CHAPTER III. Undeniable Reasons against Malignant Enmity to Serious Godliness. 1. To deny that there is a God who is the Supreme Governor of man, is to be mad in despite of the whole world which proveth it: and it deposeth all kings, who claim their authority as given them by God, and as his officers; for if there be no God, there is none to give them authority: and to grant that there is a God, and yet deny him our love, honour and obedience, is to speak gross contradiction, or else profess open malice against God himself. If he be God, he is perfectly wise; and should not perfect wisdom govern us? If he be God, he is perfectly good, and man's chief benefactor; and should he not then have our chiefest love? If he be God, he is of absolute power; and should he not then be obeyed? If he be God, he made us, and still maintaineth us, and we live continually by his will, and have all that we have of his bounty, and we, and all we have are wholly his own; and are not then all our thanks and service due to him? If he be God, he is our Judge, and will be just in punishing and rewarding; and should we not then serve him with the greatest fear, and with the highest hopes? These things are undeniable. Dare any man that believeth there is a God, say, that man can love him too much, or too much honour him or obey him? Can we return him more than his due? It is therefore no less than practical atheism, or else a rebellious defiance of God, to blame or hate men for loving, honouring and serving him to the very utmost of their power. And to deny God, or defy him, is a thousandfold more damnable sin and treason, than to deny and defy the king, or your own parents. 2. God hath himself commanded man to love him with all his heart, and soul, and might; and to obey him with his greatest fidelity and diligence, and to fear him more than any creature, and to place our chiefest hopes on his promised rewards, and to seek first his kingdom and righteousness, and not to sin wilfully to save our lives, or gain all the world; xx. 12. xi. 12-14. Matt. xxii. 37. Luke xi. 4. Heb. xii. 28, 29. Matt. x. 39. 42. xvi. 25. 16. vi. 33. Luke xiv. 26. 33. Matt. v. 19,20. And the law of nature speaks no less. And if God command it, and you condemn it, do you not condemn God? If you command your son, or servant, or subject any thing, he that blames him for obeying you, blames you more than him. If it be a fault or folly to love and serve God with all our heart, and mind, and might, the fault or folly would be God's that requireth it, and not ours And, is such a blasphemer fit for human society, who will accuse his Maker? If God be blameworthy, he is not perfect; and if he be not perfect, he is not God: and so to be against our utmost obedience, doth amount to no less than blasphemy or atheism. 3. Do you think that man is a creature that needs to be blamed for loving or obeying God too much? Do you not know that nature is vitiated by sin, and man is now backward to God, and all that is good and holy? You may as well blame a lame man for running too fast, as a sinful man for obeying God too much. It is more foolish than to blame a sick man for working or eating too much, that can do neither or to hold a man in a consumption from going up the hill too fast. Do you find your own heart so forward to a holy life, as that you need pulling back or hindrance, when no exhortation or necessity will persuade you to it? And if you need no such reproof or stop, why should you think others need it? Do you not use to say that all men are sinners? And do sinners need to be blamed for obedience? Do you not daily confess that you have done the things which you ought not to have done, and left undone the things that you ought to have done, and there is no health and yet will you blame men for too much obedience? It seems then, that your confessions of sin are professions of it; and while you tell what you have done, you do but tell what you mean to do, and what you would have all others do; or else you blame yourselves for sinning, and hate your neighbours for not sinning. in you; 4. If you hate men for holiness and avoiding sin, you hate Jesus Christ most; for he was most holy, and free from all sin and you hate the angels and all in heaven, for they are holy, and void of all transgression. 5. Have you any better master to serve than God? Or any better work to do than he commandeth, or any better thing to seek and hope for than he hath promised? If not, should not the best be preferred? What do you love and seek yourselves? Is money or fleshly pleasure better than God and heaven? Is sin and sensuality a better employment than his service? Is your flesh and lust a better master? Compare them, and we are content that the best be preferred. 6. Why do you take on you to believe in Christ, if you be against holiness, and for sin? Christ came into the world to die for sin, to shew God's hatred of it: and would you have us wilfully commit it, and to despise his blood? He came to destroy the works of the devil; and will you plead for them? He came by his doctrine, example and grace, to bring man to holy obedience; and do you hate men for the same, and yet call yourselves Christians? 7. How dangerously do you draw towards the sin against the Holy Ghost, if you hate or blame men for being holy, or seeking to be such; when it is all the work of the Holy Ghost on men's souls to make them holy? It is a dangerous thing to hate the work of the Holy Ghost, and as it were defy him, and do despite to him. 8. Are you not yourselves in your baptism vowed and devoted to God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, renouncing the world, the flesh and the devil? And do you hate men for being such as you vowed to be yourselves? And do you think that God will not severely reckon with you for such perjury and base perfidiousness? 