that time; that Christ was offered you as well as he was offered them that entertained him; that you were called on and warned as well as they, but obstinately despised and neglected all; that life and death were set before you, and the everlasting joys were offered to your choice, against the charms of sinful pleasures; you might have freely had them if you would, and were told that holiness was the only way, that it must be now or never, and yet you chose your own destruction! These thoughts will be part of hell to the ungodly. They will wonder that reason could be so unreasonable; and they that had the common wit of man in other matters, should be so far beside themselves in that which is the only thing that it is commendable to be wise for; that such sottish reasonings should prevail with them against the clearest light, that nothing should be preferred before all things, and arguments brought from chaff and dust, should conquer those that were sent from heaven! What heartrending thoughts will these be, when eternity shall afford them leisure for an impartial review; yea, that they should deceive others also with such a gross deceit, and scorn at all that would not be as mad as they; that being drunken with the world's delusion, they should abuse all that were truly sober; that the one thing needful, should seem to them a needless thing; that their tongues should plead for these delusions of their wicked hearts; that they should be enemies to those that would not be enemies to God and to themselves, and cast away their time and souls as they did! They will wonder, with self-indignation, what could bewitch them into so great unreasonableness, below a man, against the light of nature, as well as of supernatural revelation. of Christ I have called you into his vineyard, told you of your work and wages, and shamed your excuses and objections this day. Come away then speedily from the snares of sinners, the company of deceived, hardened men, and cast away the works of darkness! Heaven is before you; death is at hand; the eternal God hath sent to call you; mercy doth yet stretch forth its arms; you have stayed too long, and abused patience too much already: stay no longer! O now please God, and comfort us, and save yourselves by resolving that this shall be the day; faithfully performing of this your resolution. Up and be doing: believe, repent, desire, obey, and do all this with all your might. Love him that you must love for ever, and love him with all your soul and might; seek that which is truly worth the seeking, and will pay for all your cost and pains: and seek it first with all your might; remembering still it must be now or never. Before I conclude, I have two messages yet to deliver to the servants of the Lord: the one is of encouragement; the other of direction. I know that many of you have a threefold trouble, which requires a threefold comfort and encouragement. One is, that you have done so little of your work; but lost so much of your time already: another is, that you are so opposed and hindered. The greatest of all is, that you are yet so duli and slow: the cure of which must be the matter of my directions. 1. For the first: that you have lost your time, must be the matter of your humiliation: but that all is not lost, before you see your sin and duty; but yet the patience and mercy of the Lord are attending you, and continuing your hope; this is the matter of your comfort and en Honourable and beloved hearers, I beseech you do not take it ill, that I speak so much of these matters that are so unpleasant and unwel-couragement. Repent therefore that you came come to unbelieving, careless, carnal hearts: it is that I may prevent all this in time, by the awakenings of true repentance. O that this might be the success felt that I might hear, by your penitent confessions, and see by your universal speedy reformations, that God hath so great mercy for you, that these persuasions might be the means of so much happiness to you, and comfort unto me! However this assembly shall be witnesses that you were warned; conscience shall be witness, that if you waste the rest of your days in the pleasures and vanities of this deceitful world, it was not because you could have no better, and were not called to higher things. That if you yet stand idle, it is not because you could not be hired. For in the name no sooner home: but rejoice that you are come home at last; and now be more diligent in redeeming your time, in remembrance of the time already lost: though it must be your grief that your Master hath been deprived of so much of his service, and others of so much good which you should have done them, and that time is lost which cannot be recalled; yet it is your comfort, that your own reward may be equal with them that have borne the burden and heat of the day: for many that are last, in the time of their coming in, shall be first in receiving the reward. This is the meaning of that parable in Mat. xx. which was spoken to encourage them that had stood out too long, and to rebuke the envy and high expectations of them that came in sooner; every day they wrest my words: all their thoughts are against me for evil: they gather themselves together: they hide themselves: they mark my steps when they wait for my soul.' But did he therefore fear, or fly from God? No, what time I am afraid, I will trust in thee; in God will I praise his word; in God have I put my trust; I will not fear what flesh can do unto me.