture leaves to eat the liver. For if his neighbor be made miserable, the envious man is apt to be troubled; like him that is so long unbuilding the turrets, till all the roof is low or flat, or that the stones fall upon the lower buildings and do a mischief, that the man repents of.
2. Remedies against Anger, by way of exercise.
The next enemy to mercifulness and the grace of alms is anger; against which there are proper instruments both in prudence and religion.
1. Prayer is the great remedy against anger: for it must suppose it, in some degree, removed before we pray, and then
it is the more likely it will be finished when the prayer is done. We must lay aside the act of anger as a preparatory to prayer; and the curing the habit will be the effect and blessing of prayer: so that if a man, to cure his anger, resolves to ad dress himself to God by prayer, it is first necessary that, by his own observation and diligence, he lay the anger aside before his prayer can be fit to be presented; and when we so pray, and so endeavor, we have all the blessings of prayer which God has promised to it to be our security for success.
2. If anger arises in your breast, instantly seal up your lips and let it not go forth; 29 for, like fire when it wants vent, it will suppress itself. It is good, in a fever, to have a tender and a smooth tongue; but it is better that it be so in anger: for if it be rough and distempered, there it is an ill sign, but here it is an ill cause. Angry passion is a fire, and angry words are like breath to fan them together; they are like steel and flint sending out fire by mutual collision. Some men will discourse themselves into passion; and if their neighbor be enkindled too, together they flame with rage and violence.
3. Humility is the most excellent natural cure for anger in the world; for he that, by daily considering his own infirmi ties and failings, makes the error of his neighbor or servant to be his own case, and remembers that he daily needs God's pardon and his brother's charity, will not be apt to rage at the levities, or misfortunes, or indiscretions of another, greater than which he considers that he is very frequently and more inexcusably guilty of.
4. Consider the example of the ever blessed Jesus, who suffered all the contradictions of sinners, and received all af fronts and reproaches of malicious, rash, and foolish persons, and yet in all of them was as dispassionate and gentle as the morning sun in autumn; and in this also he propounded him self imitable by us. For if innocence itself did suffer so great injuries and disgraces, it is no great matter for us quietly to receive all the calamities of fortune, and indiscretion of servants, and mistakes of friends, and unkindnesses of kindred, and rudenesses of enemies, since we have deserved these and worse, even hell itself.
5. If we be tempted to anger in the actions of government and discipline to our inferiors, (in which case anger is permit ted so far as it is prudently instrumental to government, and only is a sin when it is excessive and unreasonable, and apt to disturb our own discourse, or to express itself in imprudent words or violent actions,) let us propound to ourselves the example of God the Father, who, at the same time and with the same tranquillity, decreed heaven and hell, the joys of blessed angels and souls, and the torments of devils and ac cursed spirits; and at the day of judgment, when all the world shall burn under his feet, God shall not be at all inflamed or shaken in his essential seat and centre of tranquillity and joy. And if at first the cause seems reasonable, yet defer to execute your anger till you may better judge. For, as Phocion told the Athenians, who upon the first news of the death of Alexander were ready to revolt, " Stay a while, for if the king be not dead, your haste will ruin you; but if lie be dead, your stay cannot prejudice your affairs, for he will be dead to-morrow as well as to-day:" so if your servant or inferior deserve punishment, staying till to-morrow will not make him innocent; but it may possibly preserve you so, by preventing your striking a guiltless person, or being furious for a trifle.
