man that is false to God, will also, if an evil temptation overtakes him, betray his friend; and it is notorious in the covetous and ambitious, Αχάριστον ύμων σπερμ – Όσον δημογέρους Ζηλουτε τιμας, μη δε γινωσκεσθε μοι, Ην τοισι πολλοῖς προς χάριν λέγητε τι They are an unthankful generation, and to please the people, or to serve their interest, will hurt their friends. That man hath so lost himself to all sweetness and excellency of spirit, that is gone thus far in sin, that he looks like a condemned man, or is like the accursed spirits, preserved in chains of darkness and impieties unto the judgment of the great day, ανθρωπος δ' as ὁ μεν πονηρος ουδέν άλλο πλην κακος, this man can be nothing but evil; for these inclinations and evil forwardnesses, this dyscrasie and gangrened disposition does always suppose a long or a base sin for their parent; and the product of these is a wretchless spirit; that is, an aptness to any unworthiness, and an unwillingness to resist any temptation; a perseverance in baseness, and a consignation to all damnation, Δρασαντι δ' αισχρά δεινα τ' απόλιμια Δαίμων Jaw; if men do evil things, evil things shall be their reward. If they obey the evil spirit, an evil spirit shall be their portion; and the devil shall enter into them as he entered into Judas, and fill them full of iniquity. * Ungrateful men! who reverence not me, Nor hallowed deem the sacred name of Friend; Whom love of popularity misleads, To court the favours of the fickle vulgar. A. VOL. I. 53 SERMON XXI. PART III. 4. ALTHOUGH these are shameful effects of sin, and a man need no greater dishonour than to be a fool and a slave, and a base person, all which sin infallibly makes him; yet there are some sins which are directly shameful in their nature, and proper disreputation; and a very great many sins are the worst and basest in several respects; that is, every of them hath a venomous quality of its own, whereby it is marked and appropriated to a peculiar evil spirit. The devil's sin was the worst, because it came from the greatest malice; Adam's was the worst, because it was of most universal efficacy and dissemination : Judas sinned the worst of men, because against the most excellent person; and the relapses of the godly are the worst, by reason they were the most obliged persons. But the ignorance of the law is the greatest of evils, if we consider its danger; but covetousness is worse than it, if we regard its incurable and growing nature; luxury is most alien from spiritual things, and is the worst of all in its temptation and our proneness; but pride grows most venomous by its unreasonableness and importunity, arising even from the good things a man hath; even from graces, and endearments, and from being more in debt to God. Sins of malice, and against the Holy Ghost, oppugn the greatest grace with the greatest spite; but idolatry is perfectly hated by God by a direct enmity. Some sins are therefore most heinous, because to resist them is most easy, and to act them there is the least temptation: such as are severally, lying, and swearing. There is a strange poison in the nature of sins, that of so many sorts, every one of them should be the worst. Every sin hath an evil spirit, a devil of its own to manage, to conduct, and to embitter it: and although all these are God's enemies, and have an appendant shame in their retinue, yet to some sins shame is more appropriate, and a proper ingredient in their constitutions: such as are lying, and lust, and vow-breach, and inconstancy. God sometimes cures the pride of a man's spirit by suffering his evil manners and filthy inclination to be determined upon lust; lust makes a man afraid of publick eyes, and common voices; it is (as all sins else are, but this especially) a work of darkness, it does debauch the spirit, and make it to decay and fall off from courage and resolution, constancy and severity, the spirit of government and a noble freedom; and those punishments which the nations of the world have inflicted upon it, are not smart so much as shame: lustful souls are cheap and easy, trifling and despised in all wise accounts; they are so far from being fit to sit with princes, that they dare not chastise a sinning servant that is private to their secret follies; it is strange to consider what laborious arts of concealment, what excuses and lessenings, what pretences and fig-leaves, men will put before their nakedness and crimes: shame was the first thing that entered upon the sin of Adam; and when the second world began, there was a strange scene of shame acted by Noah and his sons, and it ended in slavery and baseness to all descending generations. We see the event of this by too sad an experience. What arguments, what hardness, what preaching, what necessity can persuade men to confess their sins? they are so ashamed of them, that to be concealed they prefer before their remedy; and yet in penitential confession the shame is going off, it is like Cato's coming out of the theatre, or the philosopher from the tavern; it might have been shame to have entered, but glory to have departed for ever: and yet ever to have relation to sin is so shameful a thing, that a man's spirit is amazed, and his face is confounded when he is dressed of so shameful a disease. And there are but few men that will endure it, but rather choose to involve it in excuses and denial, in the clouds of lying, and the white linen of hypocrisy and yet when they make a veil for their shame, such is the fate of sin, the shame grows the bigger and the thicker; we lie to men, and we excuse it to God; either some parts of lying, or many parts of impudence, darkness, or forgetfulness, running away, or running further in, these are the covers of our shame, like menstruous rags upon a skin of leprosy: but so sometimes we see a decayed beauty, besmeared with a lying fucus, and the chinks filled with ceruse; besides that it makes no real beauty, it spoils the face and betrays evil manners; it does not hide old age, or the change of years, but it discovers pride or lust; it was not shame to be old, or wearied and worn out with age, but it is a shame to dissemble nature by a wanton vizor. So sin retires from blushing into shame; if it be discovered, it is not to be endured, and if we go to hide it, we make it worse. But then if we remember how ambitious we are for fame and reputation, for honour and a fair opinion, for a good name all our days, and when our days are done, and that no ingenuous man can enjoy any thing he hath, if he lives in disgrace, and that nothing so breaks a man's spirit as dishonour, and the meanest person alive does not think himself fit to be despised, we are to consider into what an evil condition sin puts us, for which we are not only disgraced and disparaged here, marked with disgraceful punishments, despised by good men, our follies derided, our company avoided, and hooted at by boys, talked of in fairs and markets, pointed at, and described by appellatives of scorn, and every body can chide us, and we die unpitied, and lie in our graves eaten up by worms, and a foul dishonour; but after all this, at the day of judgment we shall be called from our charnel houses, where our disgrace could not sleep, and shall in the face of God, in the presence of angels and devils, before all good men and all the evil, see and feel the shame of all our sins written upon our foreheads: here in this state of misery and folly we make nothing of it; and though we dread to be discovered to men, yet to God we confess our sins without a trouble or a blush; but tell an even story, because we find some forms of confession prescribed in our prayer books; and that it may appear how indifferent and unconcerned we seem to be, we read and say all, and confess the sins we never did, with as much sorrow and regret as those that we have acted a thousand times. But in that strange day of recompenses, we shall find the devil to upbraid the criminals, Christ to disown them, the angels to drive them from the seat of mercy, and shame to be their smart, the consigning them to damnation; they shall then find, that they cannot dwell where virtue is rewarded, and where honour and glory hath a throne; there is no veil but what is rent, no excuse to any, but to them, that are declared as innocent; no circumstances concerning the wicked to be considered, but them that aggravate; then the disgrace is not confined to the talk of a village, or a province, but is scattered to all the world, not only in one age shall the shame abide, but the men of all generations shall see, and wonder at the vastness of that evil that is spread upon the souls of sinners for ever and ever; αγών μέγας, πλήρης στεναγμών, ουδε δακρυων κενος. No night shall then hide it, for in those regions of darkness where the dishonoured man |