and yet these unbelieving wretches see as great works as any of these every day before their eyes. Is not the so swift moving of such a body as the sun as great a work as its standing still? Sure, motion requireth as much power as not to move doth. Is not the course and tide of the sea, and its limitation and restraint, as great a work as its standing still, and being dried up for a passage to the Israelites? But ordinary things men take no notice of; as if God did them not at all, because he doth them every day: and so, if God do daily miracles, they are slighted, and cease to be miracles; men say, 'Nature doth it:' as if nature were any thing but God's creature, or the order he hath placed among his creatures; and if God do such wonders but seldom, men will not believe them. The like may be said of seeming improbable doctrines, as the resurrection, the last judgment, heaven, hell, and whatever else in Scripture flesh and blood can hardly digest. Scripture being proved true, all these must needs be true.

3. Also, if Scripture be certainly true, then the most terrible passages in it are certainly true; nothing is more hardly believed by men than that which will be most tormenting to their minds, when it is believed that none shall be saved but the regenerate and holy; and those that live not after the flesh, but the Spirit, and love God in Christ above all the world, even their own lives; and that, besides these few, all the rest shall be tormented in hell for ever. This is the doctrine that flesh and blood will hardly down with. They say or think they will never believe that God will be so unmerciful; as if God must needs be less merciful than man, because he is more just and holy, and will not be so indulgent to their flesh and sin as they are themselves, and would have him to be. And I have known even godly men, through the remnant of their corruption and darkness in the things of God, and the violence of temptation, much troubled with their unbelief in this particular. But God cannot lie: the Scripture being true, and the christian religion certainly true, every part of it must needs be true. But because sensual nature looks for sensible demonstration, or proof, let me ask the unbelievers this one question: 'Do you believe that which you see and feel, and all the world feels as well as you?' You know that all mankind liveth here a life of trouble and misery; we come into the world in a very poor condition, and we pass through it in daily labour and sorrow, and we pass out of it through the dreadful pangs of death. What incessant labour have the most of

them at plough and cart, and thrashing, and other hard work, in your several trades; and when one day's work is over, you must go to it again the next, and after all this, how much want and misery, how many a hard meal, and pinching cold and nakedness some of you undergo; how much care and grief of mind to pay debts, to provide for children, yea, to provide meat, and drink, and clothes, besides wrongs from men of high degree and low, the rich oppressing you, and your own poor neighbours often abusing you. Do you not see and feel how sicknesses do torment us? When one pain is over, another is at hand. Have you not seen some, under such terrible fits of the gout, or stone, or other diseases, that they thought no torment could be greater; some with their legs rotting, and must be cut off; some with loathsome cancers and leprosies on them many years together; some fastened to their beds five or six, yea, twelve years together; some that have lost their eyesight, have lost almost all the comfort of life; some that never could see; some that never could hear or speak? I have known some in such pain that they have cried out they did not believe there was greater in hell; some are mad, and some idiots: are not all these in a very miserable case? Now, I would ask you further, if God may, without any unmercifulness, do all this to men, and that as a chastisement in the way to bring them to repentance; if he may, without unmercifulness, make a David cry out in misery, and wash his couch with his tears; and make a Job to lie scraping his sores on a dunghill; why should you think he cannot, without unmercifulness, torment incurable sinners in hell? Further, I would ask you this question; suppose you had lived in Adam's paradise, or some condition of pleasure and rest, where you never had tasted of sickness, or labour, or want, or feared death, if God's word had there told you but that man shall endure so much misery as I have here mentioned and men daily suffer, and should die at last for his sin; would you have said, 'I will never believe God would be so unmerciful?' You that say so now, would likely have said so then in this case; for feeling the pleasure yourselves, you would on the same ground have said, 'God is unmerciful if he should make man so miserable;' and yet you see and feel that God doth it, and we know that he is not unmerciful.

Moreover, you see how he useth your poor beasts here; how they are made your servants, and you labour them from day to day, till they are ready to lie down under it; and you beat them

at your pleasure, and at last you kill them. Nay, men will not stick to kill the most beautiful birds, or other creatures, and perhaps twenty lives must sometimes go, for to make one meal for men at their feasts; and yet consider, 1. These creatures never sinned, and so never deserved this, as wicked men deserve their torments; 2. Yet you accuse not God of unmercifulness for giving them up to this misery; 3. Nor do you accuse yourselves of unmercifulness for using them thus; 4. Much less will any man be so mad as to say, sure this is not true, that the poor creatures suffer so much, because God is more merciful.

Yet further, I would ask you, do you not know that you and all men must die? and would you not be contented to suffer a terrible degree of misery everlastingly, rather than die ? Whatsoever men may say, it is certain they would. Though not to live to us is better than to live in hell, yet men would live in very great misery, rather than not live at all, if they had their choice. We see men that have lived, some in extreme poverty, some in great pain, for many years, that yet had rather continue in it than die. If, then, it be so great a misery to be turned again into nothing, that you would rather suffer everlasting pain in some measure, methinks you may discern a probability that God's word should be true, which threatens yet a greater pain: for is it not likely that the judge will inflict more than the pri soner will choose or submit to ?

