friendship with sin. Generally, as Plato hath it, love takes away one's living in one's self, and transfers it into the party loved; but the divine love of Christ doth it in the truest and highest manner.

By whose stripes ye were healed.] The misery of fallen man, and the mercy of his deliverance, are both of them such a depth, that no one expression, yea, no variety of expressions added one to another, can fathom them. Here we have divers very significant ones. 1. The guiltiness of sin as an intolerable burden, pressing the soul and sinking it, and that transferred and laid on a stronger back: He bare. Then, 2. The same wretchedness, under the notion of a strange disease, by all other means incurable, healed by His stripes. And, 3. It is again represented by the forlorn condition of a sheep wandering, and our salvation to be found only in the love and wisdom of our great Shepherd. And all these are borrowed from that sweet and clear prophecy in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah.

The polluted nature of man is no other than a bundle of desperate diseases: he is spiritually dead, as the Scriptures often teach. Now this contradicts not, nor at all lessens the matter; but only because this misery, justly called death, exists in a subject animated with a natural life, therefore, so considered, it may bear the name and sense of sickness, or wounds: and therefore it is gross misprision,-they are as much out in their argument as in their conclusion, who would extract out of these expressions, any evidence that there are remains of spiritual life, or good, in our corrupted nature. But they are not worthy the contest, though vain heads think to argue themselves into life, and are seeking that life, by logic, in miserable nature, which they should seek, by faith, in Jesus Christ, namely, in these His stripes, by which we are healed.

It were a large task to name our spiritual maladies; how much more, severally to unfold their natures! Such a multitude of corrupt false principles in the mind, which, as gangrenes, do spread themselves through the soul, and defile the whole man; that total gross blindness and unbelief in spiritual

things, and that stone of the heart, hardness and impenitency; lethargies of senselessness and security; and then, (for there be such complications of spiritual diseases in us, as in naturals are altogether impossible,) such burning fevers of inordinate affections and desires, of lust, and malice, and envy, such racking and tormenting cares of covetousness, and feeding on earth and ashes, (as the Prophet speaks in another case, Isa. xliv. 20.) according to the depraved appetite that accompanies some diseases; such tumours of pride and self-conceit, that break forth, as filthy botches, in men's words, and carriage one with another! In a word, what a wonderful disorder must needs be in the natural soul, by the frequent interchanges and fight of contrary passions within it! And, besides all these, how many deadly wounds do we receive from without, by the temptations of Satan and the world! We entertain them, and by weapons with which they furnish us, we willingly wound ourselves; as the Apostle says of them who will be rich, they fall into divers snares and noisome lusts, and pierce themselves through with many sorrows. 1 Tim. vi. 9, 10.

Did we see it, no infirmary or hospital was ever so full of loathsome and miserable spectacles, as, in a spiritual sense, our wretched nature is in any one of us apart: how much more when multitudes of us are met together! But our evils are hid from us, and we perish miserably in a dream of happiness! This makes up and completes our wretchedness, that we feel it not with our other diseases; and this makes it worse still. This was the Church's disease, Rev. iii. 17. Thou sayest, I am rich, and knowest not that thou art poor, &c. We are usually full of complaints of trifling griefs which are of small moment, and think not on, nor feel our dangerous maladies: as he who shewed a physician his sore finger but the physician told him, he had more need to think on the cure of a dangerous imposthume within him, which he perceived by looking at him, though himself did not feel it.

In dangerous maladies or wounds, there be these evils: a tendency to death, and with that, the apprehension of the

terror and fear of it, and the present distemper of the body. So, there are in sin, 1. The guiltiness of sin binding over the soul to death, the most frightful, eternal death; 2. The terror of conscience in the apprehension of that death, or the wrath that is the consequence and end of sin; 3. The raging and prevailing power of sin, which is the ill habitude and distemper of the soul. But these Stripes, and that blood which issued from them, are a sound cure. Applied unto the soul, they take away the guiltiness of sin, and death deserved, and free us from our engagement to those everlasting scourgings and lashes of the wrath of God; and they are likewise the only cure of those present terrors and pangs of conscience, arising from the sense of that wrath and sentence of death upon the soul. Our iniquities which met on Him, laid open to the rod that back which in itself was free. Those hands which never wrought iniquity, and those feet which never declined from the way of righteousness, yet, for our works and wanderings, were pierced; and that tongue dropped with vinegar and gall on the cross, which never spoke a guileful nor sinful word. The blood of those Stripes is that balm issuing from that Tree of Life so pierced, which can alone give ease to the conscience, and heal the wounds of it: they deliver from the power of sin, working by their influence a loathing of sin, which was the cause of them; they cleanse out the vicious humours of our corrupt nature, by opening that issue of repentance: They shall look on Him, and mourn over Him whom they have pierced. Zech. xii. 10.

