him no more deceive himself. For, that I may still use the words of St. Paul, "this is a faithful saying, and these things I will that thou affirm constantly, that they which have believed in God might be careful to maintain good works"." For such, and such only, in the great scrutiny for faith in the day of doom, shall have their portion in the bosom of faithful Abraham. THE PRAYER. O eternal God, fountain of all truth and holiness, in whom to believe is life eternal; let Thy grace descend with a mighty power into my soul, beating down every strong hold and vainer imagination, and bringing every proud thought, and my confident and ignorant understanding, into the obedience of Jesus. Take from me all disobedience and refractariness of spirit, all ambition, and private and baser interests; remove from me all prejudice and weakness of persuasion, that I may wholly resign my understanding to the persuasions of Christianity, acknowledging Thee to be the principle of truth, and Thy word the measure of knowledge, and Thy laws the rule of my life, and Thy promises the satisfaction of my hopes, and an union with Thee to be the consummation of charity in the fruition of glory. Amen. II. Holy Jesus, make me to acknowledge Thee to be my Lord and Master, and myself a servant and disciple of Thy holy discipline and institution; let me love to sit at Thy feet, and suck in with my ears and heart the sweetness of Thy holy sermons. Let my soul be shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace, with a peaceable and docile disposition. Give me great boldness in the public confession of Thy name and the truth of Thy gospel, in despite of all hostilities and temptations. And grant I may always remember that Thy name is called upon me, and I may so behave myself, that I neither give scandal to others, nor cause disreputation to the honour of religion; but that Thou mayest be glorified in me, and I by Thy mercies, after a strict observance of all the holy laws of Christianity. Amen. III. O holy and ever blessed Spirit, let Thy gracious influences be the perpetual guide of my rational faculties: inspire me with wisdom and knowledge, spiritual understanding, and a holy faith; and sanctify my faith, that it may arise up to the confidence of hope z Titus iii. 8. and the adherences of charity, and be fruitful in a holy conversation. Mortify in me all peevishness and pride of spirit, all heretical dispositions, and whatsoever is contrary to sound doctrine; that when the eternal Son of God, the "author and finisher of our faith," shall come to make scrutiny, and an inquest for faith, I may receive the promises laid up for them that believe in the Lord Jesus, and wait for His coming in holiness and purity: to whom with the Father, and Thee, O blessed Spirit, be all honour and eternal adoration paid, with all sanctity, and joy, and eucharist, now and for ever. Amen. SECTION XI. Of Christ's going to Jerusalem to the passover, the first time after His manifestation, and what followed, till the expiration of the office of John the baptist. 1. IMMEDIATELY after this miracle Jesus abode a few days in Capernaum, but because of the approach of the great feast of passover He ascended to Jerusalem; and the first public act of record that He did was an act of holy zeal and religion in behalf of the honour of the temple. For divers merchants and exchangers of money made the temple to be the market and the bank, and brought beasts thither to be sold for sacrifice against the great paschal solemnity. At the sight of which, Jesus, being moved with zeal and indignation, "made a whip of cords, and drave the beasts out of the temple, overthrew the accounting tables, and commanded them that sold the doves to take them from thence." For His anger was holy, and He would mingle no injury with it; and therefore the doves, which, if let loose, would be detrimental to the owners, he caused to be fairly removed; and published the religion of holy places, establishing their sacredness for ever, by His first gospel sermon that He made at Jerusalem. "Take these things hence: make not My Father's house a house of merchandize; for it shall be called a house of prayer to all nations." And being required to give a sign of His vocation, (for this, being an action like the religion of the zealots among the Jews, if it was not attested by something extraordinary, might be abused into an excess of liberty,) He only foretold the resurrection of His body after three days' death, but He expressed it in the metaphor of the temple, " destroy this temple, and I will build it again in three days. He spake of the temple of His body;" and they understood Him of the temple at Jerusalem; and it was never rightly construed till it was accomplished. 2. At this public convention of the Jewish nation Jesus did many miracles, published Himself to be the Messias, and persuaded many disciples, amongst whom was Nicodemus, a doctor of the law, and a ruler of the nation: "he came by night to Jesus," and affirmed himself to be convinced by the miracles which he had seen; for "no man could do those miracles except God be with him." When Jesus perceived his understanding to be so far disposed, He began to instruct him in the great secret and mysteriousness of regeneration, telling him, "that every production is of the same nature and condition with its parent; from flesh comes flesh and corruption, from the Spirit comes spirit, and life, and immortality; and nothing from a principle of nature could arrive to a supernatural end; and therefore the only door to enter into the kingdom of God, was water, by the manuduction of the Spirit; and by this regeneration we are put into a new capacity, of living a spiritual life in order to a spiritual and supernatural end." 3. This was strange philosophy to Nicodemus; but Jesus bade him not to wonder: for this is not a work of humanity, but a fruit of God's Spirit, and an issue of predestination. For 'the Spirit bloweth where it listeth,' and is, as the wind, certain and notorious in the effects, but secret in the principle and in the manner of production. And therefore this doctrine was not to be estimated by any proportions to natural principles or experiments of sense, but to the secrets of a new metaphysic, and abstracted, separate speculations. Then Christ proceeds in His sermon, telling him there are yet higher things for him to apprehend and believe; for this, in respect of some other mysteriousness of His Gospel, was but as earth in comparison of heaven. Then He tells of His own descent from heaven, foretells His death and ascension, and the blessing of redemption which He came to work for mankind; He preaches of the love of the Father, the mission of the Son, the rewards of faith, and the glories of eternity; He upbraids the unbelieving and impenitent, and declares the differences of a holy and a corrupt conscience, the shame and fears of the one, the confidence and serenity of the other. And this is the sum of His sermon to Nicodemus, which was the fullest of mystery and speculation and abstracted senses, of any that He ever made, except that which He made immediately before His passion; all His other sermons being more practical. 