ends; witty counsels that are underminings of our neighbour, destroying his just interest to serve our own, stratagems to deceive, infinite and insignificant answers with fraudulent design, unjust and unlawful concealment of our purposes, fallacious promises and false pretences, flattery, and unjust and unreasonable praise, saying one thing and meaning the contrary, pretending religion to secular designs, breaking faith, taking false oaths, and such other instruments of human purposes framed by the devil, and sent into the world to be perfected by man. Christian simplicity speaks nothing but its thoughts; and when it concerns prudence that a thought or purpose should be concealed, it concerns simplicity that silence be its cover, and not a false vizor; it rather suffers inconvenience than a lie: it destroys no man's right, though it be inconsistent with my advantages; it reproves freely, palliates no man's wickedness; it intends what it ought, and does what is bidden, and uses courses regular and just, sneaks not in corners, and walks always in the eye of God, and the face of the world.

7. Jesus told Nathanael that he knew him, when he saw him under the fig-tree: and Nathanael took that to be probation sufficient that he was the Messias; and believed rightly upon an insufficient motive. Which because Jesus did accept, it gives testimony to us, that however faith be produced, by means regular or by arguments incompetent, whether it be proved or not proved, whether by chance or deliberation, whether wisely or by occasion, so that faith be produced by the instrument, and love by faith, God's work is done, and so is ours. For if St. Paul rejoiced that Christ was preached, though by the envy of peevish persons,

certainly God will not reject an excellent product because it came from a weak and sickly parent. And he that brings good out of evil, and rejoices in that good, having first triumphed upon the evil, will certainly take delight in the faith of the most ignorant persons, which his own grace hath produced out of innocent, though insufficient, beginnings. It was folly in Naaman to refuse to be cured, because he was to recover only by washing in Jordan. The more incompetent the means is, the greater is the glory of God, who hath produced waters from a rock, and fire from the collision of a sponge and wool: and it is certain the end, unless it be in products merely natural, does not take its estimate and degrees from the external means. Grace does miracles, and the productions of the Spirit, in respect of its instruments, are equivocal, extraordinary, and supernatural; and ignorant persons believe as strongly, though they know not why, and love God as heartily as greater spirits and more excellent understandings: and when God pleases, or if he sees it expedient, he will do to others as to Nathanael, give them greater arguments and better instruments for the confirmation and heightening of their faith, than they had for the first production.

8. When Jesus had chosen these few disciples to be witnesses of succeeding accidents, every one of which was to be a probation of his mission and divinity, he entered into the theatre of the world at a marriage-feast, which he now first hallowed to a sacramental signification, and made to become mysterious. He now began to choose his spouse out from the communities of the world, and did mean to endear her by unions ineffable and glori

ous, and consign the sacrament by his blood, which he first gave in a secret representment, and afterwards in letter and apparent effusion. And although the holy Jesus did in his own person consecrate celibacy, and abstinence and chastity in his mother's; yet by his presence he also hallowed marriage, and made it honourable, not only in civil accounts and rites of heraldry, but in a spiritual sense, he having new sublimed it, by making it a sacramental representment of the union of Christ and his spouse, the church. And all married persons should do well to remember what the conjugal society does represent, and not break the matrimonial bond, which is a mysterious ligament of Christ and his church for whoever dissolves the sacredness of the mystery, and unhallows the vow by violence and impurity, he dissolves his relation to Christ. To break faith with a wife or husband is a divorce from Jesus, and that is a separation from all possibilities of felicity. In the time of the Mosaical statutes, to violate marriage was to do injustice and dishonour, and a breach to the sanctions of nature, or the first constitutions: but two bands more are added in the gospel, to make marriage more sacred. For now our bodies are made 'temples of the Holy Ghost,' and the rite of marriage is made significant and sacramental, and every act of adultery is profanation and irreligion; it desecrates a temple, and deflours a mystery.

9. The married pair were holy, but poor, and they wanted wine; and the blessed virgin-mother, pitying the affront of the young man, complained to Jesus of the want; and Jesus gave her an answer which promised no satisfaction to her purposes. For now that Jesus had lived thirty years,

and done in person nothing answerable to his glorious birth, and the miraculous accidents of his person, she longed till the time came in which he was to manifest himself by actions as miraculous as the star of his birth. She knew, by the rejecting of his trade, and his going abroad, and probably by his own discourse to her, that the time was near; and the forwardness of her love and holy desires possibly might go some minutes before his own precise limit. However, Jesus answered to this purpose, to show that the work he was to do was done not to satisfy her importunity, which is not occasion enough for a miracle, but to prosecute the great work of divine designation: for in works spiritual and religious all exterior relation ceases. The world's order, and the manner of our nature, and the infirmities of our person, have produced societies, and they have been the parents of relation; and God hath tied them fast by the knots of duty, and made the duty the occasion and opportunities of reward: but in actions spiritual, in which we relate to God, our relations are founded upon the spirit; and therefore we must do our duties upon considerations separate and spiritual, but never suffer temporal relations to impede our religious duties. Christian charity is a higher thing than to be confined within the terms of dependence and correlation; and those endearments which leagues, or nature, or society have made, pass into spiritual, and, like stars in the presence of the sun, appear not when the heights of the spirit are in place.' Where duty hath prepared special instances, there we must, for religion's sake, promote them; but

· Συγγένεια γὰρ οἰκειοτέρα ἡ πρὸς δικαιοσύνην καὶ πᾶσαν áλŋv åpeтýv ópixía. Philo. in exposit. general.

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even to our parents or our children the charities of religion ought to be greater than the affections of society. And though we are bound in all offices exterior to prefer our relatives before others, because that is made a duty; yet to purposes spiritual, all persons eminently holy put on the efficacy of the same relations, and pass a duty upon us of religious affections.

10. At the command of Jesus the water-pots were filled with water, and the water was by his divine power turned into wine; where the different economy of God and the world is highly observable: Every man sets forth good wine at first, and then the worse; but God not only turns the water into wine, but into such wine that the last draught is most pleasant. The world presents us with fair language, promising hopes, convenient fortunes, pompous honours; and these are the outsides of the bole: but when it is swallowed, these dissolve in the instant, and there remains bitterness, and the malignity of coloquintida. Every sin smiles in the first address, and carries light in the face, and honey in the lip; but when we have well drunk, then comes that which is worse;' a whip with six strings, fears and terrors of conscience, and shame and displeasure, and a caitive disposition, and diffidence in the day of death. But when, after the manner of the purifying of the Christians, we fill our water-pots with water, watering our couch with our tears, and moistening our cheeks with the perpetual distillations of repentance, then Christ turns our water into wine: first penitents, and then communicants; first waters of sorrow, and then the wine of the chalice; first the justification of correction, and then the