that you understand not the nature of true friendship, nor the use of a true friend; and are yet yourselves too friendly to your sins.

14. Moreover, those few friends that are truest to you, may be utterly unable to relieve you in your distress, or to give you ease, or to do you any good. The case may be such that they can but pity you, and lament your sorrows, and weep over you: you may see in them that man is not as God, whose friendship can accomplish all the good that he desireth to his friends. The wisest, and greatest, and best of men, are silly comforters, and uneffectual helps. You may be sick, and pained, and grieved, and distressed, notwithstanding any thing that they can do for you; nay, perhaps in their ignorance, they may increase your misery, while they desire your relief; and by striving indirectly to help and ease you, may tie the knot faster and make you worse. They may provoke those more against you that oppress you, while they think they speak that which should tend to set you free: they may think to ease your troubled minds by such words as shall increase the troubled; or to deliver you as Peter would have delivered Christ, and saved his Saviour, first by carnal counsel; "Be it far from thee, Lord; this shall not be unto thee:" (Matt. xvi. 22 :) And then by carnal unjust force, (by drawing his sword against the officers). Love and good meaning will not prevent the mischiefs of ignorance and mistake. If your friend cut your throat, while he thought to cut but a vein to cure your disease, it is not his friendly meaning that will save your lives. Many a thousand sick people are killed by their friends, that attend them, with an earnest desire of their life; while they ignorantly give them that which is contrary to their disease, and will not be the less pernicious for the good meaning of the giver. Who have more tender affections than mothers to their children? And yet a great part of the calamity of the world of sickness, and the misery of man's life, proceedeth from the ignorant and erroneous indulgence of mothers to their children, who to please them, let them eat and drink what they will, and use them to excess and gluttony in their childhood, till nature be abused and mastered, and clogged with those superfluities and crudities, which are the dunghill matter of most of the following diseases of their lives.

I might here also remember you how your friends may themselves be overcome with a temptation, and then become the more dangerous tempters of you, by how much the greater their interest is in your affections. If they be infected with error, they are the likest persons to ensnare you: if they be tainted with covetousness or pride, there is none so likely to draw you to the same sin and so your friends may be in effect your most deadly enemies, deceivers and destroyers.

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15. And if you have friends that are never so firm and constant, they may prove (not only unable to relieve you, but) very additions to your grief. If they are afflicted in the participation of your sufferings, as your troubles are become theirs (without your ease), so their trouble for you will become yours, and so the stock of your sorrow will be increased. And they are mortals, and liable to distress as well as you. And therefore they are like to bear their share in several sorts of sufferings: and so friendship will make their sufferings to be yours: their sicknesses and pains, their fears and griefs, their wants and dangers, will all be yours. And the more they are your hearty friends, the more they will be yours. And so you will have as many additions to the proper burden of your griefs, as you have suffering friends: when you do but hear that they are dead, you say as Thomas, "Let us also go that we may die with him." (John xi. 16.) And having many such friends you will almost always have one or other of them in distress; and so be seldom free from sorrow; besides all that which is properly your own.

16. Lastly, If you have a friend that is both true and useful, yet you may be sure he must stay with you but a little while. "The godly men will cease, and the faithful fail from among the children of men; while men of lying, flattering lips, and double hearts survive, and the wicked walk on every side, while the vilest men are exalted.” (Psal. xii. 1, 2. 8.) While swarms of false, malicious men are left round about you, perhaps God will take away your dearest friends. If among a multitude of unfaithful ones, you have but one that is your friend indeed, perhaps God will take away that one. He may be separated from you into another country; or taken away to God by death. Not that God doth grudge you the mercy of a faithful friend; but

that he would be your All, and would not have you hurt yourselves with too much affection to any creature, and for other reasons to be named anon.

And to be forsaken of your friends is not all your affliction: but to be forsaken is a great aggravation of it. 1. For they used to forsake us in our greatest sufferings and straits, when we have the greatest need of them.

2. They fail us most at a dying hour, when all other worldly comfort faileth: as we must leave our houses, lands and wealth, so must we for the present leave our friends and as all the rest are silly comforters, when we have once received our citation to appear before the Lord, so also are our friends but silly comforters: they can weep over us, but they cannot, with all their care, delay the separating stroke of death, one day or hour.

Only by their prayers, and holy advice, remembering us of everlasting things, and provoking us in the work of preparation, they may prove to us friends indeed. And therefore we must value a holy, heavenly, faithful friend, as one of the greatest treasures upon earth. And while we take notice how, as men, they may forsake us, we must not deny but that, as saints, they are precious, and of singular use to us; and Christ useth by them to communicate his mercies; and if any creatures in the world may be blessings to us, it is holy persons, that have most of God in their hearts and lives.

