shame and their dishonor, their dangerous follies and their huge deceptions, and they go into the clefts of the rock, and every little hand may cover them.

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3. Next to these, as the soul is still undressing, she takes off the roughness of her great and little angers and animosities, and receives the oil of mercies and smooth forgiveness, fair interpretations and gentle answers, designs of reconcilement and christian atonement, in their places. For so did the wrestlers in Olympus, they stripped themselves of all their garments and then anointed their naked bodies with oil, smooth and vigourous; with contracted nerves and enlarged voice they contended vehemently, till they obtained their victory, or their ease; and a crown of olive, or a huge pity, was the reward of their fierce contentions. Some wise men have said, that anger sticks to man's nature as inseparably as other vices do to the manners of fools, and that anger is never quite cured: But God, that hath found out remedies for all diseases, hath so ordered the circumstances of man, that, in the worser sort of men, anger and great indignation consume and shrivel into little peevishnesses and uneasy accents of sickness, and spend themselves in trifling instances; and in the better and more sanctified; it goes off in prayers, and alms, and solemn reconcilement. And however the temptations of this state, such I mean which are proper to it, are

- Quatenus excidit penitus vitium iræ, Cætera item nequeunt stultis hærentia.

:

Hor. lid. 1. Sat. 2.

little and inconsiderable; the man is apt to chide a servant too bitterly, and to be discontented with his nurse, or not satisfied with his physician, and he rests uneasily, and (poor man!) nothing can please him; And indeed these little indecencies must be cured and stopped, lest they run into an inconvenience. But sickness is in this particular a little image of the state of blessed souls, or of Adam's early mourning in Paradise, free from the troubles of lust, and violences of anger, and the intricacies of ambition, or the restlessness of covetousness. For though a man may carry all these along with him into his sickness, yet there he will not find them; and in despite of all his own malice, his soul shall find no rest from labouring in the galleys and baser captivity of sin; And if we value those moments of being in the love of God and in the kingdom of grace, which certainly are the beginnings of felicity; we may also remember that the not sinning actually is one step of innocency; and therefore this state is not intolerable, which by a sensible trouble makes it, in most instances, impossible to commit those great sins which make death, hell, and horrid damnations. And then let us but add this to it, that God sends sicknessess, but he never causes sin; that God is angry with a sinning person, but never with a man for being sick; that sin causes God to haste us; and sickness causes him to pity us; that all wise men in the world choose trouble rather than dishonour, affliction rather than baseness; and that sickness stops the torrent of sin, and interrupts its

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violence, and even to the worst men makes it to retreat many degrees. We may reckon sickness amongst good things, as we reckon rhubarb, and aloes, and child-birth, and labour and obedience, and discipline: These are unpleasant, and yet safe; they are troubles in order to blessings, or they are securities from danger, or the hard choices of a less and a more tolerable evil.

4. Sickness is in some sense eligible, because it is the opportunity and the proper scene of exercising some virtues *: It is that agony in which men are tried for a crown: And if we remember what glorious things are spoken of the grace of faith, that it is the life of just men, the restitution of the dead in trespasses and sins, the justification of sinners, the support of the weak, the confidence of the strong, the magazine of promises, and the title to very glorious rewards; we may easily imagine that it must have in a work and a difficulty in some proportion answerable to so great effects. But when we are bidden to believe strange propositions, we are put upon it when we cannot judge, and those propositions have possessed our discerning faculties, and have made a party there, and are become domestics before they come to be disputed; and then the articles of faith are so few and are made so credible, and in their event, and in their object, are so useful and gaining upon the af

it a

* Nolo quod cupio statim tenere,
Nec victoria mî placet parata.

Petron.

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fections, that he were a prodigy of a man, and would be so esteemed, that should in all our present circumstances disbelieve any point of faith and all is well as long as the sun-shines, and the fair breath of heaven gently wafts us to our own purposes. But if you will try the excellency, and feel the work of faith, place the man in a persecution, let him ride in a storm, let his bones be broken with sorrow, and his eye-lids loosed with sickness, let his bread be dipped with tears, and all the daughters of music be brought low; let God commence a quarrel against him, and be bitter in the accents of his anger or his discipline: then God tries your faith. Can you then trust his goodness, and believe him to be a father, when you groan under his rod? Can you rely upon all the strange, propositions of scripture, and be content to perish if they be not true? Can you receive comfort in the discourses of death and heaven, of immortality and the resurrection, of the death of Christ, and conforming to his sufferings? Truth is, there are but two great periods in which faith demonstrates itself to be a powerful and mighty grace: and they are persecution and the approaches of death, for the passive part; and a temptation for the active. In the days of pleasure, and the night of pain, faith is to fight her agonisticon, to contend for mastery; and faith overcomes all alluring and fond temptations to sin, and faith overcomes all our weaknesses and faintings in our troubles. By the faith of the promises we learn to despise the world, choosing those objects which

faith discovers; and by expectations of the same promises, we are comforted in all our sorrows, and enabled to look through and see beyond the cloud: but the vigour of it is pressed and called forth, when all our fine discourses come to be reduced to practice. *For in our health, and clearer day, it is easy to talk of putting trust in God; we readily trust him for life when we are in health, for provisions when we have fair revenues, and for deliverance when we are newly escaped: but let us come to sit upon the margent of our grave, and let a tyrant lean hard upon our fortunes, and dwell upon our wrong, let the storm arise, and the keels toss till the cordage crack, or that all our hopes bulge under us, and descend into the hollowness of sad misfortunes; then can you believe, when you neither hear, nor see, nor feel any thing but objections? This is the proper work of sickness: Faith is then brought into the theatre, and so exercised, that if it abides but to the end of the contention, we may see that work of faith, which God will hugely crown. The same I say of hope, and of charity, or the love of God, and of patience, which is a grace produced from the mixtures of all these: they are virtues which are greedy of danger. And

* Mors ipsa beatior indè est,
Quod per cruciamina lethi
Via panditur ardua justis,

Et ad astra doloribus itur.

Prud. hymn. in Exeq. defunct.

+ Virtutes avidæ periculi monstrant quàm non pœniteat tanto pretio æstimâsse virtutem. Senec.