members that his helper is omnipotent, and can do what he please. Let us rest there a while; he can if he please: And he is infinitely loving, willing enough: And he is infinitely wise, choosing better for us than we can do for ourselves. This in all ages and chances hath supported the afflicted people of God, and carried them on dry ground through the Red Sea. God invites and cherishes the hopes of men by all the variety of his providence.

4. If your case be brought to the last extremity, and that you are at the pit's brink, even the very margin of the grave, yet then despair not; at least put it off a little longer, and remember that whatsoever final accident takes away all hope from you, if you stay a little longer, and in the mean while bear it sweetly, it will also take away all despair too. when you enter into the regions of death, you rest from all your labours and your fears.

For

5. Let them who are tempted to despair of their salvation, consider how much Christ suffered to redeem us from sin and its eternal punishment: and he that considers this, must needs believe, that the desires, which God had to save us, were not less than infinite, and therefore not easily to be satisfied without it.

6. Let no man despair of God's mercies to forgive him, unless he be sure that his sins be greater than God's mercies. If they be not, we have much reason to hope, that the stronger ingredient will prevail, so long as we are in the time and state of repentance, and within the possibilities and latitude of the covenant, and as long as any promise can but reflect upon him with an oblique beam of comfort. Possibly the man may err in his judgment of circumstances, and therefore let him fear; but because it is not certain he is mistaken, let him not despair.

7. Consider that God, who knows all the events of men, and what their final condition shall be, who shall be saved, and who will perish, yet he treateth them

as his own, calls them to be his own, offers fair conditions as to his own, gives them blessings, arguments of mercy, and instances of fear to call them off from death, and to call them home to life, and in all this shews no despair of happiness to them; and therefore much less should any man despair for himself, since he never was able to read the scrolls of the eternal predestination.

8. Remember that despair belongs only to passionate fools or villains, (such as were Achitophel and Judas) or else to devils and damned persons: and as the hope of salvation is a good disposition towards it; so is despair a certain consignation to eternal ruin. A man may be damned for despairing to be saved. Despair is the proper passion of damnation.

9. Gather together into your spirit and its treasurehouse, the memory, not only all the promises of God, but also the remembrances of experience, and the former senses of the Divine favours, that from thence you may argue from times past to the present, and enlarge to the future, and to greater blessings. For although the conjectures and expectations of hope are not like the conclusions of faith, yet they are a helmet against the scorchings of despair in temporal things, and an anchor of the soul sure and stedfast against the fluctuations of the spirit in matters of the soul. St. Bernard reckons divers principles of hope by enumerating the instances of the Divine mercy; and we may by them reduce this rule to practice in the following manner: 1st, God hath preserved me from many sins: his mercies are infinite: I hope he will still preserve me from more, and for ever. 2d, I have sinned, and God smote me not: his mercies are still over the penitent: I hope he will deliver me from all the evils I have deserved. He hath forgiven me many sins of malice, and therefore surely he will pity my infirmities. 3d, God visited my heart and changed it: he loves the work of his own hands, and so my heart is now become: I hope he will love this too. 4th, When

I repented he received me graciously: and therefore I hope, if I do my endeavour, he will totally forgive me. 5th, He helped my slow and beginning endeavours; and therefore I hope he will lead me to perfection. 6th, When he had given me something first, then he gave me more: I hope therefore he will keep me from falling, and give me the grace of perseverance. 7th, He hath chosen me to be a disciple of Christ's institution; he hath elected me to his kingdom of grace; and therefore I hope, also, to the kingdom of his glory. 8th, He died for me when I was his enemy; and therefore I hope he will save me, when he hath reconciled me to him, and is become my friend. 9th, "God hath given us his Son; how should not he with him give us all things else?" All these St. Bernard reduces to these three heads, as the instruments of all our hopes 1st, The charity of God adopting us; 2d, The truth of his promises; 3d, The power of his performance which if any truly weighs, no infirmity or accident can break his hopes into undiscernible fragments, but some good planks will remain after the greatest storm and shipwreck. This was St. Paul's instrument: "Experience begets hope, and hope maketh not ashamed."

10. Do thou take care only of thy duty, of the means and proper instruments of thy purpose, and leave the end to God: lay that up with him, and he will take care of all that is entrusted to him: and this being an act of confidence in God, is also a means of security to thee.

11. By special arts of spiritual prudence and arguments secure the confident belief of the resurrection, and thou canst not but hope for every thing else which you may reasonably expect, or lawfully desire, upon the stock of the Divine mercies and promises.

12. If a despair seizes you in a particular temporal instance, let it not defile thy spirit with impure mixture, or mingle in spiritual considerations; but rather let it make thee fortify thy soul in matters of religion,

that by being thrown out of your earthly dwelling and confidence, you may retire into the strengths of grace, and hope the more strongly in that, by how much you are the more defeated in this, that despair of a fortune or a success may become the necessity of all virtue.

SECTION III.

Of Charity, or the Love of God.

LOVE is the greatest thing that God can give us, for himself is love; and it is the greatest thing we can give to God, for it will also give ourselves, and carry with it all that is ours. The apostle calls it the band of perfection; it is "the old," and it is "the new," and it is "the great commandment," and it is all the commandments, for it "is the fulfilling of the law." It does the work of all other graces, without any instrument but its own immediate virtue. For as the love to sin makes a man sin against all his own reason, and all the discourses of wisdom, and all the advices of his friends, and without temptation, and without opportunity; so does the love of God; it makes a man chaste without the laborious arts of fasting and exterior disciplines, temperate in the midst of feasts, and is active enough to choose it without any intermedial appetites, and reaches at glory through the very heart of grace, without any other arms but those of love. It is a grace, that loves God for himself, and our neighbours for God. The consideration of God's goodness and bounty, the experience of those profitable and excellent emanations from him, may be, and most commonly are, the first motive of our love : but when we are once entered, and have tasted the goodness of God, we love the spring for its own excellency, passing from passion to reason, from thanking

to adoring, from sense to spirit, from considering ourselves to an union with God: and this is the image and little representation of heaven; it is beatitude in picture, or rather the infancy and beginnings of glory.

We need no incentives by way of special enumeration to move us to the love of God, for we cannot love any thing for any reason real or imaginary, but that excellence is infinitely more eminent in God. There can but two things create love, perfection and usefulness; to which answer on our part, 1st, Admiration, and 2d, Desire; and both these are centered in love. For the entertainment of the first, there is in God an infinite nature, immensity or vastness without extension or limit, immutability, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, holiness, dominion, providence, bounty, mercy, justice, perfection in himself, and the end to which all things and all actions must be directed, and will at last arrive. The consideration of which may be heightened, if we consider our distance from all these glories; our smallness and limited nature, our nothing, our inconstancy, our age like a span, our weakness and ignorance, our poverty, our inadvertency and inconsideration, our disabilities and disaffections to do good, our harsh natures and unmerciful inclinations, our universal iniquity, and our necessities and dependencies, not only on God originally and essentially, but even our need of the meanest of God's creatures, and our being obnoxious to the weakest and most contemptible. But for the entertainment of the second, we may consider that in him is a torrent of pleasure for the voluptuous, he is the fountain of honour for the ambitious, an inexhaustible treasure for the covetous. Our vices are in love with fantastic pleasures and images of perfection, which are truly and really to be found no where but in God. And therefore our virtues have such proper objects, that it is but reasonable they should all turn into love for certain it is that this love will turn all into virtue.

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