VII.

SERM. French friar's conceit, that courtiers were of all men the likeliest to bear him company to his convent, not only fittest, but likeliest to forsake the world, and turn penitentiaries. He judged it, because such an one of all others had most reason to be displeased with the pleasures of the world, he hath seen to the bottom of sensual delights, found the emptiness and torments of those things, which the distance and ignorance that other men are kept at, makes them behold with reverence and appetite; the courtier hath made the experiment, and sees how strangely the world is mistaken in its admired delights, and with Solomon, after a glut of vexatious nothings, is now fit to turn Ecclesiastes, or Preacher. I wish you would be but at so much leisure, as to think of the friar's meditation, that you would try what mortifying sermons you could make out of your own observations, concerning the vanity of sensual miscalled pleasures. I am confident you would be very eloquent, able to out-preach all the orators you ever heard from the pulpit, to write more pathetical descriptions of the madness of a carnal life, than from any more innocent speculator could be hoped for. That you may begin that useful, edifying, lasting sermon, I shall close up mine, having at length run through the particulars of my text, shewed you yourselves in the Jewish glass, if it were possible to put you out of countenance, to shake you out of all tolerable good opinion of yourselves. And now let every man go home with a tu es homo, he is the very Jew I have preached of all this while.

[2 Sam. xii. 7.]

O that he would think fit to hate that Jew, humble him, labour his conversion, bring him down into the dust, if so be there may yet be hope. And that God that can bring from the dust of death again, open this door to us, a forlorn destitute people! so shall we see and praise the power and seasonable bounty of our deliverer, and ascribe unto Him, -as our only tribute,—the honour, the glory, the power, the praise, the might, the majesty, the dominion, which through all ages of the world have been given to Him that sitteth on the throne, to the Holy Spirit and to the Lamb for evermore. Amen.

SERMON VIII.

BEING A LENT SERMON AT OXFORD, A.D. 1645.

ST. PAUL'S SERMON TO FELIX.

ACTS xxiv. 25.

And as he reasoned of righteousness, and temperance, and

judgment to come, Felix trembled.

VIII.

THE words are the notes taken from a sermon of St. Paul's; SER M. and the success it met with among the auditors, the trembling of one heathen officer that was at it, is entirely the consideration that commended it to me at this time, in hope it might help to perform that strange work, beget a spiritual palsy or soul-quake in the Christian sinner, that worser kind of heathen, at the repetition.

There is matter enough, God knows, of trembling abroad, -though there were never a judgment to come,-to put us all into Belshazzar's paralytic posture,-the countenance [Dan.v.6.] changed, the thoughts troubled, the joints or the loins loosed, and the knees smiting against one another,—and we bear it with a strange constancy, continue still in as perfect an unconcerned tranquillity, as if it were but a scene, a romance, a news from Germany all this while; the Jonas that is gone down to sleep in the sides of the ship, and is the cause of all this tempest, must not be awaked after all these billows, our lethargic habits of sin not disturbed, only a few cowardly mariners may be allowed to pray "every man to his God," [Jon. i. 5.] and that is the utmost that all these prodigies of vengeance can extort from us.

You will therefore give me leave to count it a prize, that I

VIII.

SER M. have here found a clap of thunder, that could awake somebody, a sermon that set one Felix a trembling; I should be too happy, if the repeating of it might have the same effect on any here present. "And as he reasoned of," &c.

In the words I shall but observe,

1. The matter of St. Paul's sermon, "righteousness, and temperance, and judgment to come."

And 2. The form of it by way of reasoning. As for the trembling, that must be God's work on you, while I treat of these.

The matter I must consider, 1. absolutely; then as it is here clothed in a double relation, 1. to the text on which it was preached, and that you shall see in the verse precedent, to be the faith of Christ; 2. in relation to the prime auditor, Felix, whether as an officer of Cæsar's, or as a heathen, or as one peculiarly guilty of these sins to which the discourse is accommodated.

I begin first with the matter, considered absolutely, "righteousness," &c.

Three grand particulars, which though they are common places and vulgar themes, may yet have leave to give you divertisements awhile.

The Sixaιooúvn, whether justice, or righteousness in the front,-if you had the fathers' wish, to see and hear St. Paul in the pulpit, a pressing at large what you have here only in brachygraphy, would look very sternly upon the most unrighteous oppressions of the many; that trade of subtlety and intricacy, that hath gotten the inclosure of all, not only the wealth and greatness of the world, but of the credit also, the reputation of wisdom, yea and of virtue too, the only honourable handsome quality, that all our respects and estimations are paid to; that new body of morality, that instead of the old out-dated despised rules of justice and uprightness, hath set up that one beloved law of self-preservation,—that other Antipheron in the Rhetorics that always seeth his own picture before him, and if health or security may be acquired, can say to himself, as Paracelsus to his scrupulous patient, if the cure be wrought, what matter is it whether it be by God, or the devil?-instead of the comfort of a pure immaculate conscience, the pleasure of satisfaction of having out-witted

VIII.

and overreached our brethren; the joy and ravishment, the SERM. high taste and sensuality, as it were, of an indirect action, being to him far above the advantage and gain of it; and either of them able to outweigh the mystery of godliness, the (whether conscience, or) reward of blameless souls.