4. From Jerusalem Jesus goeth into the country of Judea, attended by divers disciples, whose understandings were brought into subjection and obedience to Christ upon confidence of the divinity of His miracles. There His disciples did receive all comers, and baptized them, as John at the same time did; and by that ceremony admitted them to the discipline and institution; according to the custom of the doctors and great prophets among the Jews, whose baptizing their scholars was the ceremony of their admission. As soon as John heard it, he acquitted himself in public by renewing his former testimony concerning Jesus; affirming Him "to be the Messias," and now the time was come that "Christ must increase, and the Baptist suffer diminution; for Christ came "from above," was "above all," and the sum of His doctrine was "that which He had heard and seen from the Father;" "whom God sent to that purpose," "to whom God had set His seal that He was true," "who spake the words of God," "whom the Father loved, to whom He gave the Spirit without measure," and "into whose hands God had delivered all things;" this was He whose "testimony the world received not." And that they might know not only what person they slighted, but how great salvation also they neglected, he sums up all his sermons, and finishes his mission with this saying, "He that believeth on the Son, hath everlasting life; and he that believeth not on the Son, shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him"." 5. For now that the Baptist had fulfilled his office of bearing witness unto Jesus, God was pleased to give him his writ of ease, and bring him to his reward, upon this occasion: John, who had so learned to despise the world, and all its exterior vanities and impertinent relations, did his duty justly, and so without respect of persons, that as he reproved the people for their prevarications, so he spared not Herod for his; but abstaining from all expresses of the spirit of scorn and asperity, mingling no discontents, interests, nor mutinous intimations with his sermons, he told Herod, "it was not lawful for him to have his brother's wifeb." For which sermon he felt the furies and malice of a woman's spleen, was cast into prison, and about a year after was sacrificed to the scorn and pride of a lustful woman, and her immodest daughter; being, at the end of the second year of Christ's preaching, beheaded by Herod's command, who would not retract his promise, because of his honour, and a rash vow he made in the gaiety of his lust, and complacencies of his riotous dancings. His head was brought up in a dish, and made a festival present to the young girl, who gave it to her mother: a cruelty that was not known among the barbarisms of the worst of people, to mingle banquetings with blood and sights of death; an insolence and inhumanity, for which the Roman orators accused Q. Flaminius of treason, because to satisfy the wanton cruelty of Placentia, he caused a condemned slave to be killed at supper; and which had no precedent but in the furies of Marius, who caused the head of the consul Antonius to be brought up to him in his feasts, which he handled with much pleasure and insolency. a 6. But God's judgments, which sleep not longd, found out Herod, John iii. 36. Montanistæ, et cum his Tertul. adv. Marcion, lib. iv. cap. 34. [p.450 D.] aiunt Philippum defunctum fuisse, et inde probare satagunt secundas nuptias illicitas esse; sed hoc tam aperta fraude, ut agens adv. catholicos Tertullianus abstineat abs • Οστις δὲ θνητῶν μέμφεται τὰ θεῖο, ὅτι and marked him for a curse. For the wife of Herod, who was the daughter of Aretas, a king of Arabia Petræa, being repudiated by paction with Herodias, provoked her father to commence a war with Herod; who prevailed against Herod in a great battle, defeating his whole army, and forcing him to an inglorious flight: which the Jews generally expounded to be a judgment on him for the unworthy and barbarous execution and murder of John the baptist; God, in His wisdom and severity, making one sin to be the punishment of another, and neither of them both to pass without the signature of a curse. And Nicephoruse reports that the dancing daughter of Herodias passing over a frozen lake, the ice brake, and she fell up to the neck in water, and her head was parted from her body by the violence of the fragments shaken by the water and its own fall, and so perished; God having fitted a judgment to the analogy and representment of her sin. Herodias herself, with her adulterous paramour Herod, were banished to Lyons in France, by decree of the Roman senatef, where they lived ingloriously, and died miserably; so paying dearly for her triumphal scorn, superadded to her crime of murder: for when she saw the head of the Baptist, which her daughter Salome had presented to her in a charger, she thrust the tongue through with a needle as Fulvia had formerly done to Cicero. But herself paid the charges of her triumph. Ad SECTION XI. Considerations upon the first journey of the holy Jesus to Jerusalem, when He whipped the merchants out of the temple. 1. WHEN the feast came and Jesus was ascended up to Jerusalem, the first place we find Him in is the temple; where not only was the area and court of religion, but, by occasion of public conventions, the most opportune scene for transaction of His commission and His Father's business. And those Christians who have been religious and affectionate even in the circumstances of piety, have taken this for precedent, and accounted it a good express of the regularity of their devotion and order of piety, at their first arrival to a city to pay their first visits to God, the next to His servant, the president of religious rites. First they went into the church, and worshipped; then [Lib. i. cap. 20.] εἰ γὰρ παραυτίκ ̓ ἦσαν αἱ τιμωρίαι, πολὺς διὰ φόβον, κοὐ δι' εὐσεβῆ τρόπον, ἄπωθεν οὔσης, τῇ φύσει χρῶνται βροτοί. ὅταν δὲ φωραθῶσιν ὀφθέντες κακοὶ τίνουσι ποινὰς ὑστέροισιν ἐν χρόνοις. Theodect. [apud Stob. ed. Grot., 4to. Par. 1623. p. 123.] Joseph. Ant., lib. xviii. [cap. 8. tom. ii. p. 818.] Hist., lib. ii. [cap. 9. § 6. tom. ii. p. 1067.] |