the universal experience and feeling of mankind bears witness to it. For say, did ever any of you break the power of a darling lust, resist a pressing temptation, or perform any act of a conspicuous and distinguishing virtue, but that you found it soon turn to account to you? Did not your minds swell with a secret satisfaction at the moment when you were doing it? And was not a reflection upon it afterwards always sweet and refreshing? health to your navel, and marrow to your bones? Prov. iii. 8. On the contrary, did you ever indulge a criminal appetite, or allow yourself sedately in any practice which you knew to be unlawful, but that you felt an inward struggle, and strong reluctances of mind before the attempt, and bitter pangs of remorse attending it? Though no eye saw what you did, and you were sure that no mortal could discover it; did not shame and confusion secretly lay hold of you? was not your own conscience instead of a thousand witnesses to you? did it not plead with you face to face? Ezek. xx. 35, as it were, and upbraid you with your backslidings? Have not some of you, perhaps, at this instant, a sensible experience of the truth which I am pressing upon you? Do you not feel the operation of that powerful principle of which I am discoursing? Is not the memory of some of your past sins even now present to you? And are not your minds stung with some degree of that regret and uneasiness which followed upon the first commission of them? And do you not discover what passes within you, by a more than ordinary attention, seriousness, and silence; and even by an endeavour to throw off these visible marks of concern, into which you are surprised, as soon as they are observed?. The jolly and voluptuous livers, the men who set up. for freedom of thought, and for disengaging themselves from the prejudices of education and superstitious opinions, may pretend to dispute this truth, and perhaps, in the gaiety of their hearts, may venture even to deride it: but they cannot, however, get rid of their inward convictions of it; they must feel it sometimes, though powerfully to pursue the one, and to avoid the other; to pursue natural good, and to avoid natural evil, by delightful or uneasy sensations, that immediately affect the body; to pursue moral good, and to avoid moral evil, by pleasing or painful impressions made on the mind. From hence it is, that we so readily choose or refuse, do or forbear, every thing that is profitable or noxious to us, and requisite to preserve or perfect our beings. And because it is an end of far greater importance, and more worthy of our all-wise Creator's care, to secure the inte grity of our moral, than of our natural perfections ; therefore he hath made the pleasures and pains subser vient to this purpose more extensive and durable; so that the inward complacence we find in acting reason+ ably and virtuously, and the disquiet we feel from vicious choices and pursuits, is protracted beyond the acts themselves from whence it arose, and renewed often upon our souls by distant reflections; whereas the pleasures and pains attending the perceptions of natural good and evil, are bounded within a narrower compass, and do seldom stay long, or return with any force upon the mind, after a removal of the objects that occasioned them. Hence then the satisfactions or stings of conscience severally arise they are the sanctions, as it were, and enforcements of that eternal law of good and evil to which we are subjected; the natural rewards and punishments originally annexed to the observance, or breach of that law, by the great Promulger of it; and which being thus joined and twisted together by God, can scarce, by any arts, endeavours, or practices of men, be put asunder. The prophet, therefore, explains good and evil, by sweet and bitter, Wo be to them (says he) that call evil good, and good evil! that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! Isa. v. 20. Implying, that the former of these do as naturally and sensibly affect the soul, as the latter do the palate; and leave as grateful or displeasing a relish behind them. But, 3. There is no need of arguments to evince this truth; VOL. II. Te collect the thoughts, and turn the mind inward upon itself, by shutting out external objects and impressions. It is not because the pleasures of society are always new and grateful to him that he pursues them thus keenly; for they soon lose their relish, and grow flat and insipid by repetition. They are not his choice, but his refuge; for the truth is, he dares not long converse with himself, and with his own thoughts; and the worst company in the world is better to him, than that of a reproving conscience. A lively and late proof of this we had in a certain writer, who set up for delivering men from these vain fantastic terrors; and was on that account, for a season, much read and applauded. But it is plain that he could not work that effect in himself, which he pretended to work in others for his books manifestly shew, that his mind was over-run with gloomy and terrible ideas of dominion and power; and that he wrote in a perpetual fright against those very principles which he pretended