their ashes. And now that our city is revived again, and flourishes in perfect health and vigour, methinks I hear the God of heaven bespeak her, as our Saviour did his recovered patient in the text, Go thy way, and sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee. In which words you have,

I. A caution; Sin no more.

II. A twofold reason of it;

1. Behold thou art made whole.

2. Lest a worse thing come unto thee.

I. I begin with the first of these, Sin no more. Which words plainly imply, that he had been a sinner heretofore; and that because he had so, therefore he was reduced to that wretched impotent condition, that his disease was the punishment of his fault, and the product of his own wickedness: for otherwise he had no reason to take warning by it not to sin again. If his former impotence had not been the effect of his sin, it could not have been urged as a proper argument to persuade him to a future reformation. In this therefore the strength of our Saviour's caution lies: The impotence under which thou didst so lately languish, and of which I have now recovered thee, was inflicted on thee by God, as a just retribution for thy wickedness; and therefore, since thou art now happily recovered, beware thou dost not sin again, lest thou provoke him to scourge thee more severely. So that the main design of this caution is to convince us, that those evils and calamities under which we suffer are some way or other occasioned by our sin. And indeed, if we impartially survey those numerous calamities which oppress the world, we shall find them generally reducible to one of these three heads: either (1.) they are

the natural effects of sin, or (2.) the just retributions of it, or (3.) the necessary antidotes against it. Of each of these very briefly.

(1.) In the first place, many of those evils and calamities under which we suffer are the natural effects of sin; and such, it is possible, was the disease of which our Saviour cured this impotent patient; even the natural effect, either of his intemperance, wantonness, or immoderate passion; which are the natural causes of most of those diseases under which we languish. For either they are entailed upon us by our parents, who beget us usually in their own likeness; and so having diseased themselves by their own debauches, derive to us their frail and crazy constitutions, and leave us heirs of the woful effects of their own intemperance and lasciviousness: for so we commonly find the stone and gout, consumption, and catarrhs, derived through many generations from the vices of one wicked progenitor, who, to enjoy the pleasures of an intemperate draught, or the embraces of a rotten whore, doth many times entail a lingering torment upon his children, and his children's children. Others again owe their diseases to their own personal vices, and, by abusing their bodies to satisfy their lusts, convert them into walking hospitals: they suck in rheums and defluxions with their intemperate draughts, and change the pleasure of a sober and temperate life for fevers and the uneasiness of debauches; they swallow their surfeits in their gluttonous meals, and fill their veins with flat and sprightless humours, till by degrees they have turned their sickly bodies into mere statues of earth and phlegm; and, in a word, they waste themselves in their insatiable wantonness, and sacri

fice their strength to a beastly importunity, and many times contract those noisome diseases that make them putrefy alive, and even anticipate the uncleanness of the grave. And as our bodily diseases are generally the natural effects of our sin, so are most others of those calamities under which we groan. Thus want and poverty are usually the effects, either of our own sloth or prodigality, or else of the fraud and oppression of those we deal with; and wars and devastations, the natural products, either of the ambition or covetousness of those who are the aggressors. Thus sin, you see, is the Pandora's box whence most of those swarms of miseries issue, that sting and disturb the world: and indeed, the God of nature, to deter men from sin, hath coupled misery to it so inseparably, that whilst he continues things in their natural course, we may as soon be men without being reasonable, as sinful men without being miserable. Hence we find, that when he had tried all the arts of discipline on the obstinate Jews, and none were effectual, he at last consigns them to the dire correction of their own follies, Jer. ii. 19. Thine own wickedness shall correct thee, and thy backslidings shall reprove thee.

(2.) Again, secondly, Many of those evils and calamities under which we suffer are the just retributions of sin. For besides those numerous evils that are naturally appendant unto wicked actions, there are sundry others under which we suffer, that are the more immediate effects of the divine displeasure, and are inflicted on us by God, as the condign punishments of our rebellions against him: and these are such as proceed not from any necessary causality in the sinful actions themselves, but are

wholly owing to the providence of Heaven; which either inflicts them immediately upon us, or else disposes second causes, contrary to their natural tendency, to come to the production of them: such were the drowning of the world, the burning of Sodom and Gomorrah, the judgment of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, and sundry other such like mentioned in the scripture. And though in sundry of those judgments which God inflicts upon sinful men, his hand doth not so visibly appear as it did in those, yet many of them are impressed with such visible characters of the divine displeasure, that we have all the reason in the world to conclude them to be the immediate effects of it. As, when we see some great and unexpected calamity befall a sinner in the very commission of a wicked action; or when he is punished in kind, and the judgment inflicted on him bears an exact correspondence with his sin; or when, upon the commission of some notorious villainy, some strange and extraordinary evil befalls him: in these and such like cases, although it is possible they may be the effects of some casual concurrence of second causes; yet there being such plain indications of designed punishment in them, it would be very unreasonable to attribute them to a mere blind and undesigning chance. And therefore, although on the one hand it argues an uncharitable and superstitious mind, to attribute every calamity of our brother to the righteous judgment and displeasure of God; yet on the other hand, it is no less an argument of a stupid wretched soul, to attribute those evils to chance, on which there are such apparent symptoms of the divine displeasure. And though there is no doubt, but many of those evil events that

befall us do merely result from the established course and order of necessary causes, yet there is no man that owns either a providence, or the truth of scripture, but must readily acknowledge, that in this established course of things God very often interposes, and, for the rewarding of good and punishing of bad men, so varies the courses of these secondary causes, as to produce good and evil by them, contrary to their natural series and tendencies. For should he have limited himself to the laws of nature, and resolved to keep things on for ever in one fatal and unvariable course of motion, he must have tied up his hands from rewarding and punishing, which are the principal acts of his governing providence; and consequently all his promises and threats of temporal blessings and judgments must have been perfectly null and insignificant. This therefore must be acknowledged by all that have any sense of God and religion, that many of those evils under which we suffer are the just judgments of God in retribution for our folly and wickedness. But I see I must hasten.

(3.) And lastly, Many of those evils and calamities we endure are inflicted as necessary antidotes against sin. For certainly considering the degenerate state of human nature, the perverseness and disingenuity of the generality of mankind, afflictions and calamities are as necessary to keep us within the bounds of sobriety, as chains and whips are to tame madmen : and should the great Governor of the world still indulge to us our wills, and accommodate all events to our desires, we should grow so extravagantly insolent, that it would be impossible to keep us within any bounds or compass; and therefore, in charity to