-Hearken to me ye that know righteousness, the people in whose heart is my law ; fear ye not the reproach of men, neither be ye afraid of their revilings; for the moth shall eat them up like a garment, and the worm shall eat them like wool: but my righteousness shall be for ever, and my salvation from generation to generation.' You deserve to be shut out of heaven, if you will not bear the breath of a fool's derision for it. and it is no whit contradictory to those passages | hands of Christ? Mark how they used David; in Mat. xxv. which intimate a different degree of glory to be given to them that have different degrees of grace upon their industrious improvement. The former parable shows that men shall not be rewarded differently for their longer or shorter continuance in the work, but that those that come in late, and yet are found with equal holiness, shall be rewarded equally with the first: and more, if their holiness be more, which the latter parable expresses, declaring God's purpose to give them the greatest glory, that have improved their holiness to the greatest measure. O therefore that the sense of your former unkindness might provoke you the more resolvedly to give up yourselves in fervent love and full obedience! and then you will find that your time is redeemed, though it cannot be recalled; and that mercy hath secured your full reward. What an unspeakable mercy is this! that if yet you will devote yourselves entirely to Christ, and serve him with your might, the little time that yet remains, he will take it as if you had come in at the first hour of the day! 2. As for the opposition and hinderances in your way, they are no other than what your Lord foretold. He hath gone before you, and conquered much more than ever you will encounter from without, though he had not a body of sin to conquer; and in that respect the conquest of his Spirit in his members, hath the pre-eminence of his personal conquest. He hath bid you be of good cheer, because he hath overcome the world. If you will not take up your cross and follow him, you cannot be his disciples. would you be soldiers on condition you may not fight, or fight and yet have no opposition? Follow the Captain of your salvation. If mocking, or buffeting, or spitting in his face, or hanging him upon a cross, or piercing his side, would have made him give up the work of your redemption, you had been left to utter desperation. The opposition that is conquerable, should serve but to excite your courage and resolution in a case of such necessity, where you must prevail, or perish. Have you God himself on your side, and Christ your captain, and the Spirit of Christ to give you courage, and the promise to invite you, and heaven before you, hell behind you, and the examples of such an army of conquering believers and shall the scorns or threats of a worm prevail against all these for your discouragement? You are not afraid lest any man should pull down the sun, or dry up the sea, or overturn the earth: and are you afraid that man should conquer God: or take you out of the : 3. But saith the self-accusing soul, I am convinced that I ought to be laborious for my salvation, and that all this is too little that I can do; but I am dull, cold, and negligent in all: I am far from doing it with my might: I hear, read, and pray as if I did it not, and as if I were half asleep, or my heart were away upon somewhat else. I fear I am but a lazy hypocrite. Answ. I shall first speak to thy doubt, and then proceed to direct thee against thy sin. First. You must be resolved whether your sloth be such as is predominant, or mortified; such as proves that you are dead in sin; or only such as proves you but diseased and infirm. To know this you must distinguish, 1. Between the dullness and coldness of the affections, and the unresolvedness and disobedience of the soul, 2. Between a slothfulness that keeps men from a godly life'in a life of wickedness; and that which only keeps them from some particular act of duty, or abates the degree of their sincere affection and obedience. 