to contradict and deride: and such as knew his conversation well, have assured us that nothing was so dreadful to him as to be in the dark, and to give his natural fears an opportunity of recoiling upon him. That he was timorous to an excess is certain; he himself owns it in the account which he wrote of himself, and which is in every one's hands: but he did not care to own the true reason of it, and therefore lays it upon a mighty fright which seized his mother when the Spaniards attempted their famous invasion in the year 1588, the year in which he was born. The more probable account of it is, that it naturally sprung from his own conduct and method of thinking. He had been endeavouring, all his life-time, to get rid of those religious principles, under which he was carefully educated by his father, (a divine of the church of England), and to set up for a new system and sect, which was to be built upon the ruins of all those truths, that were then, and had ever been held sacred by the best and wisest of men. It was vanity pushed him on to this attempt, but he could not compass it. He was able, here and there, to delude a superficial thinker with his new terms and reasonings but the hardest task of all was, thoroughly to deceive himself. His understanding could not be completely imposed upon, even by its own artifices; and his conscience, every now and then, got the better of him in the struggle; so he lived in a perpetual suspicion and dread of the reality of those truths which he represented as figments; and while he made sport with that kingdom of darkness, (as he loved to call another world), trembled in good earnest at the thought of it. Tiberius, that complete pattern of wickedness and tyranny, had taken as much pains to conquer these fears as any man, and had as many helps and advantages towards it from great splendour and power, and a perpetual succession of new business and new pleasures; and yet, as great a master of the art of dissimulation as he was, he could not dissemble the inward sense of his guilt, nor prevent the open eruptions of it upon very improper occasions. Witness that letter which he wrote to the senate from his impure retreatment at Capreæ. Tacitus has preserved the first lines of it; and there cannot be a livelier image of a mind filled with wild distraction and despair than what they afford us: Quid scribam vobis, P. C., aut quomodo scribam, aut quid omnino non scribam hoc tempore, Dii me Deaque pejus perdant, quàm perire quotidie sentio, si scio! that is, What, or how, at this time, I shall write to you, fathers of the senate, or what indeed I shall not write to you, may all the powers of heaven confound me yet worse than they have already done, if I know, or can imagine!" And his observation upon it is well worthy of ours, and very apposite to our present purpose: "In this manner, (says he), was this emperor punished by a reflection on his own infamous life and guilt; nor was it in vain that the greatest master of wisdom, (he means Plato), affirmed, that were the breasts of tyrants once laid open. to our view, we should see there nothing but ghastly wounds and bruises; the consciousness of their own , cruelty, lewdness, and ill conduct, leaving as deep and bloody prints on their minds, as the strokes of the scourge do on the back of a slave. Tiberius, (adds he), confessed as much when he uttered these words; nor could his high station, or even privacy and retirement itself, hinder him from discovering to all the world the inward agonies and torments under which he laboured," Thus that excellent historian *. Believe it, the tales of ghosts and spectres were not, (as is commonly said), the mere inventions of designing men to keep weak minds in awe; nor the products only of a religious fear, degenerated into melancholy and superstition; but wicked men, haunted with a sense of their own guilt, as the cruel tetrarch here in the text, with the Baptist's murder, were used to affright themselves with such phantoms as these, and often mistook strong and terrible imaginations for real apparitions. Thus I am sure, the author of the Book of Wisdom very naturally accounts for them in his 17th chapter; out of which I shall recite a large passage, very apposite to the point which we are now handling. He is there, with great elegance, describing that panic fear which seized the impious Egyptians, when as he speaks, "they were fettered with the bonds of a long night, and shut up in their houses, the prisoners of darkness. Then," says he," they who had supposed that they lay hid in their secret sins, were horribly astonished and troubled with strange sights. For neither might the corner that held them, keep them from fear; but noises, as of waters falling down, sounded about them, and sad visions appeared unto them with heavy countenances. they that promised to drive away terrors and troubles from a sick soul," (the men, we may suppose, who set up for confounding the notions of good and evil, and ridiculing conscience), "were sick themselves of fear worthy to be laughed at. For though no terrible thing And About this passage of Tiberius, see Hooker's excellent Reflections, p. 367, 368. |