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grace and mercy. The words of the second commandment are observable, shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments. They that love God and keep his commandments, all the reward they can hope for is, that God should shew mercy unto them. And there is a great deal of congruity, though they seem strange, in the words of David, Psalm lxii. 12. Unto thee, O Lord, belongeth mercy: for thou renderest to every man according to his work. That God rendereth to every man, that is, every righteous man, according to his work, is an act of his mercy. Nehemiah, chap. xiii. reckons up many great and noble works that he had done for the honour and service of God; but that you may see he boasted not in all this, that he had no conceit of any merit in himself, observe how humbly towards the conclusion of the chapter he supplicates for mercy, and such mercy, as whereby God would spare him, that is, not punish him. Ver. 22. Remember me, O my God, concerning this also, and spare me according to the greatness of thy mercy. He counts it greatness of mercy to be spared by God, after all his great good works. In like manner St. Paul, after he had mentioned the frequent acts of charity that Onesiphorus had exercised towards him, prays that God would reward them, in this style; The Lord grant unto him that he may find mercy of the Lord in that day. 2 Tim. i. 16, 17, 18.

There are two reasons suggested in the text itself, that utterly destroy all conceit of the merit of our righteousness.

1. By our righteousness we give nothing to God; he reaps no advantage from it to himself. If we sow in righteousness, we sow to ourselves, and the harvest

of this righteousness we ourselves reap. Sow to yourselves, reap ye. My goodness, saith the Psalmist, extends not to thee, but to the saints that are in the earth, Psalm xvi. 2, 3. As if he had said, I may and will do good to thy saints, but I can do no good to thee; for I receive all the good I have, or do, from thee. Indeed if we are wicked, we hurt not God, but ourselves; and if we are righteous, the benefit is to ourselves, and not to him. Whatsoever we crawling worms do here on earth, God sits still upon the circle of the heavens, the same perfect, unchangeable, blessed, and happy God for ever and ever. Only he is pleased out of his infinite condescension to look down from heaven, upon those little things we do here out of a hearty desire to glorify him; and in his abundant mercy he will plentifully reward them. We may challenge all who lay such stress upon merit, to answer St. Paul's question, Who hath first given to him, that is, God, and it shall be recompensed to him again? Rom. xi. 35.

2. The other reason against all merit of our good works, suggested in the very text, is this: there is no just proportion between our works of righteousness, and the reward of them. Our good works are but a few seeds; but the reward is a harvest. Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy. The words in the Hebrew are emphatical, reap

lephi chesed, according to the measure of mercy. For lephi and kephi are in Scripture used to signify the measure or proportion of a thing. Thus Exod. xvi. 21. Every man gathered lephi o kelo,

according to the measure of his eating. The sense therefore is: He that sows in righteousness shall reap and receive his reward, not according to the small

proportion of the seeds of righteousness that he hath sown, but according to the measure of the divine mercy and goodness, which useth superabundantly to remunerate man's slender performances. And accordingly the learned Drusius thus paraphraseth the words; in, or according to, mercy; benigna, ac pleniore mensura, quam seminastis, "in a bountiful and "fuller measure than you have sown." As in a good and plentiful year, the harvest or crop that is reaped vastly exceeds the seed sown, every grain yielding many more; so and much more it is here. What poor slender seeds of righteousness do we sow! But O the vast crop and harvest of glory that shall, through the mercy of God, spring and rise out of those seeds! It shall be so great, that when we come to reap it, we ourselves shall stand amazed at it.

To conclude therefore: he that hath sown the seeds of righteousness most plentifully, must look for his harvest of glory only from the mercy of God. He that is richest in good works, must sue for heaven in the quality of a poor worthless creature, that needs infinite mercy to bring him thither; mercy to pardon his sins antecedent to his good works; mercy to forgive the sins and defects in his works; mercy to advance his works (being, though supposed never so perfect, yet finite and temporary) to the possibility of attaining an infinite and endless reward. He must confess with St. Paul, that eternal life is the gift of God through Jesus Christ, Rom. vi. 23. That it is the rich purchase of Christ's most precious blood, by which alone a covenant of eternal life was established upon the gracious condition of faith working by love; that it was the grace of the divine Spirit promised in the same covenant, that prevented

him, and cooperated with him, and continually assisted and followed him in all his good works: and consequently, that though his crown of glory be a crown of righteousness, that is, of God's righteousness, whereby he is obliged to make good his own covenant; yet that it is a crown of mercy too, because that covenant itself was a covenant of infinite grace and mercy.

And if the best of men, after all the good works they have done, or can do, need mercy, infinite mercy to save them; what a miserable condition are they in, who have no good works at all to shew; but on the contrary, a large catalogue of wicked works, unrepented of, to account for? We may say in this sense with St. Peter; If the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear? 1 Pet. iv. 18. Certainly even the mercy of God cannot save this man, because his holiness will not suffer him. For though our good works are not required to make us capable of meriting heaven, (that being impossible for us;) yet they are absolutely necessary to make us fit objects for infinite mercy to bestow heaven on, or, in the excellent words of St. Paul, to make us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light. Col. i. 12.

To which inheritance, God of his infinite mercy bring us, through Jesus Christ:

To whom, with the Father and the Holy Ghost, be given all honour and glory, adoration and worship, now and for evermore. Amen.

SERMON II.'

THAT THE SOUL OF MAN SUBSISTS AFTER DEATH, IN A PLACE OF ABODE PROVIDED BY GOD FOR IT, TILL THE

RESURRECTION.

ACTS i. 25.

That he might go to his own place.

IN the verses before my text, we have an account of the election of a new apostle, in the room of the apostate Judas, who by his defection and miserable death consequent thereon, had rendered the complete and mysterious number of apostles, chosen by our Saviour, uneven, and made a breach in that jury of witnesses, that were to report and testify his resurrection. In this grand affair they first make use of their best judgment, by appointing two persons of the number of the seventy disciples, Barsabas and Matthias; either of them, as they conceived, fit for the office, leaving it to their Lord and Master to determine which of the two should be the man, and stand as an apostle. This divine determination they seek for by casting of lots, an ancient way of decision in such cases, used both in the church of

a

[This and the following Sermon seem to have been written after the eighth, of which they are in a manner the continuation.]

b[St. Luke does not expressly say that they were of the number of the seventy disciples, Acts i. 21-23. It is stated by Eusebius, Hist. Eccles. I. 12.]

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