such instances, the misery of which was a fit instrument to speak aloud the glories of God's mercies, and gentleness, and readiness to forgive. Such were St Paul, a persecutor,—and St Peter, that forswore his Master,— Mary Magdalene, with seven devils,—the thief upon the cross,-Manasses, an idolater, David, a murderer and adulterer,-the Corinthian, for incest, -the children of Israel, for ten times rebelling against the Lord in the wilderness, with murmuring, and infidelity, and rebellion, and schism, and a golden calf, and open disobedience: and above all, I shall instance in the Pharisees among the Jews, who had sinned against the Holy Ghost, as our blessed Saviour intimates, and tells the particular, viz., in saying, the Spirit of God, by which Christ did work, was an evil spirit; and afterward they crucified Christ; so that two of the persons of the most holy Trinity were openly and solemnly defied, and God had sent out a decree that they should be cut off yet forty years' time, after all this, was left for their repentance, and they were called upon by arguments more persuasive and more excellent in that forty years, than all the nation had heard from their prophets, even from Samuel to Zacharias. And Jonah thought he had reason on his side to refuse to go to threaten Nineveh; he knew God's tenderness in destroying his creatures, and that he should be thought to be but a false prophet; and so it came to pass according to his belief. "Jonah prayed unto the Lord, and said, I pray thee, Lord, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled; for I knew thou wert a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil." He told beforehand what the event would be, and he had reason to know it: God proclaimed it in a cloud before the face of all Israel, and made it to be his name: "The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious," &c.

The result of this consideration is, that as we fear the Divine judgments, so we adore and love his goodness, and let the golden chains of the Divine mercy tie us to a noble prosecution of our duty and the interest of religion. For he is the worst of men whom kindness cannot soften, nor endearment oblige, whom gratitude cannot tie faster than the bands of life and death. He is an ill-natured sinner, if he will not comply with the sweetnesses of heaven, and be civil to his angel-guardian, or observant of his patron God, who made him, and feeds him, and keeps all his faculties, and takes care of him, and endures his follies, and waits on him more tenderly than a nurse, more diligently than a client, who hath greater care of him than his father, and whose bowels yearn over him with more compassion than a mother; who is bountiful beyond our need, and merciful beyond our hopes, and makes capacities in us to receive more. Fear is stronger than death, and love is more prevalent than fear, and kindness is the greatest endearment of love; and yet to an ingenuous person, gratitude is greater than all these, and obliges to a solemn duty, when love fails, and fear is dull and inactive, and death itself is despised. But the man who is hardened against kindness, and whose duty is not made alive with gratitude, must be used like a slave, and driven like an ox, and enticed with goads and whips; but must never enter into the inheritance of sons. Let us take heed; for mercy is like a rainbow, which God set in the clouds to remember mankind: it shines here as long as it is not hindered; but we must never look for it after it is night, and it shines not in the other world. If we refuse mercy here, we shall have justice to eternity.

THE WAY OF UNDERSTANDING.

A SERMON PREACHED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN, SHOWING BY WHAT MEANS THE SCHOLARS SHALL BECOME MOST LEARNED AND MOST USEFUL.

If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.-John vii. 17.

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THE ancients, in their mythological learning, tell us, that when Jupiter espied the men of the world striving for Truth, and pulling her in pieces to secure her to themselves, he sent Mercury down amongst them; and he, with his usual arts, dressed Error up in the imagery of Truth, and thrust her into the crowd, and so left them to contend still and though then, by contention, men were sure to get but little truth, yet they were as earnest as ever, and lost peace too, in their importune contentions for the very image of truth. And this, indeed, is no wonder; but when truth and peace are brought into the world together, and bound up in the same bundle of life; when we are taught a religion by the Prince of Peace, who is the truth itself; to see men contending for this truth, to the breach of that peace; and when men fall out, to see that they should make Christianity their theme, that is one of the greatest wonders in the world. For Christianity is a soft and gentle institution;' it was brought into the world to soften the asperities of human nature, and to cure the barbarities of evil men, and the contentions of the passionate. The eagle seeing her breast wounded, and espying the arrow that hurt her to be feathered, cried out, 'The feathered nation is destroyed by their own feathers;' that is, a Christian fighting and wrangling with a Christian; and indeed, that is very sad : but wrangling about peace too, that peace itself should be the argument of a war that is unnatural; and if it were not that there are many, who are 'men of much religion and little godliness,'-it would not be that there should be so many quarrels in and concerning that religion, which is wholly made up of truth and peace, and was sent amongst us to reconcile the hearts of men, when they were tempted to uncharitableness by any other unhappy argument. Disputation cures no vice, but kindles a great many, and makes passion evaporate into sin: and though men esteem it learning, yet it is the most useless learning in the world. When Eudamidas the son of Archidamus, heard old Xenocrates disputing about wisdom, he asked very soberly, If the old man be yet disputing and inquiring concerning wisdom, what time will he have to make use of it? Christianity is all for practise ; and so much time as is spent in quarrels about it, is a diminution to its interest. Men inquire so much what it is, that they have but little time left to be Christians. I remember a saying of Erasmus, that when he first read the New Testament, with fear and a good mind, with a purpose to understand it and obey it, he found it very pleasant; but when, afterwards, he fell on reading the vast differences of commentaries, then he understood it less than he did before, then he began not to understand it :' for, indeed, the truths of God are best dressed in the plain culture and simplicity of the Spirit ; but the truths that men commonly teach, are like the reflection of a multiplying glass; for one piece of good money, you shall have forty that are fantastical; and it is forty to one if your finger hit upon the right.