3. Between that sloth which is the vicious habit of the will, and that which is the effect of age, or sickness, or melancholy, or other distemper of the body. So the case lies plain before you. 1. If it be not only your affections that are dull, but your will through sloth is unresolved; and this not only in a temptation to the abatement of some degrees, and the neglect of some particular duty, but against a holy life, and against the forsaking of your reigning sin; and this be not only through some bodily distemper, disabling your reason, but from the vicious habit of your wills; then is your sloth a mortal sign, and proves you in a graceless state: but if the sloth which you complain of be only dullness of your affections, and the backwardness of your wills to some high degrees, or particular duties, and the effect of some bodily distemper, or the weakness of your spiritual life, while your wills are habitually resolved for God and a holy life, against a worldly, fleshly life this is your infirmity, and a sin to be lamented, but not a mark of death and gracelessness. any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and it is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. Therefore it may do much to make you feel. Many a thousand hath it pricked at the heart, and sent them home alive, that before were dead. Much more may you expect, that it should excite the principle which you have already. Direction 4. If it may be, converse with You will have a backward, slothful heart to strive with while you live: but bless God that lively, active, stirring Christians: but especially you are offended with it, and would fain be delivered from it. This was Paul's evidence. You will have flesh, and flesh will plead for its interest, and will be striving against the Spirit; but bless God that you have also the Spirit to strive against the flesh. Be thankful that you have life to feel your sickness, though you languish under it, and cannot work as healthful men; and that you are in the way to heaven, though you go not so fast as you should and would. 2. But yet though you have life, it is so grievous to be diseased and languish under such an infirmity as sloth, that I advise you to stir up yourselves to the utmost, and give not way to a lazy temper and that you may serve the Lord with all your might, I recommend these few directions to your observation. Direction 1. When you would be quickened up to seriousness and diligence, have ready at hand such quickening considerations as are here before propounded to you; set them before you, and labour to work them upon your hearts. Powerful truths would have some power upon your souls, if you will but soberly apply your reason to them, and plead them with yourselves, as you would do with another in any of your reproofs or exhortations. Direction 2. Take heed lest any worldly design or interest, or any lusts or sensual delight, divert your minds from God and duty. For all the powers of your soul will languish, when you should set them on work on spiritual things, and your hearts will be abroad, when you should be wholly taken up with God, if once they be entangled with worldly things. Watch therefore over them in your callings, lest the creature steal too deep into your affections: for if you be alive to the world, you will be in that measure dead to God. Direction 3. If it be possible, live under a lively ministry, that when your hearts go cold and dull unto the assemblies, they may come warm and quickened home. Life cherishes life as fire kindles fire. The word and ordinances of God are quick, powerful, and sharper than have one such for a bosom friend, that will warm you when you are cold, help to awake you when you drop asleep, and will not comply with you in a declining, lazy and unprofitable course. Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labour: for if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow; but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up. Again, if two lie together, then they have heat; but how can one alone be warm? And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.' Direction 5. Put not away from you the day of death. Look not for long life. It is the life to come that must be the life of all your duties here, and distant things lose their force. Set death, judgment, and eternal life continually as near at hand: live in a watchful expectation of your change: do all as dying men, and as passing to receive the recompence of endless joy or woe, and this will quicken you. To this end, go often to the house of mourning, and be not unseasonably or immoderately in the house of mirth. When you observe what is the end of all men, the heart will be made better by it. But excess of carnal mirth doth infatuate men, destroy their wisdom, seriousness, and sobriety. Keep always a sense of the brevity of life, and of the preciousness of time, and remember that it is posting on whether you work or play: methinks, if you forget any of the rest, this one consideration that we have in hand, should make you bestir with your might, that it must be now or never. I shall only add two needful cautions, lest while we cure one disease, we cause another, as knowing that corrupted nature is used to run from one extreme into another. 1. Desire and labour more for an high estimation of things spiritual and eternal, and a fixed resolution, and an even and diligent endeavour, than for passionate feelings and affections. For these latter are more unconstant in the best, and depend much on the temper of the body, and are not of so great necessity as the former. though excellent in a just degree and season. | tence of exalting Christ, did set up a heartless, For it is possible that passion even about good lifeless doctrine, that tended to turn out the life things may be too much; when estimation, re- of Christianity, and take men off their necessolution, and regular endeavours cannot. sary diligence, as a legal, dangerous thing? 