6. Remove from yourself all provocations and incentives to anger; especially, 1. Games of chance and great wager. Patroclus killed his friend,30 the son of Amphidarnas, in his rage and sudden fury, rising upon a cross game at tables. Such also are petty curiosities, and worldly business and carefulness about it; but manage yourself with indifferency or contempt of those external things, and do not spend a passion upon them, for it is more than they are worth. But they that desire but few things, can be crossed but in a few.31 2. In not heaping up, with an ambitious or curious prodigality, any very curious or choice utensils, seals, jewels, glasses, precious stones; because those very many accidents wThich happen in the spoiling or loss of these rarities, are, in event, an irresistible cause of violent anger. 3. Do not entertain nor suffer tale bearers; for they abuse our ears first, and then our credulity,
and then steal our patience, and, it may be, for a lie; and, if it be true, the matter is not considerable; or if it be, yet it is pardonable. And we may always escape with patience at one of these outlets; either, 1. By not hearing slanders; or, 2. By not believing them; or, 3. By not regarding the thing; or, 4. By forgiving the person. 4. To this purpose also it may serve well, if we choose (as much as we can) to live with peaceable persons, for that prevents the occasions of confusion; and if we live with prudent persons, they will not easily occasion our disturbance. But because these things are not in many men's power, therefore I propound this rather as a felicity than a remedy or a duty, and an art of prevention than of cure.
7. Be not inquisitive into the affairs of other men, nor the faults of your servants, nor the mistakes of your friends; but what is offered to you, use according to the former rules; but do not you go out to gather sticks to kindle a fire to burn your own house. And add this: " If my friend said or did well in that for which I am angry, I am in the fault, not he; but if he did amiss, he is in the misery, not I: for either he was deceived, or he was malicious; and either of them both is all one with a miserable person; and that is an object of pity, not of anger."
8. Use all reasonable discourses to excuse the faults of others; considering that there are many circumstances of time, of person, of accident, of inadvertency, of infrequency, of aptness to amend, of sorrow for doing it; and it is well that we take any good in exchange; for the evil is done or suffered.
9. Upon the arising of anger, instantly enter into a deep consideration of the joys of heaven, or the pains of hell; for "fear and joy are naturally apt to appease this violence."32
10. In contentions be always passive, never active; upon the defensive, not the assaulting part; and then also give a gentle answer, receiving the furies and indiscretions of the other, like a stone into a bed of moss and soft compliance, and you shall find it sit down quietly; whereas anger and violence make the contention loud and long, and injurious to both the parties.
11. In the actions of religion, be careful to temper all your instances with meekness, and the proper instruments of it;
and if you are apt to be angry, neither fast violently, nor entertain the too-forward heats of zeal, but secure your duty with constant and regular actions, and a good temper of body, with convenient refreshments and recreations.
12. If anger rises suddenly and violently, first restrain it with consideration; and then let it end in a hearty prayer for him that did the real or seeming injury. The former of the two stops its growth, and the latter quite kills it; and makes amends for its monstrous and involuntary birth.
Remedies against Anger, by way of consideration.
1. Consider, that anger is a professed enemy to counsel; it is a direct storm, in which no man can be heard to speak or call from without: for if you counsel gently, you are despised; if you urge it and be vehement, you provoke it more. Be careful, therefore, to lay up beforehand a great stock of reason and prudent consideration,33 that, like a besieged town, you may be provided for, and be defensible from within, since you are not likely to be relieved from without. Anger is not to be suppressed but by something that is as inward as itself and more habitual. To which purpose add, that, 2. Of all passions it endeavors most to make reason useless. 3. That it is a universal poison, of an infinite object; for no man was ever so amorous as to love a toad, none so envious as to repine at the condition of the miserable, no man so timorous as to fear a dead bee; but anger is troubled at every thing, and every man, and every accident: and therefore, unless it be sup pressed, it will make a man's condition restless. 4. If it proceeds from a great cause, it turns to fury; if from a small cause, it is peevishness; and so is always either terrible or ridiculous.34 5. It makes a man's body monstrous, deformed, and contemptible; the voice horrid; the eyes cruel; the face pale or fiery; the gait fierce; the speech clamorous and loud. 6. It is neither manly nor ingenuous. 7. It proceeds from softness of spirit and pusillanimity; which makes that women are more angry than men, sick persons more than the healthful, old men more than young, unprosperous and calamitous
people than the blessed and fortunate. 8. It is a passion fitter for flies and insects than for persons professing nobleness and bounty. 9. It is troublesome not only to those that suffer it, but to them that behold it; there being no greater incivility of entertainment, than for the cook's fault,35 or the negligence of the servants, to be cruel or outrageous, or unpleasant in the presence of the guests. 10. It makes marriage to be a necessary and unavoidable trouble; friendships, and societies, and familiarities, to be intolerable. 1 1. It multiplies the evils of drunkenness, and makes the levities of wine to run into madness. 12. It makes innocent jesting to be the beginning of tragedies. 13. It turns friendship into hatred; it makes a man lose himself, and his reason, and his argument, in dis putation. It turns the desires of knowledge into an itch of wrangling. It adds insolency to power. It turns justice into cruelty, and judgment into oppression. It changes discipline into tediousness and hatred of liberal institution. It makes a prosperous man to be envied, and the unfortunate to be unpitied. It is a confluence of all the irregular passions; there is in it envy and sorrow, fear and scorn, pride and prejudice, rashness and inconsideration, rejoicing in evil and a desire to inflict it, self-love, impatience, and curiosity. And, lastly, though it be very troublesome to others, yet it is most troublesome to him that has it.
