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judice in their superiors, will often present their defects to them, and interrupt any career of their passion and vanity; but princes and great men, who can have few friends (because friendship presupposeth some kind of equality), whose counsellors are commonly compliers with their humours, and flatterers of their infirmities, who are seldom checked by want of success in what they propose to themselves, have little help but their own observation and experience to cure their follies and defects; and that observation and experience is never so pregnant and convincing, as under adversity, which refreshes the memory, makes it revolve that which was purposely laid aside that it might never be remembered; reforms and sharpens the understanding, and faithfully collects all that hath been left undone, or hath been done amiss, and presents it to the judgment; which, now that the clouds and fumes and mists of pride, ambition, and flattery, that used to transport and intoxicate and mislead it, are dispersed, discerns what misfortunes attended those faults, what ruin that wickedness, the gradation and progress each error hath made, and how close the punishment had attended the transgression: every faculty of the mind does its office ex

actly, so that how disturbed and disquieted soever the body is, without doubt the mind was never in better health than under this examination. Besides, if there were no other good to be expected from it, than what keeps it company; if we were not sure by well bearing it to be freed from it, and rewarded for it; the very present benefit and advantages it gives us, and gives us title to, renders it most ambitiously to be desired; it entitles us to the compassion and pity of all good men: "To him that is afflicted pity should be shewed from his friend," says Job vi. 14. Nay, it gives us a title to salvation itself: "For thou wilt save the afflicted people,' says holy David, Psal. xviii. 27. Yet notwithstanding all these invitations and promises, all the examples of good men, and the blessings which have crowned those examples, all our own experience of ourselves, that we have really gained more understanding and more piety in one year's affliction than in the whole course of our prosperous fortunes, we are so far from a habit of patience, and so weary of our sufferings, that we are even ready to exchange our innocence to change our condition.

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There was never an age, in which men underwent greater trials by adversity, and I

fear scarce an age in which there was a less stock of patience to bear it; never more tribulation, never less glorying in tribulation. We are all ready enough to magnify our sufferings, and our merit in those sufferings, to make the world believe we have undergone them out of our piety to God, and devotion to his worship; out of our allegiance to our sove. reign lord the king, and because we would not consent to the violation of that, and the wresting his rights from him by violence; out of our tender affection to our native country, and because we would not consent that should be subject to the exorbitant lawless power of ambitious wicked men; the suffering for either of which causes (and we would have it believed we suffer jointly for them all) entitles us justly to the merit of martyrdom; yet we are so far from comforting and delighting ourselves with the conscience of having performed our duty, and from the enjoying that ease and quiet which naturally results from innocence, that we rather murmur and censure and reproach God Almighty, for giving the trophies we have deserved to those who have oppressed us; and study nothing more, than stratagems to impose upon that conscience we are weary of, and to barter away our innocence, that we may be ca

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pable of overtaking those in their properous wickedness, from whom we would be thought to have fled for conscience sake; and instead of a confident attending and waiting God's time to vindicate himself and us (for if our sufferings proceeded from those grounds and principles we pretend, it were so much his own cause that we should be sure of his vindication) we make excuses for the little good we have done, and even renounce it by professing to be sorry for it; and that we may be sure to find no check from our reason, when we have prevailed with our science, we corrupt and bribe our understandings with fallacious argumentations, and argue ourselves into a liking of our stupidity, as if we did nothing but what God required at our hands; we say, God expects we should help ourselves, and by natural means endeayoured to remove from us those afflictions and calamities which the power of ill men has brought upon us; that God doth assist and bless those endeavours: on the other hand, if we sit still, and without any industry of our own look for supernatural deliverance, we presume to put God to a miracle, which he will work for us, and that he will countenance our lethargic laziness. Having by this argumentation brought ourselves to

an activity, we must then guide ourselves by what is possible, and what is practicable, that is, by such rules and mediums as they have set 'down, with whom our transactions must be admitted. When, we are then in any straits, which before our setting out we would not forsee, we have a maxim at hand to carry us on. Of two evils the least is to be chosen. If we can prevent this mischief, which seems to us greater, though we are guilty of another which seems less, all is well: especially if our formal and temporary and dissembled consent to this or that ill act, enables us or gives us a probable hope (which is a flattery we much delight ourselves, and are always furnished with) of undoing or reversing those mischiefs, which for the present we are not, or think ourselves not able to prevent. And having thus speciously reduced the practice of Christianity to the notions of civil prudence and world-ly policy, we insensibly run into all the guilt we have hitherto with damage and loss avoided, and renounce all the obligations of piety and religion by our odious apostacy. It is true, God expects we should perform all on our parts that is lawful to be done for our own behoof; but when we have done that, he will have us rely on him for our de

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