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Man have wearied themselves in the dark, having been amused with false fires; and instead of going home, have wandered all night in untrodden, unsafe, uneasy ways;' but have not found out what their soul desires. But, therefore, since we are so miserable, and are in error, and have wandered very far, we must do as wandering travellers use to do, go back just to that place from whence they wandered, and begin upon a new account. Let us

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go to the truth itself, to Christ; and he will tell us an easy way of ending all our quarrels for we shall find Christianity to be the easiest and the hardest thing in the world it is like a secret in arithmetic, infinitely hard till it be found out by a right operation, and then it is so plain, we wonder we did not understand it earlier.

Christ's way of finding out truth, is by doing the will of God. Every man must, in his station, do that portion of duty, which God requires of him, and then he shall be taught of God all that is fit for him to learn. There is no other way for him but this: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and a good understanding have all they that do thereafter." And so David of himself, "I have more understanding than my teachers; because I keep thy commandments."+ And this is the only way which Christ hath taught us. If you ask, "What is truth?" you must not do as Pilate did-ask the question, and then go away from him that only can give you an answer; for as God is the author of truth, so is he the teacher of it; and the way to learn it is this of my text: for so saith our blessed Lord, "If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God or no."

My text is simple as truth itself, but greatly comprehensive, and contains a truth that alone will enable you to understand all mysteries, and to expound all prophecies, and to interpret all scriptures, and to search into all secrets ; all, I mean, which concern our happiness and our duty; and, is plainly to be resolved into this proposition,-The way to judge of religion is by doing of our duty and theology is rather a Divine life than a Divine knowledge.' In heaven, indeed, we shall first see, and then love; but here on earth, we must first love, and love will open our eyes as well as our hearts; and we shall then see, and perceive, and understand.

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In the handling of which proposition, I shall first represent to you, that the certain causes of our errors are nothing but direct sins,-nothing makes us fools and ignorants but living vicious lives; and then I shall proceed to the direct demonstration of the article in question, that holiness is the only way of truth and understanding.

. No man understands the word of God, as it ought to be understood, unless he lays aside all affections to sin: of which because we have taken very little care, the product hath been, that we have had very little wisdom, and very little knowledge, in the ways of God. "Wickedness," said Aris

totle, "does corrupt a man's reasoning;" it gives him false principles and evil measures of things; the sweet wine that Ulysses gave to the Cyclops, put his eye out; and a man that hath contracted evil affections, and made a league with sin, sees only by those measures. A covetous man understands nothing to be good that is not profitable; and a voluptuous man likes your reasoning well enough, if you discourse of the pleasures of the sense, the ravishments of lust, the noises and inadvertencies, the mirth and

songs of merry company; but if you talk to him of the melancholy lectures of the cross, the content of resignation, the peace of meekness, and the joys of the Holy Ghost, and of rest in God, after your long discourse, and his great silence, he cries out, "What is the matter?" He knows not what you mean. Either you must fit his humour, or change your discourse. Every man understands by his affections more than by his reason: and when the wolf in the fable went to school to learn to spell, whatever letters were told him, he could never make any thing of them but "lamb;" he thought of nothing but his belly and if a man be very hungry, you must give him meat, before you give him counsel. A man's mind must be like your proposition, before it can be entertained; for whatever you put into a man, it will smell of the vessel: it is a man's mind that gives the emphasis, and makes your argument to prevail.

And upon this account it is, that there are so many false doctrines in the only article of repentance. Men know they must repent, but the definition of repentance they take from the convenience of their own affairs : what they will not part with, that is not necessary to be parted with; and they will repent, but not restore: they will say "they wish they had never done it ;" but since it is done, you must give them leave to rejoice in their purchase they will ask forgiveness of God; but they sooner forgive themselves, and suppose that God is of their mind: if you tie them to hard terms, your doctrine is not to be understood: or it is but one doctor's opinion,—and, therefore, they will fairly take their leave, and get them another teacher.

