sure thou canst make out of any sin, to breed thyself all this pains and all this grief, at once to displease thy God, and displease thyself, and make a partition between him and thee. O sweet and safe ways of holiness, walking with God in his company, and favor! He that orders his conversation aright, he sees the loving-kindness of the Lord: it is shown to him; he lives in the sight of it.

But if any such separation is made, yet is it thy great desire to have it removed? Why then there is hope. See to it; labor to break it down; and pray to him to help thee; and he will put forth his hand, and then it must fall. And in all thy sense of separation, look to him who brake down the middle wall of partition; Eph. ii, 14. There it is spoken of as betwixt men, Jews and Gentiles, but so as it was also between the Gentiles and God, who were separated from his people and from himself. See ver. 16; That he might reconcile both to God in one body; and ver. 18; Through him we have access by one Spirit to the Father. And then he adds, that they were no more strangers and foreigners, dwelling on the other side of the wall, as the word is, but fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God.

O that we knew more what it were to live in this sweet society, in undivided fellowship with God! Alas! how little is understood this living in him, separated from sin and the world, which otherwise do separate from him; solacing our hearts in his love, and despising the base muddy delights that the world admires; hoping for that New Jerusalem, where none of these walls of sin are, nor any one stone of them, and for that bright day wherein there is no cloud nor mist to hide our sun from us.

Now for the condition of the church, know sin to be the great obstructer of its peace, making him to withdraw his hand, and hide his face, and to turn away his ear from our prayers, and loath our fasts; Isa. i, 15; and Jer. xiv, 12. The quarrel stands; sin not repented of and removed. The wall is still standing; oaths, and sabbathbreaking, and pride, and oppression, and heart-burnings still remaining. O. what a noise of religion and reformation! All sides are for the name of it, and how little of the thing! the gospel itself is despised, grown stale, as

trivial doctrine. O, my beloved, if I could speak many hours without intermission, all my cry would be, Repent and pray. Let us search and try our ways, and turn unto the Lord our God. O what walls of every one's sin are set up! Dig diligently to bring down thine own; and for those huge walls of public national guiltinesses, if thou canst do nothing to them more, compass them about as Jericho, and look up to heaven for their downfall. Cry-Lord, these we ourselves have reared, but without thee who can bring them down? Lord, throw them down for us. A touch of thy hand, a word of thy mouth, will make them fall. Were we less busied in impertinencies, and more in this most needful work, it might do some good. Who knows but the Lord might make his own way clear, and return and visit us, and make his face to shine, that we might be saved?

SERMON XIX.

Time to Awake.

ROMANS xiii. 11, 12, 13, 14.

And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep; for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.

The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.

Let us walk honestly as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying.

But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.

THE highest beauty of the soul, the very image of God upon it, is holiness. He that is aspiring to it, is upon a most excellent design; and if he can do any thing to excite and call up others to it, he performs a work of the greatest charity.

'This St. Paul doth frequently and pressingly in his writings. This epistle, as it doth admirably clear the doctrine of justification, so it doth not less earnestly urge the doctrine of sanctification. That one sentence about the middle thereof does excellently unite them, and so is the summary of all that goes before and all that follows; There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus; who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit ; viii, 1.

The present words are as an alarm, or morning watchbell, of singular use, not only awaking a Christian to his day's work, but withal reminding him what it is. And these two shall be all our division of them-I. our awaking sounded; II. our walking directed. The former tells us, it is time to rise, and calls us up to put on our clothes, and, being soldiers, our arms. The latter directeth our behaviour and employment throughout the day. The last verse doth shortly, and that fully and clearly, fold up both together. We shall take the words just as they lie.

And that knowing the time. This imports much in all actions, and here it is the apostle's great argument. Now it is unfit to sleep, knowing the time: however it might have been before, now it is very unseasonable and unsuitable, that you lie snoring as at midnight. Do you know what o'clock it is? It is time to rise; it is morning, the day begins to appear.

