and seconded with wit, breaks forth into perverse disputes, and corrupts the mind: therefore St. Pauls advised the Christians of his time, to "Beware lest any man spoil them through philosophy, and beguile them with enticing words." And the ancient fathers counted the philosophers, the seminaries of heresy. Proof whereof, to let pass the Antitrinitarians and Pelagians, and other ancient heretics, who out of the niceness of a quaint wit, perverted God's truth to the patronage of their lies; and to pass by the schoolmen and Jesuits of late ages, who have made the way to Heaven, a very labyrinth of crooked subtilties, and have weaved divinity into cobwebs; we may have abundantly in those Libertines and Cyrenians who disputed with Stephen, and those Stoics that wrangled with St. Paul" about the resurrection. And now learning, being thus corrupted, is not only turned into weariness, but into very notorious and damnable folly; "For thinking themselves wise," saith the Apostle ", " they became fools; and their folly shall be made known unto all men "." To get wealth in an honest and painful calling, is a great blessing for the diligent hand maketh rich ;' but corruption is apt to persuade unto cozenage, lying, equivocation, false weights, engrossments, monopolies, and other arts of cruelty and injustice; and by this means our lawful callings are turned into abominations, mysteries of iniquity, and a pursuit of death. Every creature of God is good in itself, and allowed both for necessity and delight; but corruption is apt to abuse the creatures to luxury and excess, to drunkenness, gluttony, and inordinate lusts; and by this means a man's

table is turned into a snare," as the Psalmist speaks. Now then, since all the world is thus bespread with gins, it mainly concerns us always to pray, that we may use the world as not abusing it; that we may enjoy the creatures with such wisdom, temperance, sobriety, heavenly affections, as may make them as so many ascents to raise us nearer to God; as so many glasses, in which to contemplate the wisdom, providence, and care of God to men; as so many witnesses of his

Col. ii. 4. 8. * Tertul. de præscrip. c. 7. de Idololatr. c. 10.-Hieron. contr. Lucifer. cum Præfat. Erasmi. Vid. Pet. Erodium. Decret. 1. 1.Tit. 6. sect. 2.-Hook. 1. 5, sect. 2. See Reynolds Confer. with Hart, cap. 2. Divis. 3. p. 72. u Acts vi. and xvii. Eccles. xii. 12. z 2 Tim. iii. 9. a Prov. xxi. 6. b Deut. xxv. 14. 16.

y Rom. i. 22. Prov. xx. 10. 23.

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love, and of our duty. And thus doth prayer sanctify the creature in the use of it.

Sect. 21.-Lastly, and in one word, prayer sanctifies the creatures in the review and recognition of them, and God's mercy in them, with thanksgiving and thoughts of praise, as Jacob, and David, looked upon God in the blessings with which he had blessed them. And now, since prayer doth thus sanctify the creatures unto us, we should make friends of the unrighteous Mammon, that we may by that means get the prayers of the poor saints, upon us and our estate; that the eye which seeth us, may bless us,-and the ear that heareth us, may give witness to us; that the loins and the mouths, the backs and the bellies of the poor and fatherless, may be as so many real supplications unto God for us.

Sect. 22.-The third and last direction which I shall give you, to find life in the creature, shall be to look on it, and love it in its right order, with subordination to God and his promises; to love it after God, and for God, as the beam which conveys the influences of life from him; as his instrument, moved and moderated by him to those ends for which it serves; to love it as the cistern, not as the fountain of life; to make Christ the foundation, and all other things but as accessions unto him. Otherwise, if we love it either alone, or above Christ,-however it may, by God's providence, keep our breath awhile in our nostrils, and fatten us against the last day; yet impossible it is, that it should ever minister the true and solid comforts of life unto us, "which consisteth not in the abundance of things which a man possesseth," as our Saviour speaks. Life goes not upward, but downward; the inferior derives it not on the superior: therefore by placing the creature in our estimation above Christ, we deny unto it any influence of livelihood from him, whom yet in words we profess to be the fountain of life. But men will object and say, This is a needless caution, not to prefer the creature before the Creator; as if any man were so impious and absurd. & Surely St. Paul tells us, "That men without faith, are impious and absurd men," who do in their affec

c Gen. xxxii. 9, 10.

d 2 Sam. vii. 18. 21.

• In eo fundamentum

non est Christus, cui cætera præponuntur. Aug. de Civit. Dei. 1. xxi. c. 26. f Luke xii. 15.

2 Thes. iii. 2.

tions and practices, as undoubtedly undervalue Christ, as the Gadarenes that preferred their swine before him. What else did Esau, when, for a mess of pottage, he sold away his birth-right, which was a privilege that led to Christ? What else did the people in the Wilderness, who despised the Holy Land, which was the type of Christ's kingdom, and in their hearts turned back to Egypt? What else did those wicked Israelites, who polluted the table of the Lord, and made his altar contemptible", which was a type of Christ? What else did Judas" and the Jews, who sold and bought the Lord of glory, for the price of a beast? What else do daily those men, who make religion serve turns, and godliness wait upon gain? who creep into houses with a form of piety, to seduce unstable souls, and pluck off their feathers to make themselves a nest? The apostle's rule is general, “That sensual and earthly-minded men, are all the enemies of the cross of Christ" P.