In the use of these arguments and the former exercises, be diligent to observe lest, in your desires to suppress anger, you be passionate and angry at yourself for being angry; like physicians36 who give a bitter potion when they intend to eject the bitterness of choler; for this will provoke the person and increase the passion. But placidly and quietly set upon the mortification of it, and attempt it first for a day, resolving that day not at all to be angry, and to be watchful and ob servant; for a day is no great trouble: but then, after one day's watchfulness, it will be as easy to watch two days as at first it was to watch one day, and so you may increase till it becomes easy and habitual.
Only observe, that such an anger alone is criminal which is against charity to myself or my neighbor; but anger against sin is a holy zeal, and an effect of love to God and my brother
for whose interest I am passionate, like a concerned person; and if I take care that my anger makes no reflection of scorn or cruelty upon the offender, or of pride and violence, or transportation to myself, anger becomes charity and duty. And when one commended Charilaus the king of Sparta for a gentle, a good, and a meek prince, his colleague said well, " How can he be good, who is not an enemy even to vicious persons?37 3. Remedies against Covetousness, the third Enemy of Mercy, Covetousness is also an enemy to alms, though not to all the effects of mercifulness: but this is to be cured by the proper motives to charity before mentioned, and by the proper rules of justice, which being secured, the arts of getting money are not easily made criminal. To which also we may add:
1. Covetousness makes a man miserable,38 because riches are not means to make a man happy; and unless felicity were to be bought with money, he is a vain person who admires heaps of gold and rich possessions. For what Hippomachus said to some persons, who commended a tall man as fit to be a champion in the Olympic games, " It is true," said he, " if the crown hang so high that the longest arm could reach it;" the same we may say concerning riches; they were excellent things, if the richest man were certainly the wisest and the best: but as they are, they are nothing to be wondered at, because they contribute nothing towards felicity; which appears, because some men choose to be miserable that they may be rich, rather than be happy with the expense of money and doing noble things.
2. Riches are useless and unprofitable; for, beyond our needs and conveniences, nature knows no use of riches: and they say, that the princes of Italy, when they sup alone, eat out of a single dish, and drink in a plain glass, and the wife eats without purple; for nothing is more frugal than the back and belly, if they be used as they should; but when they would entertain the eyes of strangers, when they are vain, and would make a noise, then riches come forth to set forth the spectacle, and furnish out the comedy of wealth, of vanity.39 No man