2. Be suspicious when you have the warmest and liveliest affections, lest your judgment should be perverted by following, when they should lead. It is very common for zeal and strong affections, even to that which is good, to occasion the mistakes of the understanding, and make men look all on one side, and think they can never go far enough from some particular sins, till ignorantly they are carried into some perhaps as great on the other hand. Be warned, by the sad experience of these times, to suspect your judgments in the fervour of your affections. Observing these cautions, let nothing abate your zeal and diligence; but whatever duty is set before you, do it with your might; for it must be now or never. Though I know that the enmity to a holy, heavenly life is so deeply seated in corrupted nature, that all that I have said is necessary and too little; yet some, I know, will think it strange that I should intimate that any who preach the gospel are guilty of any measure of this sin, and will think that I intend by it to reflect upon some parties above the rest. But again I profess, that it is no party but the devil's party, and the ungodly party, that I mean. It is hard if you will not believe me concerning my own sense. Nor is it my desire that any of the odiousness of schism, sedition, rebellion, or disobedience to authority, should be so much as diminished by any man's profession of godliness. No, I beseech you, by how much the more godly you are, by so much the more you will detest all these; godliness tends to shame and condemn these odious sins, and not to be a cloak for them or any extenuation; Nay, what can more aggravate them, than that they should be found in the professors of godliness? I again profess that I have no design but to plead for serious diligence in the religion which we are all agreed in, and to stop the mouth of those that wickedly speak against it. But alas! it is too evident that I have too many to speak to, that are not innocent; why else doth scripture tell us that such there will be still to the end of the world; and that there are some that preach Christ of strife and envy, to add affliction to the bonds of the afflicted? Can we already forget what abundance of antinomian teachers were among us, that turned out the very doctrine of practical diligence, cried it down as a setting up ourselves and our own works, as injurious to free grace, and under pre What ordinance of God hath not been cast out by preachers themselves upon religious pretences; as family duties, catechising, singing of psalms, baptism, the Lord's Supper, and what not? If all these were down, wherein should the practice of religion consist? And what abundance of pamphlets had we, that laboured to make the orthodox, faithful ministry a very scorn, and derided them for their faithful service of God, and their faithfulness to their superiors in opposition to their unrighteous ways? Let no Papist, or any enemy of our church, reproach us because such enemies to holiness are found among us. Can it be expected that our church should be better than the family of Adam, that had a Cain; or of Noah, that had a Ham; or of Christ, that had a Judas? And are there not far more enemies to serious godliness among the Papists themselves, than among us? There is no place, no rank of men in the world, where some of the enemies of a holy life are not to be found, even among those that profess the same religion in doctrinals, with those whom they oppose. Christ and the devil have their several armies; if once the devil disband his soldiers, and have none to oppose a holy life, then tell me that it is a needless thing to defend it and to confute them. But I am listed under Christ, and will never give over pleading for him, till his adversaries give over pleading against him, and his cause, as long as he continues my liberty and duty. Blessed be the Lord, that if a hypocritical preacher be found among us, who secretly or openly disgraces a diligent, holy life, there are more able, holy, faithful ones to confute him, both by doctrine and by their lives, than are to be found in any other kingdom in the world proportionably, that ever I could hear of. And that the faithful disciples are so many, and the Judases so few, how great a blessing is it to this land, how great an honour to his Majesty's government, and to the church in his dominions. The Lord teach this sinful nation to be thankful, pardon their ingratitude, and never deprive them of this forfeited mercy. The Lord teach them to hearken to the friends, not to the enemies of holiness, and never to receive a wound at the heart of their religion, however they hear their smaller differences about things circumstantial. Now when I should conclude, I am loth to end, for fear lest I have not yet prevailed with you. What are you now resolved to do, from this day forward? It is work that we have been speaking of, necessary work