The third and last disproportion between the soul of man and the creature, arising from the vanity thereof, is in regard of duration and continuance. Man is by nature a provident creature, apt to lay up for the time to come. And that disposition should reach beyond the forecast of the fool in the Gospel for many years,' even for immortality itself. For certainly there is no man who hath but the general notions of corrupted reason alive within him; who hath not his conscience quite vitiated, and his mind putrefied with noisome lusts; who is not wrapped up in the mud of thick ignorance, and palpable stupidity; but must of necessity have oftentimes the immediate representations of immortality before his eyes. Let him never so much smother and suppress the truth; let him with all the art he can, divert his conceits, and entangle his thoughts in secular cares; let him shut his eye-lids as close as his nail is to his flesh; yet the flashes of immortality are of so penetrative and searching a nature, that they will undoubtedly get through all the obstacles which a mind, not wholly over-daubed with worldliness and ignorance, can put between. Therefore the apostle useth that for a strong

hMulti non à Christi unitate, sed à suis commodis nolunt recedere: Aug. de Baptis. 1. iv. c. 10. i Mark v. 17. k Psal. cvi. 24. 1 Acts vii. 39. m Mal. i. 7. n Zech. xi. 12. 'Uti volunt Deo, ut fruantur mundo :' Aug. de Civit. Dei, l. xv. c. 7.

p Phil. iii. 18, 19.

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argument, why rich men should not trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, and should be rich in good works; "That so, (saith he,) they may lay up in store a good foundation against the time to come, that they may lay hold on eternal life." Wicked men indeed lay up in store: but it is not riches, but wrath', even violence and oppression against the last day. But by trusting God, and doing good, a man lays up ‘durable riches', as the wise man speaks; in which respect he presently adds, that "The fruit of wisdom is better than gold." For though gold be of all metals the most solid, and therefore least subject to decay, yet it is not immortal and durable riches; for the apostle tells us, that silver and gold are corruptible" things', and that there is a 'rust and canker' which eateth up the gold and silver of wicked men. I confess, the hearts of many men are so glued unto the world, especially when they find all things succeed prosperously with them, that they are apt enough to set up their rest, and to conceit a kind of steadfastness in the things they possess. "Because they have no changes," saith the prophet David, "therefore they fear not God.” But yet I say, where the Lord doth not wholly give a man over to heap up treasures unto the last day, to be eaten up with the canker of his own wealth,-the soul must of necessity sometime or other, happen upon such sad thoughts as these: "What ails my foolish heart thus to eat up itself with care, and to rob mine eyes of their beloved sleep for such things, as to the which, the time will come, when I must bid an everlasting farewell? Am I not a poor mortal creature, brother to the worms, sister to the dust? Do I not carry about with me a soul full of corruptions, a skin full of diseases? Is not my breath in my nostrils, where there is room enough for it to go out, and possibility never to come in again? Is my flesh of brass, or my bones of iron, that I should think to hold out, and without interruption to enjoy these earthly things? Or if they were, yet are not the creatures themselves subject to period and mortality? Is there not a moth in my richest garments, a worm in my tallest cedars, a canker and rust in my firmest gold, to corrupt and eat it out? Or if not, will there not come a day,

when the whole frame of nature shall be set on fire, and the elements themselves shall melt with heat? when that universal flame shall devour all the bags, and lands, and offices, and honours, and treasures, and storehouses of worldly men? when Heaven and Hell shall divide the world: Heaven, into which nothing can be admitted which is capable of moth or rust to corrupt it; and Hell, into which, if any such things could come, they would undoubtedly in one instant be swallowed up in those violent and unextinguishable flames? And shall I be so foolish as to put my felicity in that which will fail me, when I shall stand in greatest need; to heap up treasures into a broken bag; to work in the fire where all must perish" Certainly the soul of a mere worldly man, who cannot find God or Christ in the things he enjoys, must of necessity be so far from reaping solid or constant comfort from any of these perishable creatures, that it cannot but ache and tremble, but be wholly surprised with dismal passions, with horrid pre-apprehensions of its own woful estate, upon the evidence of the creature's mortality, and the unavoidable flashes and conviction of its own everlastingness.

Sect. 24.-Now if we consider the various roots of this corruption in the creature, it will then further appear unto us, that they are not only mortal, but even momentary and vanishing.

First, By the law of their creation they were made subject to alterations: there was an enmity and reluctancy in their entirest being.

Secondly, This hath been exceedingly improved by the sin of man, whose evil, being the Lord of all creatures, must needs redound to the misery and mortality of all his retinue. For it was in the greater world, as in the administration of a private family: the poverty of the master is felt in the bowels of all the rest; his stain and dishonour runs into all the members of that society. As it is in the natural body, some parts may be distempered and ill-affected alone; others, not without contagion on the rest. A man may have a dim eye, or a withered arm, or a lame foot, or an impedite tongue, without any danger to the parts adjoining; but a lethargy in the head, or an obstruction in the liver, or a dyspepsy and indisposition in the stomach, diffuseth universal malignity through the body, because these are sovereign and architec