SUMMARY OF SERMON VIII. 2 SAMUEL, CHAP. XIV.-VERSE 14. PREVIOUS observations on the mortality of man and his subjection to death, as the effects of sin and disobedience. All must die. We are as water spilt on the ground, which cannot be gathered up again. 1. We are as water, weak and of no consistency, always descending, abiding in no certain place, unless where we are detained by violence, &c. 2. But besides the weaknesses and natural decay of our bodies, if chances and contingencies be innumerable, then no man can reckon our dangers, and the preternatural causes of our deaths; so that he is a vain person whose hopes of life are too confidently increased by reason of his health, &c.: peculiar dangers of infancy exhibited. 3. But in the middle way the case is altered. Nature is strong, and art is apt to give us ease and remedy: but still there is no security. Peculiar diseases to which men are incident, and various stages of them, described, &c. Our farther likeness to water insisted on. 4. In all the process of our health we are running to the grave: private vices and quarrels, public wars, &c. enlarged on : so that we make ourselves like to water spilt on the ground, throwing away our lives, as if they were wholly unprofitable. There is no redemption from the grave: the topic commented on and illustrated. This consideration intended as a severe monitor of careful ness; that we should so order our affairs as to be partakers of the first resurrection, that is, from sin to a life of grace; for such only can or will be called a resurrection from death to life: the taking of the wicked from their graves to the bar of judgment, can scarcely be called a resurrection: such are but the solemnities of an eternal death: the wicked are spilt like water, and shall never be gathered up again. But the godly also come under the sense of the words: they descend into the grave, and are no more reckoned among the living; they have no more concern with what is done under the sun, &c. It is true, they envy and murmur not; they are consigned to kingdoms where these passions disturb them not: "yet there is a relation continued still." Opinion of Aristotle, that the dead take thought for the good of the living: that also of the church. We must remember, that in this world we are something besides flesh and blood: we may not, without violent necessities, run into new relations; but must preserve the affections which we bore towards our dead when they were alive: we must not so live as if they had perished, but as pressing forward to the most intimate participation of the communion of saints: this topic enlarged on. Though to us they are as water spilt, yet to God they are as water fallen into the sea; safe in his comprehension. Farther consideration of the sentence: this descending to the grave is the lot of all men: the rich is not protected through favor, nor the poor for pity; the old man is not reverenced for his age, nor the infant regarded for his tender years: youth and beauty, learning and prudence, wit and strength, all lie down equally in dishonor: this subject enlarged on. Well, it may be said, this is a sad story. Is there no comfort after this? Shall we all go hence, and be no more seen, and have no recompense? Is there no allay to this great calamity? Yes, there is a yet in the text; yet doth he devise means, &c. All this sorrow and trouble is but a phantasm, and receives its account and degrees from our present conceptions, &c. Death is nothing but the middle point between two lives: this illustrated from Scripture. We must not venture to determine what are the circumstances of the abode of blessed souls in their separate dwellings; yet possibly that might be easier than to tell what or how the soul is, and how it works when in the body, &c. Certain it is that the body hinders many actions of the soul : it is an imperfect body, a diseased brain, or a violent passion, that makes fools; for no one has an imperfect soul; &c. That the soul is alive after our death, St. Paul affirms: Christ died for us, that, whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with him. It is a weak and unlearned proposition to say, that the soul can do nothing of itself, without the provisions of the body. Reasons given against such a supposition. To which this consideration may be added; that our souls have the same condition that Christ's soul had in the state of separation; because he took on himself all our nature, and all our condition, &c. But if these arguments should fail, yet the felicity of God's saints cannot fail: for suppose the body to be a necessary instrument, &c., yet then God devises other means that his departed be not expelled from him. For God will restore the soul to the body, and raise the body to such a perfection, that it shall be an organ fit to praise him on it shall be made spiritual, to minister to the soul, when the soul shall become a spirit: this topic enlarged on. In the mean time, whatever may be the case with regard to the soul's separate consciousness, it will concern us only to secure our state by holy living, leaving the event to God; that whether present or absent, whether sleeping or waking, whether perceiving or perceiving not, we may be accepted of him. Character and conduct of Lady Carbery displayed. Conclusion. SERMON VIII. A FUNERAL SERMON, &c. 2 SAMUEL, CHAP. XIV.-VERSE 14. For we must needs die, and are as water spilt on the ground, which cannot be gathered up again: neither doth God respect any person; yet doth he devise means, that his banished be not expelled from him. 6 WHEN our blessed Saviour and his disciples viewed the temple, some one amongst them cried out, Magister, aspice, quales lapides! Master, behold, what fair, what great stones are here!' Christ made no other reply, but foretold their dissolution, and a world of sadness and sorrow which should bury that whole nation, when the teeming cloud of God's displeasure should produce a storm, which was the daughter of the biggest anger, and the mother of the greatest calamity, which ever crushed any of the sons of Adam; The time shall come, that there shall not be left one stone on another.' The whole temple and the religion, the ceremonies ordained by God, and the nation beloved by God, and the fabric erected for the service of God, shall run to their own period, and lie down in their several graves. Whatsoever had a beginning, can also have an ending; and it shall die, unless it be daily watered with the purls flowing from the fountain of life, and refreshed with the dew of heaven, and the wells of God: and, therefore, God had provided a tree in Paradise to have supported Adam in his artificial immortality: immortality was not in his nature, but in the hands and arts, in the favor and superad ditions of God. Man was always the same mixture of heat and cold, of dryness and moisture; ever the same weak thing, apt to feel rebellion in the humors, and to suffer the evils of a civil war in his body natural: and, therefore, health and life were to descend on him from heaven, and he was to suck life from a tree on earth; himself being but ingrafted into a tree of life, and adopted into the condition of an immortal nature. But he that in the best of his days was but a scion of this tree of life, by his sin was cut off from thence quickly, and planted on thorns, and his portion was for ever after among the flowers, which to-day spring and look like health and beauty, and in the evening they are sick; and at night are dead, and the oven is their grave and, as before, even from our first spring from the dust on earth, we might have died, if we had not been preserved by the continual flux of a rare providence; so now that we are reduced to the laws of our own nature, 6 we must needs die.' It is natural, and, therefore, necessary it is become a punishment to us, and therefore it is unavoidable; and God hath bound the evil on us by bands of natural and inseparable propriety, and by a supervening unalterable decree of heaven; and we are fallen from our privilege, and are returned to the condition of beasts, and buildings, and common things and we see temples defiled unto the ground, and they die by sacrilege; and great empires die by their own plenty and ease, full humors, and factious subjects; and huge buildings fall by their own weight, and the violence of many winters eating and consuming the cement, which is the marrow of their bones; and princes die like the meanest of their servants; and every thing finds a grave and a tomb: and the very tomb itself dies by the bigness of its pompousness and luxury, Phario nutantia pondera saxo, Quæ cineri vanus dat ruitura labor,* and becomes as friable and uncombined dust, as the ashes of the sinner or the saint that lay under it, and is now forgotten in his bed of darkness. And to this catalogue of mortality man is enrolled with a statutum est; It is appointed for all men to die once, and after death comes judgment:' and if a * Martial, i. 89. 3. TAY. VOL. IV. E |