and carry us; not as the causes of it, but as the way and antecedents unto it.

But these pertaining to a nobler science, and being without the limits of the subject which I proposed to speak of, I shall follow Pliny's counsel, and look back to the title of my book; which having (as well as my weakness was able) endeavoured to go through, it now calls upon me to go no farther.

A

SERMON

PREACHED IN THE CATHEDRAL CHURCH OF NORWICH,

AT THE

FUNERAL

OF THE

RIGHT REVEREND FATHER IN GOD,

EDWARD, LORD BISHOP OF NORWICH,

WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE JULY 28, 1676.

BY B. RIVELEY,

ONE OF HIS LORDSHIP'S CHAPLAINS, AND PREACHER IN THE SAID CITY.

"Of whom the World was not worthy."-HEB. xi. 38.

A

SERMON

Preached in the Cathedral Church of Norwich, at the Funeral of the Right Reverend Father in God,

EDWARD, LORD BISHOP of NORWICH, &c.

JOB xxx. 23.

For I know that thou wilt bring me to death, and to the house appointed for all living.

No book of scripture better furnished with funeral texts than this of Job; and no funeral could better deserve a text out of Job than this; being the funeral of a man fearing God, and eschewing evil; a man perfect and upright in his generation; a man patient, and holding fast his integrity to the last. But intending his just encomium at the end of my sermon, I shall say no more of him now.

The words are doubly considerable to us, in their dependent, and in their abstracted sense.

That they have a coherence, easily appears by the illative particle, for, by which they are tacked to somewhat said afore but to spend any of my time in giving you the various conjectures of expositors about their connexion, would be hugely unjustifiable, knowing my own mind of not handling them at all under this consideration; only this may be (obiter) observable to us, that Job was at present in sad case. The days of affliction had taken hold upon him, he was diseased in body, and restless through pain and sickness, (as out of the foregoing verses may be learned) and he thought this a fit season wherein to contemplate human frailty, and to consider his own dying. He knew, no man, at best, was

a Ver. 16, 17, 18.

far distant from a grave, or could entertain hopes of living always; much less could he do so, that was at the brink of that place already; it was an easy and short remove, he knew, for God to send him from his weary pallet and sick bed, to his long and last home. And possibly this was the argument of his patience, that in all likelihood he had but a little while longer to endure. He was sure (if nothing else could) his own mortality at last would give him a quietus est: the grave is a period as to all earthly comforts, so to all worldly crosses and perturbations; and to this period Job knew all must come, and himself among the rest: For I know thou wilt bring,' &c.

་

But it is the entire abstract and sense of the words that I would come to, and I take them to contain in them a right comfortable, profitable, and practical notion of man's mortality in general, and of thine and mine in particular. I (know) thou wilt bring (me) to death, and to the (house) appointed,' &c.

It is the speech of a Job, that was not only a good man himself, but an exemplar of such, and so referred to in the New Testament ; and therefore when he saith, 'I know'-'tis as much as if he had said, "I would have others to know it too-That God will bring them (every mother's child of them) to death, and to the house,' &c."

Let us then carefully observe what the holy man professes to know here, and how; and thence draw rules and documents for our own present instruction and regulation of future practice. As

I. He knows the grave, under the metaphor of a house, (that is) he hath a comfortable notion of that sad, solitary, dark, silent place; for doubtless that is it he means by the 'house of all living. The allegory is the very same, chap. xvii. 13. If I wait, the grave is mine house.'<

From whence we may know thus much too-That it is in the power of religion, and the grace of God, to frame in a man's mind most comfortable and amiable ideas even of dying, and being laid in the grave; things otherwise most formidable and terrifying.

He that says here- I know that I shall die,' had said be