JESTING. CCLESIASTICAL History reports that many jests passed between St. Anthony, the father of the Hermits, and his scholar St. Paul; and St. Hilarion is reported to have been very pleasant, and of facetious, sweet, and more lively conversation; and indeed plaisance, and joy, and a lively spirit, and a pleasant conversation, and the innocent caresses of a charitable humanity, is not forbidden; and here in my text our conversation is commanded to be such, that it may minister grace, that is, favor, complacence, cheerfulness, and be acceptable and pleasant to the hearer and so must be our conversation; it must be as far from sullenness as it ought to be from lightness, and a cheerful spirit is the best convoy for religion; and though sadness does in some cases become a Christian, as being an index of a pious mind, of compassion, and a wise, proper resentment of things, yet it serves but one end, being useful in the only instance of repentance; and hath done its greatest works, not when it weeps and sighs, but when it hates and grows careful against sin. But cheerfulness and a festival spirit fills the soul full of harmony, it composes music for churches and hearts, it makes and publishes glorifications of God, it produces thankfulness and serves the end of charity; and when the oil of gladness runs over, it makes bright and tall emissions of light and holy fires, reaching up to a cloud, and making joy round about. And therefore, since it is so innocent, and may be so pious and full of holy advantage, whatsoever can innocently minister to this holy joy does set forward the work of religion and charity. And indeed charity itself, which is the vertical top of all religion, is nothing else but a union of joys, concentred in the heart, and reflected from all the angles of our life and intercourse. It is a rejoicing in God, a gladness in our neighbor's good, a pleasure in doing good, a rejoicing with him; and without love we cannot have any joy at all. It is this that makes children to be a pleasure, and friendship to be so noble and divine a thing; and upon this account it is certain that all that which can innocently make a man cheerful does also make him charitable; for grief, and age, and sickness, and weariness, these are peevish and troublesome; but mirth and cheerfulness is content, and civil, and compliant, and communicative, and loves to do good, and swells up to felicity only upon the wings of charity. Upon this account here is pleasure enough for a Christian at present; and if a facetious discourse, and an amicable friendly mirth, can refresh the spirit, and take it off from the vile temptation of peevish, despairing, uncomplying melancholy, it must needs be innocent and commendable. And we may as well be refreshed by a clean and a brisk discourse as by the air of Campanian wines; and our faces and our heads may as well be anointed and look pleasant with wit and friendly intercourse as with the fat of the balsam-tree; and such a conversation no wise man ever did or ought to reprove. But when the jest hath teeth and nails, biting or scratching our brother, when it is loose and wanton, when it is unseasonable, and much, or many, when it serves ill purposes, or spends better time, then it is the drunkenness of the soul, and makes the spirit fly away, seeking for a temple where the mirth and the music is solemn and religious. COMMON SWEARING. AGAINST common swearing, St. Chrysos tom spends twenty homilies: and by the number and weight of arguments hath left this testimony, that it is a foolish vice, but hard to be cured; infinitely unreasonable, but strangely prevailing; almost as much without remedy as it is without pleasure; for it enters first by folly, and grows by custom, and dwells with carelessness, and is nursed by irreligion and want of the fear of God. It profanes the most holy things, and mingles dirt with the beams of the sun, follies and trifling talk interweaved and knit together with the sacred name of God. It placeth the most excellent of things in the meanest and basest circumstances; it brings the secrets of heaven into the streets, dead men's bones into the temple. Nothing is a greater sacrilege than to prostitute the great name of God to the petulancy of an idle tongue, and blend it as an expletive to fill up the emptiness of a weak discourse. The name of God is so sacred, so mighty, that it rends mountains; it opens the bowels of the deepest rocks, it casts out devils, and makes hell to tremble, and fills all the regions of heaven with joy. The name of God is our strength and confidence, the object of our worshippings, and the security of all our hopes; and when God had given himself a name, and immured it with dread and reverence, like the garden of Eden with the swords of cherubims, none durst speak it but he whose lips were hallowed, and that at holy and solemn times, in a most holy and solemn place. FLATTERY. THIS it is a design against the wisdom, against the repentance, against the growth and promotion of a man's soul. He that persuades an ugly, deformed man, that he is handsome, a short man that he is tall, a bald man that he hath a good head of hair, makes him to become ridiculous and a fool, but does no other mischief. But he that persuades his friend that is a goat in his manners, that he is a holy and a chaste person, or that his looseness is a sign of a quick spirit, or that it is not dangerous but easily pardonable, a trick of youth, a habit that old age will lay aside, as a man pares his nails, this man hath given great advantage to his friend's mischief; he hath made it grow in all the dimensions of the sin, till it grows intolerable, and perhaps unpardonable. And let it be considered, what a fearful destruction and contradiction of friendship or service it is, so to love myself and my little interest, as to prefer it before the soul of him whom I ought to love. Carneades said bitterly, but it had in it too many degrees of truth, that princes and great personages never learn to do anything perfectly well but to ride the great horse, because the proud beast knows not how to flatter, but |