39 Plutarch.
can, with all the wealth in the world, buy so much skill as to be a good lutenist; he must go the same way that poor people do, he must learn and take pains: much less can he buy con stancy, or chastity, or courage; nay, not so much as the contempt of riches: and by possessing more than we need, we cannot obtain so much power over our souls as not to require more. And certainly riches must deliver me from no evil, if the possession of them cannot take away the longing for them. If any man be thirsty, drink cools him; if he be hungry, eating meat satisfies him; and when a man is cold and calls for a warm cloak, he is pleased if you give it him; but you trouble him if you load him with six or eight cloaks. Nature rests, and sits still, when she has her portion; but that which exceeds it is a trouble and a burden: and, there fore, in true philosophy, no man is rich but he that is poor according to the common account: for when God has satisfied those needs which he made, that is, all that is natural, whatsoever is beyond it is thirst and a disease; and, unless it be sent back again in charity or religion, can serve no end but vice or vanity: it can increase the appetite to represent the man poorer, and full of a new and artificial, unnatural need; but it never satisfies the need it makes, or makes the man richer. No wealth can satisfy the covetous desire of wealth. 3. Riches are troublesome; but the satisfaction of those appetites which God and nature has made, are cheap and easy; for who ever paid use-money for bread, and onions, and water to keep him alive? 40 But when we covet after houses of the frame and design of Italy, or long for jewels, or for my next neighbor's field, or horses from Barbary, or the richest perfumes of Arabia, or Galatian mules, or fat eunuchs for our slaves from Tunis, or rich coaches from Naples, then we can never be satisfied till we have the best thing that is fancied, and all that can be had, and all that can be desired, and that we can lust no more; but before we come to the one half of our first wild desires, we are the bondmen of usurers, and of our worse tyrant appetites, and the tortures of envy and im patience. But I consider that those who drink on still when their thirst is quenched, or eat after they have well dined, are forced to vomit not only their superfluity, but even that
which at first was necessary: so those that covet more than they can temperately use, are often forced to part even with that patrimony which would have supported their persons in freedom and honor, and have satisfied all their reasonable desires.
4. Contentedness is therefore health, because covetousness is a direct sickness: and it was well said of Aristippus, (as Plutarch reports him,) if any man, after much eating and drinking, be still unsatisfied, he has no need of more meat or more drink, but of a physician; he more needs to be purged than to be filled: and, therefore, since covetousness cannot be satisfied, it must be cured by emptiness and evacuation. The man is without remedy, unless he be reduced to the scantling of nature, and the measures of his personal necessity. Give to a poor man a house, and a few cows, pay his little debt, and set him on work, and he is provided for, and quiet: but when a man enlarges beyond a fair possession, and desires another lordship, you spite him if you let him have it; for, by that, he is one degree the further off from rest in his desires and satisfaction; and now he sees himself in a bigger capacity to a larger fortune; and he shall never find his period, till you begin to take away something of what he has; for then he will begin to be glad to keep that which is left: but reduce him to nature's measures, and there he shall be sure to find rest: for there no man can desire beyond his bellyful; and, when he wants that, any one friend or charitable man can cure his poverty, but all the world cannot satisfy his covetousness.
5. Covetousness is the most fantastical and contradictory disease in the whole world: it must therefore be incurable, because it strives against its own cure. No man therefore abstains from meat, because he is hungry; nor from wine, because he loves it and needs it: but the covetous man does so, for he desires it passionately, because he says he needs it, and when he has it he will need it still, because he dares not use it. He gets clothes, because he cannot be without them; but when he has them, then he can; as if he needed corn for his granary, and clothes for his wardrobe, more than for his back and belly. For covetousness pretends to heap much together for fear of want; and yet, after all his pains and purchase, he suffers that really, which, at first, he feared vainly; and by not using what he gets, he makes that suffering to be actual,
present, and necessary, which, in his lowest condition, was but future, contingent, and possible. It stirs up the desire, and takes away the pleasure of being satisfied. It increases the appetite, and will not content it: it swells the principal to no purpose, and lessens the use to all purposes; disturbing the order of nature, and the designs of God; making money not to be the instrument of exchange or charity, nor corn to feed him self or the poor, nor wool to clothe himself or his brother, nor wine to refresh the sadness of the afflicted, nor his oil to make his own countenance cheerful; but all these to look upon, and to tell over, and to take accounts by, and make himself considerable, and wondered at by fools; that while he lives he may be called rich, and when he dies may be accounted miserable; and, like the dish-makers of China, may leave a greater heap of dirt for his nephews, while he himself has a new lot fallen to him in the portion of Dives. But thus the ass carried wood and sweet herbs to the baths, but was never washed or perfumed himself: he heaped up sweets for others, while himself was filthy with smoke and ashes. And yet it is considerable; if the man can be content to feed hardly, and labor extremely, and watch carefully, and suffer affronts and disgrace, that he may get money more than he uses in his temperate and just needs, with how much ease might this man be happy! and with how great uneasiness and trouble does he make himself miserable! For he takes pains to get content, and when he might have it he lets it go. He might better be content with a virtuous and quiet poverty, than with an artificial, troublesome, and vicious. The same diet and a less labor would, at first, make him happy, and, for ever after, rewardable.
