drawn upon foreheads, carried upon banners, put upon crowns imperial-presently it came to pass that the religion of the despised Jesus did infinitely prevail: a religion that taught men to be meek and humble, apt to receive injuries, but unapt to do any ; a religion that gave countenance to the poor and pitiful, in a time when riches were adorned, and ambition and pleasure had possessed the heart of all mankind: a religion that would change the face of things, and the hearts of men, and break vile habits into gentleness and counsel. That such a religion, in such a time, by the sermons and conduct of fishermen, men of mean breeding and illiberal arts, should so speedily triumph over the philosophy of the world, and the arguments of the subtle, and the sermons of the eloquent; the power of princes and the interests of states, the inclinations of nature and the blindness of zeal, the force of custom

"About twenty years after the ascension of our Saviour it came to pass, that there was seen by the people of Renfusa, a city upon the eastern coast of our island, within night, the night was cloudy and calm, as it might be some mile into the sea, a great pillar of light; not sharp, but in form of a column or cylinder rising from the sea, a great way up towards heaven: and on the top of it was seen a large cross of light, more bright and resplendent than the body of the pillar. Upon which so strange a spectacle, the people of the city gathered apace together upon the sands to wonder; and so after put themselves into a number of small boats, to go nearer to this marvellous sight. But when the boats were come within about sixty yards of the pillar, they found themselves all bound, and could go no further, yet so as they might move to go about, but might not approach nearer: so as the boats stood all as in a theatre, beholding this light as a heavenly sign. It so fell out, that there was in one of the boats one of the wise men of the society of Solomon's house, which house or college, my good brethren, is the very eye of this kingdom: who having awhile attentively and devoutly viewed and contemplated this pillar and cross, fell down upon his face; and then raised himself upon his knees, and lifting up his hands to heaven, made his prayers.

“When he had made his prayer, he presently found the boat he was in moveable and unbound; whereas all the rest remained still fast; and taking that for an assurance of leave to approach, he caused the boat to be softly and with silence rowed towards the pillar. But ere he came near it, the pillar and cross of light brake up, and cast itself abroad, as it were into a firmament of many stars; which also vanished soon after; and there was nothing left to be seen but a small ark or chest of cedar, dry, and not wet at all with water, though it swam. And in the fore-end of it, which was towards him, grew a small green branch of palm."

and the solicitation of passions, the pleasures of sin and the busy arts of the devil; that is against wit and power, superstition and wilfulness, fame and money, nature and empire, which are all the causes in this world that can make a thing impossible; this, this is to be ascribed to the power of God, and is the great demonstration of the resurrection of Jesus. Everything was an argument for it, and improved it: no objection could hinder it, no enemies destroy it; whatsoever was for them, it made the religion to increase; whatsoever was against them, made it to increase; sun-shine and storms, fair weather or foul, it was all one as to the event of things: for they were instruments in the hands of God, who could make what himself should choose to be the product of any cause; so that if the Christians had peace, they went abroad and brought in converts; if they had no peace, but persecution, the converts came in to them. In prosperity they allured and enticed the world by the beauty of holiness; in affliction and trouble they amazed all men with the splendor of their innocence and the glories of their patience; and quickly it was that the world became disciple to the glorious Nazarene, and men could no longer doubt of the resurrection of Jesus, when it became so demonstrated by the certainty of them that saw it, and the courage of them that died for it, and the multitude of them that believed it; who by their sermons and their actions, by their public offices and discourses, by festivals and eucharists, by arguments of experience and sense, by reason and religion, by persuading rational men, and establishing believing Christians, by their living in the obedience of Jesus, and dying for the testimony of Jesus, have greatly advanced his kingdom, and his power, and his glory, into which he entered after his resurrection from the dead.*

OF TRUE AND OF MOCK RELIGION.

I HAVE seen a female religion that wholly dwelt upon the face and tongue; that like a wanton and an undressed tree spends all its juice in suckers and irregular branches, in leaves and gum, and after all such goodly outsides you should never eat an apple, or be delighted with the beauties, or the perfumes of a hopeful * Sermon preached at the Funeral of the Lord Primate.

blossom. But the religion of this excellent lady was of another constitution; it took root downward in humility, and brought forth fruit upward in the substantial graces of a Christian, in charity and justice, in chastity and modesty, in fair friendships and sweetness of society: she had not very much of the forms and outsides of godliness, but she was hugely careful for the power of it, for the moral, essential, and useful parts: such which would make her be, not seem to be, religious.

