midst of a troublesome world, and of vexatious businesses, and with the afflictions of her dearest relations almost continually before her and that our quiet or disquiet, our peace or trouble, dependeth more on our inward strength and temper than upon our outward state, occasions, or provocations: and that it is more in our hands than of any or all our friends and enemies, whether we shall have a comfortable or uncomfortable life.

What remaineth now, but that all we that survive, especially you that are her children, do follow her as she followed Christ? Though the word of God be your sufficient rule, and the example of Christ be your perfect pattern, yet as the instructions, so the example of a parent must be a weighty motive to quicken and engage you to your duty; and will else be a great aggravation of your sin. A holy child, of unholy parents, doth no more than his necessary duty; 'because whatever parents are, he hath an holy God: but an unholy child of holy parents is inexcusable in sin, and deplorably miserable, as forsaking the doctrine and pattern both of their Creator and their progenitors, whom nature engageth them to observe; and it will be an aggravation of their deserved misery to have their parents witness against them, that they taught them, and they would not learn; and went before them in a holy life, but they would not follow them. "My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother; for they shall be an ornament of grace unto thy head, and chains about thy neck." (Prov. i. 8.) Read and consider Prov. xxx. 17, and xv. 20, and xxiii. 22, 25. Sins against parents have a special curse affixed to them in this life, (as the case of Ham showeth; and the due observance and honouring of parents hath a special promise of temporal blessings, as the fifth commandment showeth. "Children obey your parents in the Lord, for it is right: honour thy father and thy mother, (which is the first commandment with promise,) that it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth." (Eph. vi. 1-3.) Thehistories of all ages are so full of the instances of God's judgments, in this life, upon five sorts of sinners, as may do much to convince an atheist of the government and special providence of God, that is, upon persecutors, murderers, sacrilegers, false witnesses (especially by perjury), and abusers and dishonourers of parents. And the great honour that is due to parents when they are dead, is to give just honour to their names, and to obey their precepts, and imitate their good examples. It is the high commendation of the Rechabites,

that they strictly kept the precepts of their father, even in a thing indifferent, a mode of living; not to drink wine, or build houses, but dwell in tents: and God annexeth this notable blessing, "Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel, Because ye have obeyed the commandment of Jonadab your father, and kept all his precepts, and done according unto all that he hath commanded you: Therefore thus saith the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel; Jonadab the son of Rechabshall not want a man to stand before me for ever." (Jer. xxxvi. 6, 7, 18, 19.) But, especially in the great duties of religion, where parents do but deliver the mind of God, and use their authority to procure obedience to divine authority; and where the matter itself is necessary to our salvation, the obligation to obedience and imitation is most indispensable; and disobedience is an aggravated iniquity, and the notorious brand of infelicity, and prognostic of ensuing wo; the ungodly children of godly parents being the most deplorable, unhappy, unexcusable persons in the world (if they hold on).

There is yet another doctrine that I should speak to.

Doct. 7. Prayer in general, and this prayer in particular, that Christ will receive our departing souls, is a most suitable conclusion of all the action of a Christian's life.

Prayer is the breath of a Christian's life: it is his work and highest converse, and therefore fittest to be the concluding action of his life, that it may reach the end at which he aimed. We have need of prayer all our lives, because we have need of God, and need of his manifold and continued grace. But in our last extremity we have a special need. Though sloth is apt to seize upon us, while prosperity hindereth the sense of our necessities, and health persuadeth us that time is not near its journey's end, yet it is high time to pray with doubled fervour and importunity when we see that we are near our last. When we find that we have no more time to pray, but must now speak our last for our immortal souls, and must at once say all that we have to say, and shall never have a hearing more. O, then, to be unable to pray, or to be faithless, and heartless, and hopeless, in our prayers, would be a calamity beyond expression.

Yet I know, for ordinary observation tells it us, that many truly gracious persons may accidentally be undisposed and disabled to pray when they are near to death. If the disease be such as doth disturbir soulin, or take them up with violence of pain, or overwhelr prayer d by perturbation of the passions, or

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abuse the imagination, or notably waste and debilitate the spirits, it cannot be expected that a body thus disabled should serve the soul in this or any other duty. But still the praying habit doth remain, though a distempered body do forbid the exercise. The habitual desires of the soul are there; and it is those that are the soul of prayer.