6. The sum of all is that which the apostle says, " Covet - ousness is idolatry;" that is, it is an admiring money for itself, not for its use; it relies upon money, and loves it more than it loves God and religion: and it is " the root of all evil;" it teaches men to be cruel and crafty, industrious in evil, full of care and malice; it devours young heirs, and grinds the face of the poor, and undoes those who specially belong to God's protection, helpless, craftless, and innocent people; it inquires into our parents' age, and longs for the death of our friends; it makes friendship an art of rapine, and changes a partner into a vulture, and a companion into a thief; and, after all this, it is for no good to itself; for it dares not spend those
heaps of treasure which it snatched: and men hate serpents and basilisks worse than lions and bears; for these kill because they need the prey, but they sting to death and eat not.41 And if they pretend all this care and heap for their heirs, (like the mice of Africa, hiding the golden ore in their bowels, and refusing to give back the indigested gold till their guts be out,) they may remember that what was unnecessary for themselves is as unnecessary for their sons; and why cannot they be with out it as well as their fathers who did not use it? And it often happens that to the sons it becomes an instrument to serve some lust or other; that, as the gold was useless to their fathers, so may the sons be to the public, fools or prodigals, loads to their country, and the curse and punishment of their father's avarice: and yet all that wealth is short of one blessing; but it is a load, coming with a curse, and descending from the family of a long-derived sin. However, the father transmits it to the son, and it may be the son to one more; till a tyrant, or an oppressor, or a war, or change of government, or the usurer, or folly, or an expensive vice, makes holes in the bottom of the bag, and the wealth runs out like water, and flies away like a bird from the hand of a child.
7. Add to these the consideration of the advantages of poverty: 42 that it is a state freer from temptation, secure in dangers, but of one trouble, safe under the Divine Providence, cared for in heaven by a daily ministration, and for whose support God makes every day a new decree; a state, of which Christ was pleased to make open profession, and many wise men daily make vows: that a rich man is but like a pool, to whom the poor run, and first trouble it, and then draw it dry: that he enjoys no more of it than according to the few and limited needs of a man; he cannot eat like a wolf or an elephant; that variety of dainty fare ministers but to sin and sicknesses: that the poor man feasts oftener than the rich,43
Xpvabg ad CoXog iarl Kal apyvpog di'9pu>Troi(nv.
because every little enlargement is a feast to the poor, but he that feasts every day feasts no day, there being nothing left to which he may, beyond his ordinary, extend his appetite: that the rich man sleeps not so soundly as the poor laborer; that his fears are more, and his needs are greater (for who is poorer, he that needs 51. or he that needs 5000/.?); the poor man has enough to fill his belly, and the rich has not enough to fill his eye; that the poor man's wants are easy to be relieved by a common charity, but the needs of rich men cannot be supplied but by princes; and they are left to the temptation of great vices to make reparation of their needs; and the am bitious labors of men to get great estates is but like the selling of a fountain to buy "a fever, a parting with content to buy necessity, a purchase of an unhandsome condition at the price of infelicity; that princes, and they that enjoy most of the world, have most of it but in title, and supreme rights, and reserved privileges, peppercorns, homages, trifling services, and acknowledgments, the real use descending to others, to more substantial purposes. These considerations may be useful to the curing of covetousness; that, the grace of mercifulness enlarging the heart of a man, his hand may not be contracted, but reached out to the poor in alms.