O! it is a fatal character of an accursed rebellious people, when in the prophet's style, "he that abstaineth from evil [Is.lix.15.] maketh himself a prey," when all those generous Christian virtues of meekness, and innocence, and charity, and not retaliating to enemies, shall become both undoing and scandalous qualities, a lawful prize for every harpy to seize on, and ex abundanti, over and above, matter of contumely and reproach to any that shall have so learned to be fools of Christ.

And it were a glorious and a royal design, worthy the gallantry of this congregation, and that which would bring Christianity into some credit in the heathen world, would give us more hope of proselytes from thence, than the apostle of the Indies,-Xaverius with his double gospel; one of Christ, the other of St. Peter,-ever brought back his masters; if sincerity, and uprightness, and dove-like innocence, those good-natured rarities that our Saviour could Mark x. 21. not behold without loving the owner of them, although he were no Christian,-might be brought in fashion in a court, or kingdom; if oppression and the grosser acts of piracy might be driven out like wolves, and bears, and beasts of prey; and disguises, and crafts, and cheats, and all kind of artifices and stratagems, have as many names of vermin allotted to them, and all in one herd pursued, and hounded out of the world; if the examples of a Jacob, a David, a Nathaniel, a Christ, might be permitted to rescue the guileless heart and lips, at least, from reproach, and scorn, if not from the vulture's talons, if it might be esteemed but as infamous and vile to act, as it is to suffer injuries, as ungentlemanly a thing to thrive by fraud, as to perish by good conscience. And till this be set afoot among us,—this that an heathen Socrates would, if he were alive again, venture another martyrdom to replant among his Athenians,-may this first point of St. Paul's sermon be for ever ringing in your ears, πepì dikaiσúvns, "of righteousness," and a thundering

SERM. "judgment to come," for all those that are not edified by that doctrine.

VIII.

2. For temperance, or, as the word éyxρáтeia, both here and elsewhere more properly signifies "continence," and command of passions and lusts, the τὸ ἐν κράτει ἔχειν, "the mastery over a man's self." One cannot, in charity to Christendom, but stay upon it awhile, and recommend it to men's favour, so far at the least, that it may find the ordinary justice, to be preferred,—in their judgments, if not their passions, before bestiality and villainy, before the ǎTipa Táon, the infamous affections which nature itself hath reproached and branded, that the preserving our bodies the [1 Cor. vi. temples of the Holy Ghost, may be but as creditable a thing 19.] as any of those μeσýμßρiva daιpóvia, "noon-day devils," in Gregentius' phrase", those impudencies that have put off the veil, that are become so daring and confident, fornication, adultery, uncleanness, i. e. in the New Testament dialect, [1 Pet. iv. ȧéμToi eidwλoλaтpeía, outlared abominable idolatries; that chastity may be kept in some countenance, not pass either for such a strange or such a ridiculous, such an impossible or such a scandalous rarity.

3.[

[2 Thess. iii. 14.]

Phil. iv.

[8.]

Beloved, there was once a piece of discipline in the Church of God, of sending the devil into such swine, of delivering up the incontinent to Satan's smart, his real corporeal stripes, and inflictions in the Apostles' age; and after this smart was commuted for shame, casting them out of the Church, out of the society of all civil men, va evтраπŵσι, "that they might be ashamed."

It seems it was then a more fashionable creditable thing to be a praying in the Church, than a dallying in the chamber. Continence was recommended to Christians, not only among the oeuvà and áyvà, “ the venerable and the pure," but the προσφιλή and εὔφημα, " lovely and commendable.” Embraced by men of quality upon the same motives, on which now all the contrary vices are taken up, in adoration to that great idol, civility and reputation; virtue was then the

a 1 Cor. ix. 25, et Ignat. ad Philip., εἴτις ἁγνεύει ἢ ἐγκρατεύεται, speaking of men and women.] S. Ignat. ascript. Epist. ad Philipp., c. 13. ap. Patr. Apost. ii. 119.]

b

[Gregentii Episc. Tephrensis Disput. cum Herban. Jud. ap. Gallandii Biblioth. Patr., tom. x. p. 624. See Ps. xc, (xci.) 6. LXX.]