of endless consequence, which must be done, quickly done, and thoroughly done. Are you not convinced that it is so? That ploughing and sowing are not more necessary to your harvest, than the work of holiness in this day of grace is necessary to your salvation? You are blind if you see not this; you are dead if you feel it not; what then will you do? For God's sake, and for your own sake, stand not demurring till time be gone. It is all that the devil desires, if he can but find you one thing or other to be thinking, talking, and doing about, to keep you from this till time be gone; and then he that kept you from seeing and feeling, will help you to see and feel to your calamity: then the devil will make you feel that which preachers could not make you feel; and he will make you think of that, and lay it close enough to your hearts, which we could not get you to lay to heart. Now we study and preach to you in hope; but then alas, it breaks our hearts to think of it, we have done with you for ever, because all hope is gone. Then the devil may challenge a minister, Now do thy worst to bring this sinner to repentance: now call him to consider, believe, and come to Christ: now offer him mercy, and intreat him to accept it now cry to him to take heed of sin and of temptations, that he come not to this place of torments: now tell him of the beauty or necessity of holiness, and call upon him to turn and live: now do thy worst to rescue him from my power, and save his soul. Alas, poor sinners! will you stop your ears, go on in sin, and damn yourselves, and break our hearts to foresee that day? Must we see the devil go away with such a prey, and shall we not rescue your captivated souls, because you will not hear, you will not stir, you will not consent? Hear the God of heaven, if you will not hear us, who calls to you, return and live! Hear him that shed his blood for souls, and offers you now salvation by his blood! O hear, without any more delay, before all is gone, and you are gone, and he that now deceives you, torments you! Yet hold on a little longer in a carnal, earthly, unsanctified state, and it is too late to hope, or pray, or strive for your salvation: yet a little longer, and mercy will have done with you for ever; Christ will never invite you more, nor never offer to cleanse you by his blood, or sanctify by his Spirit. Yet a little longer, and you shall never hear a sermon more, and never more be troubled with those preachers that were in good earnest with you, and longed once for your conversion and salvation. O sleepy, dead-hearted sinners, what should I do to show you how near you stand to eternity, and what is now doing in the world that you are going to, and how these things are thought on there? What should I do to make you know how time is valued, how sin and holiness are esteemed in the world where you must live for ever? What should I do to make you know those things to-day, which I will not thank you to know when you are gone hence? O that the Lord would open your eyes in time! Could I but make you know these things as believers should know them, I say not as those that see them, nor yet as dreamers that do not regard them, but as those that believe that they must shortly see them, what a joyful hour's work should I esteem this; how happy would it be to you and me, if every word were accompanied with tears! If I followed you home and begged your consideration on my bare knees, or as a beggar begs an alms at your doors: if this sermon cost me as many censures or slanders as ever sermon did, I should not think it too dear, if I could but help you to such a sight of the things we speak of, as that you might truly understand them as they are; that you had but a truly awakened apprehension of the shortness of your day, of the nearness of eternity, and of the endless consequence of your present work, and what holy labour and sinful loitering will be thought of in the world to come for ever! But when we see you sin, trifle, and no more regard your endless life, and see also what haste your time is making, and yet cannot make you understand these things; when we know ourselves, as sure as we speak to you, that you will shortly be astonished at the review of your present sloth and folly, and when we know that these matters are not thought of in another world, as they are among the sleepy or the infatuated sinners here, and yet know not how to make you know it, whom it doth so exceedingly much concern, this amazes us, and almost breaks our hearts! Yea, when we tell you of things that are past doubt, and can be no further matter of controversy then, men have sold their understandings, and betrayed their reason to their sordid lusts, and yet we cannot get reasonable men to know that which they cannot choose but know; to know that seriously and practically which always hath a witness in their breasts, and which none but the profligate dare deny. I tell you, sinners, this, even this, is worse than a prison to us: it is you that are our persecutors; it is you that are the daily sorrow of our hearts; it is you that disappoint us of our |