All the days of sinful nature are dark night, in which there is no right discerning of spiritual things. Some light there is of reason, to direct natural and civil actions, but no day-light. Till the sun arise, it is night still, notwithstanding all the stars, and the moon to help them. Notwithstanding natural speculations, that are more remote, and all prudence and policy for affairs, that come somewhat nearer to action, yet we are still in the night. And you do think that a sad life; but the truth is, we sleep on in it, and our heads are still full of new dreams which keep us sleeping. We are constantly drunk with cares or desires of sense, and so our sleep continues. Sometimes it is called death-dead in sins. Now sleep is brother to death; and so by it not unfitly is the same state resembled. No spiritual life we have at all, and

therefore in that sense are truly dead. But because there is in us a natural life, and in that, a capacity of spiritual life, therefore we are said to be asleep; as in a dead sleep, our soul is bound up and drowned in flesh, through a surcharge of the vapors of gross sensible things that we glut ourselves withal; and the condition of our wisest thoughts, in relation to our highest good, are nothing but dreams and reveries. Your projectings, and bargainings, and buildings, these be a better sort of dreams; but your envyings, and mutual despisings and discontents, your detracting and evil-speaking, these are more impertinent, and to yourselves more perplexing. And your sweetest enjoyments in this life, which you think most real, are but shadows of delight, a more pleasant sort of dreams. All pomps and royal solemnities, the scripture calls phantasies; Acts xxv, 23. A man will not readily think so while he is in them. We do not perceive the vanity of our dreams, and know that they are so, and declare them to be so, till we be awaked. Sometimes in a dream, a man will have such a thought that it is but a dream, yet doth he not thoroughly see the folly thereof, but goes on in it. The natural man may have sometimes a glance of such thoughts, that all these things he is either turmoiling or delighting in, are vanity and nothing to the purpose; yet he awakes not, but raves on still in them. He shifts a little, turns on his bed as a door on its hinges, but turns not off, does not rise.

But the spiritually-minded Christian, who is indeed awake and looks back on his former thoughts and ways O how does he disdain himself, and all his former high, fancies, that he was most pleased with, finding them dreams! O what a fool, what a wretch was I, while my head was full of such stuff, building castles in the air, imagining and catching at such gains, and such preferments and pleasures, and either they still running before me and I could not overtake them, or, if I thought I did, what have I now, when I see what it is, and find that I have embraced a shadow, false hopes, and fears, and joys? He thinketh he hath eaten, and his soul is empty. And you that will sleep on, may; but sure I am, when you come to your death-bed, if possibly you awake then,

then shall you look back, with sad regret, upon whatsoever you most esteemed and gloried in under the sun. While they are coming towards you, they have some show; but, as a dream that is past, when these gay things are flown by, then we see how vain they are; as that luxurious king caused to be painted on his tomb two fingers, as sounding one upon another, with that word, "All is not worth so much." I know not how men make a shift to satisfy themselves; but, take a sober and awakened Christian, and set him in the midst of the best of all things that are here, his heart would burst with despair of satisfaction, were it not for a hope that he hath, beyond all that this poor world either attains or is seeking after, and that hope is indeed the dawning of the day that is here spoken of.

It is time to awake, says he; your salvation is nearer than when ye believed. That bright day you look for, is hastening forward; it is nearer than when you began to believe. The night is far spent, the gross darkness is already past, some day-light there is, and it is every moment growing, and the perfect full morning-light of it is very

pear.

Grace, and the gospel that works it, compared with the dark night of nature, is the day, and is often so called: the apostle here calls it so; Let us walk honestly as in the day. But yet, that same light of the gospel shining on us in the word, and within us by the Spirit, is but the appearance or approaching of the day, a certain pledge of it, yea, a kind of beginning of it, telling us that it is near. It is one and the same light, and where it enters into any soul, it makes sure that eternal full day to it, that it shall not be disappointed of it, any more than the day can go back, and the sun fail to rise when the dawn is begun. And this begun light is still growing clearer, and tending to the perfect day; Prov. iv, 18. And at the first peep or appearance of it, so much is it, that the soul is called to awake and arise, and put on day-clothes, and apply itself to the actions of the day; and that is the thing the apostle here presses by it.

O the blessed gospel, revealing God in Christ, and calling up sinners to communion with him, dispelling