3. And it is an aggravation of the cross, that they often fail us, when we are most faithful in our duty, and stumble most upon the most excellent acts of our obedience.

4. And those are the persons that oftentimes fail us, of whom we have deserved best, and from whom we might have expected most.

Review the experiences of the choicest servants that Christ hath had in the world, and you shall find enough to confirm you of the vanity of man, and the instability of the dearest friends. How highly was Athanasius esteemed; and yet at last deserted and banished by the famous Constantine himself! How excellent a man was Gregory Nazianzen, and highly valued in the church; and yet by reproach and discouragements driven away from his church at Constantinople whither he was chosen, and envied by the bishops round about him. How worthy a man was the eloquent

Chrysostom, and highly valued in the church; and yet how bitterly was he prosecuted by Hierom and Epiphanius; and banished, and died in a second banishment, by the provocation of factious, contentious bishops, and an empress impatient of his plain reproofs! What person more generally esteemed and honoured for learning, piety, and peaceableness, than Melancthon; and yet by the contentions of Illyricus and his party, he was made aweary of his life. As highly as Calvin was (deservedly) valued at Geneva, yet once in a popular lunacy and displeasure, they drove him out of their city, and in contempt of him some called their dogs by the name of Calvin; (though after they were glad to entreat him to return.) How much our Grindal and Abbot were esteemed, it appeareth by their advancement to the archbishopric of Canterbury; and yet who knoweth not that their eminent piety sufficed not to keep them from dejecting frowns! And if you say, that it is no wonder if with princes through interest, and with people through levity, it be thus; I might heap up instances of the like untrustiness of particular friends; but all history, and the experiences of the most, do so much abound with them, that I think it needless. Which of us must not say with David, that “All men are liars;" (Psal. cxvi ;) that is, deceitful and untrusty ; either through unfaithfulness, weakness or insufficiency; that either will forsake us, or cannot help us in time of need.

Was Christ forsaken in his extremity by his own disciples, to teach us what to expect, or bear? Think it not strange then to be conformed to your Lord, in this, as well as in other parts of his humiliation. Expect that men should prove deceitful: Not that you should entertain censorious suspicions of your particular friends: but remember in general that man is frail, and the best too selfish and uncertain; and that it is no wonder if those should prove your greatest grief, from whom you had the highest expectations. Are you better than Job, or David, or Christ? and are your friends more firm and unchangeable than theirs?

Consider, 1. That creatures must be set at a sufficient distance from their Creator. Allsufficiency, immutability and indefectible fidelity, are proper to Jehovah. As it is no wonder for the sun to set, or be eclipsed, as glorious a body as it is, so it is no wonder for a friend, a pious friend, to fail us, for a time, in the hour of our distress. There are some

that will not: but there is none but may, if God should leave them to their weakness. Man is not your rock: he hath no stability but what is derived, dependant, and uncertain, and defectible. Learn therefore to rest on God alone, and lean not too hard or confidently upon any mortal wight. 2. And God will have the common infirmity of man to be known, that so the weakest may not be utterly discouraged, nor take their weakness to be gracelessness, whilst they see that the strongest also have their infirmities, though not so great as theirs. If any of God's servants live in constant holiness and fidelity, without any shakings or stumbling in their way, it would tempt some self-accusing, troubled souls, to think that they were altogether graceless, because they are so far short of others. But when we read of a Peter's denying his master in so horrid a manner, with swearing and cursing, that he knew not the man, (Matt. xxvi. 74,) and of his dissimulation and not walking uprightly; (Gal. ii ;) and of a David's unfriendly and unrighteous dealing with Mephibosheth, the seed of Jonathan; and of his most vile and treacherous dealing with Uriah, a faithful and deserving subject; it may both abate our wonder and offence at the unfaithfulness of our friends, and teach us to compassionate their frailty, when they desert us; and also somewhat abate our immoderate dejectedness and trouble, when we have failed God or man ourselves.

3. Moreover, consider, how the odiousness of that sin, which is the root and cause of such unfaithfulness, is greatly manifested by the failing of our friends. God will have the odiousness of the remnants of our self-love and carnal-mindedness, and cowardice appear: we should not discern it in the seed and root, if we did not see, and taste it in the fruits. Seeing without tasting will not sufficiently convince us. A crab looks as beautiful as an apple; but when you taste it, you better know the difference. When you must yourselves be unkindly used by your friends, and forsaken by them in your distress, and you have tasted the fruits of the remnants of their worldliness, selfishness and carnal fears, you will better know the odiousness of these vices, which thus break forth against all obligations to God and you, and notwithstanding the light, the conscience, and perhaps the grace, that doth resist them.