of the world by laying me in the grave, I must die again in an incineration of this flesh, and in a dispersion of this dust; that that monarch who spread over many nations alive, must in his dust lie in a corner of that sheet of lead, and there but so long as that lead will last; and that private and retired man, that thought himself his own forever, and never came forth, must in his dust of the grave be published, and (such are the revolutions of graves) be mingled with the dust of every highway and of every dunghill, and swallowed in every puddle and pond - this is the most inglorious and contemptible vilification, the most deadly and peremptory nullification of man, that we can consider. Death's Duell, pp. 20-22. ETERNAL BANISHMENT WHEN all is done, the hell of hells, the torment of torments, is the everlasting absence of God, and the everlasting impossibility of returning to his presence; Horrendum est, says the Apostle, "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of God," . . . but to fall out of the hands of the living God is a horror beyond our expression, beyond our imagination. That God should let my soul fall out of his hand, into a bottomless pit, and roll an unremoveable stone upon it, and leave it to that which it finds there, (and it shall find that there, which it never imagined, till it came thither) and never think more of that soul, never have more to do with it; that of that providence of God, that studies the life of every weed, and worm, and ant, and spider, and toad, and viper, there should never, never any beam flow out upon me; that that God, who looked upon me when I was nothing, and called me when I was not, as though I had been, out of the womb and depth of darkness, will not look upon me now, when though a miserable and banished and damned creature, yet I am his creature still, and contribute something to his glory, even in my damnation; that that God, who hath so often looked upon me in my foulest uncleanness, and when I had shut out the eye of the day, the Sun, and the eye of the night, the taper, and the eyes of the world, with curtains and windows and doors, did yet see me, and see me in mercy, by making me see that he saw me, and sometimes brought me to a present remorse, and (for that time) to a forbearing of that sin, should so turn himself from me to his glorious Saints and Angels, as that no Saint or Angel, nor Christ Jesus himself should ever pray him to look towards me, never remember him that such a soul there is; that that God, who hath so often said to my soul, Quare morieris? Why wilt thou die? and so often sworn to my soul, Vivat Dominus, as the Lord liveth I would not have thee die, but live, will neither let me die, nor let me live, but die an everlasting life, and live an everlasting death; that that God, who when he could not get into me by standing and knocking, by his ordinary means of entering, by his word, his mercies, hath applied his judgments, and hath shaked the house, this body, with agues and palsies, and set this house on fire with fevers and calentures, and frightened the master of the house, my soul, with horrors and heavy apprehensions, and so made an entrance into me; that that God should frustrate all his own purposes and practises upon me, and leave me, and cast me away as though I had cost him nothing; that this God at last should let this soul go away as a smoke, as a vapour, as a bubble, and that then this soul SENTENCES He that starves as well as he that surfeits, he that lies in the spitting places and excremental corners of the streets, as well as he that sits upon carpets in the region of perfumes. Ibid., p. 164. THERE is not so poor a creature, but may be thy glass to see God in. The greatest flat glass that can be made cannot represent anything greater than it is. If every gnat that flies were an Archangel, all that could but tell me that there is a God; and the poorest worm that creeps tells me that. If I should ask the basilisk, how camest thou by those killing eyes, he would tell me, thy God made me so. Ibid., p. 226. (p.26-1) THEY have put God and that man into the balance, and weighed them together, and found God too light. That mighty, that weighty, that ponderous God, that blasts a State with a breath, that melts a Church with a look, that moulders a world with a touch. Ibid., p. 245. THE dead hear not thunder, nor feel they an earthquake. If the cannon batter that church's walls in which they lie buried, it wakes not them. Eighty Sermons, p. 257. THE shutting of thine eyes from looking upon things in things, upon creatures in creatures, upon beauty in that face that misleads thee, or upon honour in that place that possesses thee. Ibid., p. 260. Caemetaria are dormitaria; churchyards are our beds. And in those beds, and in all other beds of death (for the dead have their beds in the sea too, and sleep even in the restless motion thereof) the voice of the Archangel and the trumpet of God shall awake them. Ibid., p. 263. We are all conceived in close prison . . . and then all our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death. Nor was there ever any man seen to sleep in the cart between Newgate and Tyburn - between prison and the place of execution, does any man sleep? But we sleep all the way; from the womb to the grave we are never thoroughly awake. Ibid., p. 267. THE Contemplation of God and heaven is a kind of burial, and sepulchre and rest of the soul; and in this death of rapture and ecstacy, in this death of the contemplation of my interest in my Saviour, I shall find myself and all my sins enterred and entombed in his wounds, and like a lily in Paradise, out of red earth, I shall see my soul rise out of his blade in a candour, and in an innocence contracted there, acceptable in the sight of his Father. Eighty Sermons, p. 274. He will not be satisfied... with those quails which God sends (the preaching of solid and fundamental doctrines) but must have Birds of Paradise, unrevealed mysteries out of God's own bosom, preached unto him. Ibid., p. 308. AN usurer can show me his bags, and an extortioner his houses, the fruits, the revenues of his sin; but where will the blasphemer show me his blasphemy, or what he hath got by it? The licentious man hath had his love in his arms, and the envious man hath had his enemy in the dust, but wherein hath the blasphemer hurt God? Ibid., p. 344. As the world is the whole frame of the world, God hath put into it a reproof, a rebuke lest it should seem eternal, which is a sensible decay and age in the whole frame of the world and every piece thereof. The seasons of the year irregular and distempered; the sun fainter and languishing; men less in stature and shorter-lived. No addition, but only every year new sorts, new species of worms and flies and sicknesses, which argue more and more putrefaction of which they are engendered. Ibid., p. 357. To save this body from the condemnation of everlasting corruption, when the worms that we breed |