But this should move us to pray while we have time, and while our bodies have strength, and our spirits have vigour and alacrity to serve us, seeing we are so uncertain of bodily disposition and capacity so near our end. O pray, and pray with all your hearts, before any fever or deliration overthrow your understandings or your memories, before your thoughts are all commanded to attend your pains, and before your decayed spirits fail you, and deny their necessary service to your suits, and before the apprehensions of your speedy approach to the presence of the most holy God, and your entrance upon an endless state, do amaze, confound, and overwhelm your souls with fear and perturbation. O Christians! what folly, what sin and shame is it to us, that now while we have time to pray, and leave to pray, and helps to pray, and have no such disturbing hinderances, we should yet want hearts, and have no mind, nor life and fervour for so great a work. O, pray now, lest you are unable to pray then; and if you are then hindered but by such bodily indisposedness, God will understand your habitual desires, and your groans, and take it as if you had actually prayed. Pray now, that so you may be acquainted with the God that then you must fly unto for mercy, and may not be strangers to him, or unto prayer, and that he may not find then that your prayers are but the expression of your fears, and not of your love, and are constrained, and not voluntary motions unto God; pray now in preparation to your dying prayers. Oh, what a terrible thing it is to be to learn to pray in that hour of extremity, and to have then no principle to pray by, but natural self-love, which every thief hath at the gallows! To be then without the spirit of prayer, when without it there cannot an acceptable word or groan be uttered, and when the rejection of our suits and person will be the prologue to the final judicial rejection, and will be a distress so grievous as presumptuous souls will not believe, till sad experience become their tutor. Can you imagine that you shall then at last be taught the art of acceptable prayer merely by horror, and the dead, sense of pain and danger, as seamen in a storm, or a mprecepts, by the rack, when nendation

in your health and leisure you will not be persuaded to the daily use of serious prayer, but number yourselves with the families that are under the wrath of the Almighty, being such as call not on his name. (Jer. x. 25; Psalm lxxix. 6.)

Indeed, there are many prayers must go before, or else this prayer, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit," will be in vain, when you would be loth. to find it so. You must first pray for renewing, sanctifying grace, for the death of sin, and the pardon of sin, for a holy life, and a heavenly mind, for obedience, patience, and perseverance, and if you obtain not these, there is no hope that Jesus Christ should receive your spirits, that never received his sanctifying Spirit.

How sad is it to observe that those that have most need of prayer, have least mind to pray, as being least sensible of their needs! Yea, that those that are the next step to the state of devils, and have as much need of prayer as any miserable souls on earth, do yet deride it, and hate those that seriously and fervently perform it; a man of prayer being the most common object of their malicious reproach and scorn. O miserable Cainites, that hate their brethren for offering more acceptable sacrifice than their own! Little do they know how much of the very satanical nature is in that malice, and in those reproachful scorns. And little do they know how near they are to the curse and desperation of Cain, and with what horror they shall cry out," My punishment is greater than I can bear.” (Gen. iv. 11, 13.). If God and good men condemn you for your lip-service, and heartless devotions, and ungodly lives, will you therefore hate the holy nature and better lives of those that judge you, when you should hate your own ungodliness and hypocrisy? Hear what God said to the leader of your sect, Why art thou wrath? And why is thy countenance fallen? If thou do well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door." (Gen. iv, 6.) Have you not as much need to pray as those that you hate and reproach for. praying? Have you not as much need to be oft and earnest in prayer as they? Must Christ himself spend whole nights in prayer, (Luke vi. 12,) and shall an ignorant, sensual, hardened sinner think he hath no need of it, though he be unconverted, unjustified, unready to die, and almost past the opportunity of praying? O miserable men, that shortly would cry and roar in the anguish of their souls, and yet will not pray while there is time and room for prayer! Their Judge is willing now to hear

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them, and now they have nothing but hypocritical, lifeless words to speak! Praying is now a wearisome, tedious, and unpleasant thing to them, that shortly would be glad if the most heart-tearing lamentations could prevail for the crumbs and drops of that mercy which they thus depise. (Luke xvi. 24.) Of all men in the world it ill becomes one in so deep necessities and dangers to be prayerless.

But for you, Christians, that are daily exercised in this holy converse with your Maker, hold on, and grow not strange to heaven, and let not your holy desires be extinguished for want of excitation. Prayer is your ascent to heaven; your departure from a vexatious world to treat with God for your salvation. Your retirement from a world of dangers into the impregnable fortress where you are safe, and from vanity unto felicity, and from troubles unto rest, which, though you cannot come so near, nor enjoy so fully and delightfully as hereafter you shall do, yet thus do you make your approaches to it, and thus do you secure your future full fruition of it. And let them all scoff at hearty, fervent prayer as long as they will, yet prayer shall do that with God for you which health, and wealth, and dignity, and honour, and carnal pleasures, and all the world shall never do for one of them. And though they neglect and vilify it now, yet the hour is near when they will be fain to scamble and bungle at it themselves, and the face of death will better teach them the use of prayer, than our doctrine and example now can do. A departing soul will not easily be prayerless, nor easily be content with sleepy prayers, but, alas! it is not every prayer that hath some fervency from the power of fear that shall succeed. Many a thousand may perish for ever that have prayed, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." But the soul that breatheth after Christ, and is weary of sinning, and hath long been pressing toward the mark, may receive encouragement for his last petitions, from the bent and success of all the foregoing prayers of his life. Believe it, Christians, you cannot be so ready to beg of Christ to receive your souls, as he is ready and willing to receive them. As you come praying, therefore, into the world of grace, go praying out of it into the world of glory. It is not a work that you were never used to, though you have had lamented backwardness, and coldness, and omissions. It is not to a God that you were never with before; as you know whom you have believed, so you may know to whom you pray. It is indeed a most important suit to beg for the receiving of a