What makes these evil, these dangerous and desperate doctrines? Not the obscurity of the thing, but the cloud upon the heart; for say you what you will, he that hears must be the expounder, and we can never suppose but a man will give sentence in behalf of what he passionately loves. And so it comes to pass, that, as Rabbi Moses observed, God, for the greatest sin, imposed the least oblation, as a she-goat for the sin of idolatry; for a woman accused of idolatry, a barley-cake: so do most men; they think to expiate the worst of their sins with a trifling, with a pretended, little, insignificant repentance. God, indeed, did so, that the cheapness of the oblation might teach them to hope for pardon, not from the ceremony, but from a severe internal repentance: but men take any argument to lessen their repentance, that they may not lessen their pleasures or their estates, -and that repentance may be nothing but a word,-and mortification signify nothing against their pleasures; but be a term of art only, fitted for the schools or for the pulpit,-but nothing relative to practice, or the extermination of their sin. So that it is no wonder we understand so little of religion: it is because we are in love with that which destroys it; and as a man does not care to hear what does not please him, so neither does he believe it; he cannot, he will not understand it.

2. He that means to understand the will of God and the truth of religion, must lay aside all inordinate affections to the world.-St Paul complained that there was at "that day a veil upon the hearts of the Jews, in the reading of the Old Testament;" they looked for a temporal prince to be their Messias, and their affections and hopes dwelt in secular advantages; and so long as that veil was there, they could not see, and they would not accept the poor despised Jesus.

For the things of the world, besides that they entangle one another, and

make much business, and spend much time, they also take up the attentions of a man's mind, and spend his faculties, and make them trifling and secular with the very handling and conversation. And, therefore, the Pythagoreans taught their disciples "a separation from the things of the body, if they would purely find out truth and the excellencies of wisdom.” Had not he lost his labour, that would have discoursed wisely to Apicius, and told him of the books of fate and the secrets of the other world, the abstractions of the soul, and its brisker immortality, that saints and angels eat not, and that the spirit of a man lives for ever upon wisdom, and holiness, and contemplation? The fat glutton would have stared awhile upon the preacher, and then have fallen asleep. But if you had discoursed well and knowingly of a lamprey, a large mullet, or a boar, and have sent him a cook from Asia to make new sauces, he would have attended carefully, and taken in your discourses greedily. And so it is in the questions and secrets of Christianity: which made St Paul, when he intended to convert Felix, discourse first with him about " temperance, righteousness, and judgment to come." He began in the right point; he knew it was to no purpose to preach Jesus Christ crucified to an intemperate person, to an usurper of other men's rights, to one whose soul dwelt in the world, and cared not for the sentence of the last day. The philosophers began their wisdom with the meditation of death, and St Paul his with the discourse of the day of judgment to take the heart off from this world and the amiabilities of it, which dishonour and baffle the understanding, and made Solomon himself become a child, and fooled into idolatry, by the prettiness of a talking woMen, now-a-days, love not a religion that will cost them dear. If your doctrine calls upon men to part with any considerable part of their estates, you must pardon them if they cannot believe you; they understand it not. I shall give you one great instance of it.

man.

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When we consider the infinite unreasonableness that is in the popish religion, how against common sense their doctrine of transubstantiation is, how against the common experience of human nature is the doctrine of the pope's infallibility, how against Scripture is the doctrine of indulgencies and purgatory; we may well think it a wonder, that no more men are persuaded to leave such unlearned follies. But then, on the other side, the wonder will cease, if we mark how many temporal ends are served by these doctrines. you destroy the doctrines of purgatory and indulgences; you take away the priest's income, and make the see apostolic to be poor; if you deny the pope's infallibility, you will despise his authority, and examine his propositions, and discover his failing, and put him to answer hard arguments, and lessen his power: and, indeed, when we run through all the propositions of difference between them and us, and see that, in every one of them, they serve an end of money or of power; it will be very visible that the way to confute them is not by learned disputations,-for we see they have been too long without effect, and without prosperity: the men must be cured of their affections to the world, "that with naked and divested affections they might follow the naked crucified Jesus;" and then they would soon learn the truths of God, which, till then, will be impossible to be apprehended. And how many men are there amongst us, who are, therefore, enemies to the true religion, because it seems to be against their profit? The argument of Demetrius is unanswerable: "By this craft they get their livings:" leave them in their livings, and they will let your reli