In all her religion, and in all her actions of relation towards God, she had a strange evenness and untroubled passage, sliding toward her ocean of God and of infinity with a certain and silent motion. So have I seen a river deep and smooth passing with a still foot and a sober face, and paying to the Fiscus, the great exchequer of the sea, the prince of all the watery bodies, a tribute large and full and hard by it a little brook skipping and making a noise upon its unequal and neighbor bottom; and after all its talking and bragged motion, it payed to its common audit no more than the revenues of a little cloud, or a contemptible vessel: so have I sometimes compared the issues of her religion to the solemnities and famed outsides of another's piety. It dwelt upon her spirit, and was incorporated with the periodical work of every day : she did not believe that religion was intended to minister to fame and reputation, but to pardon of sins, to the pleasure of God, and the salvation of souls. For religion is like the breath of heaven; if it goes abroad into the open air, it scatters and dissolves.

THE DANGER OF PROSPERITY.

As long as the waters of persecutions are upon the earth, so long we dwell in the ark; but where the land is dry, the dove itself will be tempted to a wandering course of life, and never to return to the house of her safety.*

Many are not able to suffer and endure prosperity; it is like the light of the sun to a weak eye,—glorious indeed in itself, but not proportioned to such an instrument.†

*The Faith and Patience of the Saints; Serm. x., 272.

†The Mercy of the Divine Judgments; Serm. xii., 290.

"We are as safe at sea, safer in the storm which God sends us, than in a calm when we are befriended with the world."

In the tomb of Terentia certain lamps burned under ground many ages together; but as soon as ever they were brought into the air, and saw a bigger light, they went out, never to be reenkindled. So long as we are in the retirements of sorrow, of want, of fear, of sickness, or of any sad accident, we are burning and shining lamps: but when God comes with his avox", with his forbearance, and lifts us up from the gates of death, and carries us abroad into the open air, that we converse with prosperity and temptation, we go out in darkness; and we cannot be preserved in heat and light, but by still dwelling in the regions of

If God suffers men to go on in sins, and punishes them not, it is not a mercy, it is not a forbearance; it is a hardening them, a consigning them to ruin and reprobation: and themselves give the best argument to prove it; for they continue in their sins, they multiply their iniquity, and every day grow more enemy to God; and that is no mercy that increases their hostility and enmity with God. A prosperous iniquity is the most unprosperous condition in the whole world. When he slew them, they sought him and turned them early, and inquired after God; but as long as they prevailed upon their enemies, they forgot that God was their strength, and the high God was their redeemer. It was well observed by the Persian ambassador of old; when he was telling the king a sad story of the overthrow of all his army by the Athenians, he adds this of his own; that the day before the fight, the young Persian gallants, being confident they should destroy their enemies, were drinking drunk, and railing at the timorousness and fears of religion, and against all their gods, saying, there were no such thing, and that all things came by chance and industry, nothing by the providence of the supreme power. But the next day, when they had fought unprosperously, and flying from their enemies, who were eager in their pursuit, they came to the river Strymon, which was so frozen that their boats could not launch, and yet it began to thaw, so that they feared the ice would not bear them; then you should see the bold gallants, that the day before said there was no God, most timorously and superstitiously fall upon

*The Mercy of the Divine Judgments, Serm. xii., 292.

their faces, and beg of God that the river Strymon might bear them over from their enemies. What wisdom and philosophy, and perpetual experience, and revelation, and promises, and blessings cannot do, a mighty fear can; it can allay the confidences of bold lust and imperious sin, and soften our spirits into the lowness of a child, our revenge into charity of prayers, our impudence into the blushings of a chidden girl; and therefore God hath taken a course proportionable: for he is not so unmercifully merciful as to give milk to an infirm lust, and hatch the egg to the bigness of a cockatrice. And therefore observe how it is that God's mercy prevails over all his works; it is even then when nothing can be discerned but his judgments, for as when a famine had been in Israel in the days of Ahab for three years and a half, when the angry prophet Elijah met the king, and presently a great wind arose, and the dust blew into the eyes of them that walked abroad, and the face of the heavens was black and all tempest, yet then the prophet was most gentle, and God began to forgive, and the heavens were more beautiful than when the sun puts on the bright. est ornaments of a bridegroom, going from his chambers of the east. So it is in the economy of the divine mercy: when God makes our faces black, and the winds blow so loud till the cordage cracks, and our gay fortunes split, and our houses are dressed with cypress and yew, and the mourners go about the streets, this is nothing but the pompa misericordiæ, this is the funeral of our sins, dressed indeed with emblems of mourning, and proclaimed with sad accents of death; but the sight is refreshing, as the beauties of the field which God had blessed, and the sounds are healthful as the noise of a physician.*

The caresses of a pleasant fortune are apt to swell into extravagances of spirit, and burst into the dissolution of manners; and unmixt joy is dangerous: but if in our fairest flowers we spy a locust, or feel the uneasiness of a sackcloth under our fine linen, or our purple be tied with an uneven and a rude cord; any little trouble, but to correct our wildnesses, though it be but a death'shead served up at our feasts, it will make our tables fuller of health, and freer from snare, it will allay our spirits, making them

*The Mercy of the Divine Judgments; Serm. xii., pages 286, 288, 295.