9. Do you not in your daily hypocritical devotions condemn yourselves by your own tongues? Do you not pray that the rest of your lives may be pure and holy? And at the same time hate purity and holiness? Do you not pray that God's will may be done on earth as it is in heaven? And can we have a higher, purer pattern? Do you know any that doth God's will better than it is done in heaven? Or is it not damnable hypocrisy to pray for that which you hate, and hate all men that desire and endeavour it? When you say or hear all the ten commandments, you pray, "Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law :" and do you hate men for endeavouring to keep it? If you come to the Lord's table, you confess your sins, and bind yourselves in covenant to forsake them, and to live a holy life, and you take the sacrament upon it; and the liturgy warneth you to take heed that you dissemble not, nor be hinderers of God's holy word, lest the devil enter into you as he did into Judas, and fill you with all unrighteousness. And if you hate or oppose that holy obedience to God which you profess, after all this, what must be the portion of such hypocrites? And in your creed you profess to believe in God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and to hold a holy catholic church, and the communion of saints; and yet do you hate saints that obey the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and hate their communion? 10. Hath not God printed on man's nature such a sense of the difference between good and evil, as that all laws and government are founded in that sense? And no man loveth to be counted or called a bad, or ungodly, or unconscionable man; a liar, a knave, a perjured man, or a wicked man; and yet do you hate men for avoiding wickedness? 11. Do not you use to accuse religious men of some sin or other (truly or falsely), and think by that to make them odious? And yet do you accuse them, and hate them most for not sinning? To be sober, just and godly, is but to avoid sins of omission and commission; and do you at once accuse them as sinners, and hate them for obeying God, and sinning no more? 12. Doth it never affright you to find the devil's nature in you, as hating the divine or holy nature which is in faithful, godly men, and to think how openly you serve the devil, and do his work? No man that believeth there are devils, can doubt, but that the hatred of God as holy, and the hatred of his holy word, and work, and servants, is the devil's malignity, and the opposing of them his work. If he were to write you his commandments, they would be contrary to God's, and the chief of them should be, Thou shalt not love God, nor serve him with all thy heart, and soul, and might, nor love them that do so; but hate, deride, oppose, and persecute them.' And is it honourable openly to serve the devil? Christ tells such men, John viii., that the devil is their father, because they have his nature, and that his work they do, for he was from the beginning a liar, and a malignant murderer, and turned man from obeying God; and can you think that he loveth you, or that his service against God is better than God's; or his reward better? 66 13. Doth it never touch your consciences to consider that you are the children and followers of cursed Cain; and how punctually his case against Abel, and yours against God's servants is the same? By faith Abel offered to God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts; and by it he being dead, yet speaketh; Heb. xi. 4. Cain hated him because God more accepted him and his offering. In this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil: whoever doth not righteousness is not of God, nor he that loveth not his brother: for this is the message that ye heard from the beginning, that we should love one another not as Cain, who was that wicked one, and slew his brother: and wherefore slew he him? Because his own works were evil, and his brother's righteous;" 1 John iii. 10—12. 14. Is it possible that any man can unfeignedly believe a heaven as the reward of holy obedience, and yet think we can do too much to obtain it, or be too careful to make it sure? Is not everlasting glory worth the cost of a holy life, or can it be too dearly bought? 15. Or is it possible to believe God's judgment, and hell's punishment, and yet to hate those that do their best according to God's own counsel to escape it? 66 66 66 16. What monstrous cruelty is it in you to wish poor souls to do that which God hath told us they shall be damned for! God saith, "Without holiness none shall see God;" Heb. xii. 14. Except your righteousness exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven;" Matt. v. 20. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God;" Matt. v. 8. If ye live after the flesh ye shall die, but if by the Spirit ye mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live ;" Rom. viii. 7,8. 13. "What manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness?" 2 Pet. iii. 11. "We receiving a kingdom that cannot be moved, let us serve God acceptably, with reverence and godly fear, for our God is a consuming fire;" Heb. xii. 28, 29. "Be stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as you know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord :" 1 Cor. xv. 58. This is the very tenor of the Gospel and |