Now, to the end it may thus cure, it must be applied: it is the only receipt, but, in order to heal, it must be received. The most sovereign medicines cure not in any other manner, and therefore, still their first letter is, R, Recipe, take such a thing.

This is amongst the wonders of that great work, that the sovereign Lord of all, who binds and looses at His pleasure the influences of heaven, and the power and workings of all the creatures, would himself in our flesh be thus bound, the only Son bound as a slave, and scourged as a malefactor! And his

willing obedience made this an acceptable and expiating sacrifice, amongst the rest of his sufferings: He gave his back to the smiters. Isa. 1. 6.

Now, it cannot be, that any one who is thus healed, reflecting upon this cure, can again take any constant delight in sin. It is impossible so far to forget both the grief it bred themselves, and that which it cost their Lord, as to make a new agreement with it, to live in the pleasure of it.

His stripes.] Turn your thoughts, every one of you, to consider this; you that are not healed, that you may be healed; and you that are, apply it still to perfect the cure in that part wherein it is gradual and not complete; and for the ease you have found, bless and love Him who endured so much uneasiness to that end. There is a sweet mixture of sorrow and joy in contemplating these Stripes; sorrow, surely, by sympathy, that they were His stripes, and joy, that they were our healing, Christians are too little mindful and sensible of this, and, it may be are somewhat guilty of that with which Ephraim is charged, Hos. xi. 3. They knew not that I healed them.

Ver. 25. For ye were as sheep going astray, but are now returned to the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls.

In these few words, we have a brief and yet clear representation of the wretchedness of our natural condition, and of our happiness in Christ. The resemblance is borrowed from the same place in the prophet Isaiah, chap. liii. ver. 6.

Not to press the comparison, or, as it is too usual with commentators to strain it beyond the purpose, in reference to our lost estate, this is all, or the main circumstance wherein the resemblance with sheep, holds,-our wandering, as forlorn and exposed to destruction, like a sheep that has strayed and wandered from the fold. So taken, it imports, indeed, the loss of a better condition, the loss of the safety and happiness of the soul, of that good which is proper to it, as the suitable good of the brute creature here named, is, safe and good pasture.

That we may know there is no one exempt in nature from the guiltiness and misery of this wandering, the Prophet is express as to the universality of it. All we have gone astray. And though the Apostle here applies it in particular to his brethren, yet, it falls not amiss to any others, Ye were as sheep going astray. Yea, the Prophet there, to the collective universal, adds a distributive, Every man to his own way, or, a man to his way. They agree in this, that they all wander, though they differ in their several ways. There is an inbred proneness to stray, in them all, more than in sheep which are creatures naturally wandering, for each man hath his own way.

And this is our folly, that we flatter ourselves by comparison, and every one is pleased with himself because he is free from some wanderings of others; not considering that he is a wanderer too, though in another way; he hath his way, as those he looks on have theirs. And as men agree in wandering, though they differ in their way, so those ways agree in this, that they lead unto misery, and shall end in that. Think you there is no way to Hell, but the way to open profaneness? Yes, surely, many a way that seems smooth and clean in a man's own eyes, and yet will end in condemnation. Truth is but one, Error endless and interminable. As we say of natural life and death, so may we say in respect of spiritual, the way to life is one, but there are many out of it. Lethi mille aditus. Each one hath not opportunity nor ability for every sin, or every degree of sin, but each sins after his own mode and power, Isa. xl. 20.

Thy tongue, it may be, wanders not in the common pathroad of oaths and curses, yet it wanders in secret calumnies, in detraction and defaming of others, though so conveyed as it scarcely appears; or, if thou speak them not, yet thou art pleased to hear them. It wanders in trifling away the precious hours of irrecoverable time, with vain unprofitable babblings in thy converse, or, if thou art much alone, or in company much silent, yet, is not thy foolish mind still hunting vanity, following this self-pleasing design or the other, and seldom, and very slightly, if at all, conversant with God and the things of heaven,