Once more let me ask you, did you never see a toad or snake; and do you not know there are such creatures in the world? Would you not think it a very grievous misery to be turned into a toad or serpent? And would you not rather endure much misery, as a man, than be such a creature? And were he not a madman that would say, 'I will not believe that there is such a creature as a toad, because God would not be so unmerciful as to make such? Why now consider; if God did make such creatures so far below you, when he might have made them men, and yet these creatures never sinned against him, judge yourselves, whether it be not very probable to reason, and very just, that God should bring men that wilfully sin in the abusing of his grace, into a far worse condition than a toad. If God might justly have made thee a toad, when he made thee a man, and continued thee so for ever, and that without any sin of thine, then how much more evident is the justness of his dealings, in dooming those to everlasting torments that have obstinately, throughout all their lives, refused his mercy. And yet

even these toads and snakes are loth to die, and thereby show that yet there is a greater evil which they are capable of, and that without sin. Have you all these so sensible demonstrations, yea, do you see the sinful world lie under war, and blood, and famine, and pestilence, and yet will you not believe that God's threats of everlasting torments are true?

Yet once more let me ask you, did you never know a man in desperation under intolerable pangs of conscience? Alas! it is frequent; so that some of them have said, as Spira, that they had the torments of hell already on them, and wished they were in hell, that they might feel the worst, so that their lives are a burden to them; that though their friends watch them never so carefully, they cannot keep them from making away themselves. Is not here a plain foretaste of hell on earth? When no pain is upon the body, no losses nor crosses on them in the world, and yet their minds lie under this torment.

Nay, is there not naturally in all men living, a fear of suffering in another world? Even as there is naturally an apprehension of a God who is holy and just, so also a fear of the execution of his judgments hereafter. And as atheists, when they have done their worst, they cannot be perfect atheists, nor blot out all apprehensions of a God from their minds; so when they have done their worst, they cannot perfectly get rid of those natural fears of everlasting sufferings; but even when they are drowning them in the pleasures of sin, and stopping the mouth of conscience with the noise of worldly delight and business,. and are drinking away, or playing away, or laughing away their fears, yet still they stick in their very hearts, and are so rooted that they can never pull them up, though they may stifle them. And very few are given over to such desperate unbelief, but many a griping fear doth stir within them, and they dare not be much alone, nor dare seriously bethink themselves one hour, whether there be such things in the life to come, or no. They dare scarce hear the minister preach of them, lest, with Felix, they should tremble. They are ready to say, what if these things should be so, what a case I am in then? And when these men have fallen among infidels, who have furnished them with all their confident cavils, and most subtle arguments against the truth, and make them believe that there is neither heaven nor hell hereafter, and so make them more atheistical than the mere sin of their nature alone could make them; yet still these fears do dwell in their very hearts, and

all the paganish arguments in the world, will not wholly root them out. Especially, when they come to die, how few of these is there but are far more afraid of misery in another world than they are of death itself alone. And are not God's threats of hell, then, to be believed? Nay, yet let me propound one question more to you: Is there nothing in it, that there is in man's nature such a strange fear of devils, and spiritual enemies, and misery? So that children that have no understanding are afraid at the naming of them; that we are afraid to go in the dark, or into a church among the graves, in the night, upon a conceit that an evil spirit may be there; nay, the fear of these things is far greater than the fear of death itself, and yet not one man of a thousand ever saw the devil appear in any shape, and, it may be, never spoken with any man that did; and yet he cannot overcome these fears. Yea, if you do but dream in the night that you see the devil in any shape, or that he followeth you, or layeth hands on you, it is a greater terror than to dream that you are beset with thieves, or that you must die. Nay, we have known dying men that have not seemed afraid of death in any extremity, and yet they have thought, shortly after, that they have seen the devil stand by them, and then they have cried out in the greatest amazement and horror; as being far more scared than they were by death itself. It seemeth to me that this natural fear of devils comes from that real captivity that men are in to the devil, from which the saints themselves are not perfectly delivered till the last enemy death be conquered; though they are so far delivered that they are not his captives, but only have yet some of the effects of his tyranny. "For Christ hath destroyed, by death, him that hath the power of death, that is, the devil, that he might deliver them who through fear of death, all their lifetime, were subject to bondage." (Heb. ii. 14, 15.) But this deliverance is not perfect in the time of this life. And, indeed, fear. of spiritual enemies, and of punishments in the world to come, so deeply rooted in the soul of man, seemeth to me to be even nature's acknowledgment of the truth and justice of everlasting punish

ments.

Besides all this, yet it is evident that God is just, and the Governor of the world, and therefore must be just in judging, and executing his laws; and it is as evident that in this life there is not that difference made between the righteous and the wicked which their different lives, and God's justice, do