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1

The Life of Christ

The opening words of the ‘Dedication’ – in the year of the execution of Charles I, a time for theology that is practical, not polemical

When interest divides the church, and the calentures of men breathe out in problems and inactive discourses, each part, in pursuance of its own portion, follows that proposition which complies with and bends in all the flexures of its temporal ends; and while all strive for truth, they hug their own opinions dressed up in her imagery, and they dispute for ever; and either the question is indeterminable, or, which is worse, men will never be convinced. For such is the nature of disputings, that they begin commonly in mistakes, they proceed with zeal and fancy, and end not at all but in schisms and uncharitable names, and too often dip their feet in blood. In the mean time, he that gets the better of his adversary oftentimes gets no good to himself, because, although he hath fast hold upon the right side of the problem, he may be an ill man in the midst of his triumphant disputations. And therefore it was not here that God would have man’s felicity to grow; for our condition had been extremely miserable if our final state had been placed upon an uncertain hill, and the way to it had been upon the waters upon which no spirit but that of contradiction and discord did ever move: for the man should have tended to an end of an uncertain dwelling, and walked to it by ways not discernible, and arrived thither by chance; which, because it is irregular, would have discomposed the pleasures of a Christian hope, as the very disputing hath already destroyed charity, and disunited the continuity of faith; and in the consequent there would be no virtue, and no felicity. But God, who never loved that man should be too ambitiously busy in imitating His wisdom (and man lost paradise for it,) is most desirous we should imitate His goodness, and transcribe copies of those excellent emanations from His holiness whereby, as He communicates Himself to us in mercies, so He propound Himself, imitable by us in graces: and in order to this, God has described our way plain, certain, and determined; and although He was pleased to leave us undetermined in the questions of exterior communion, yet He put it past all question that we are bound to be charitable. He hath placed the question of the state of separation in the dark, in hidden and undiscerned regions; but He hath opened the windows of heaven, and given great light to us, teaching how we are to demean ourselves in the state of conjunction. Concerning the salvation of the heathens He was not pleased to give us account; but He hath clearly described the duty of Christians, and tells upon what terms alone we shall be saved. And although the not inquiring into the ways of God and the strict rules of practice have been instrumental to the preserving them free from the serpentine enfoldings and labyrinths of dispute, yet God also, with a great design of mercy, hath writ His commandments in so large characters, and engraven them in such tables, that no man can want the records, nor yet skill to read the hand-writing upon this wall, if he understands what he understands, that is, what is placed in his own spirit. For God was therefore desirous that human nature should be perfected with moral not intellectual excellencies, because these only are of use and compliance with our present state and conjunction, If God had given to eagles an appetite to swim, or to the elephant strong desires to fly, He would have ordered that an abode in the sea and the air respectively should have been proportionable to their manner of living; for so God hath done to man, fitting him with such excellencies which are useful to him in his ways and progress to perfection. And man hath great use and need of justice, and all the instances of morality serve his natural and political ends; he cannot live without them, and be happy: but the filling the rooms of the understanding with airy and ineffective notions is just such an excellency as it is in a man to imitate the voice of birds; at his very best, the nightingale shall excel him, and it is of no use to that end which God designed him in the first intentions of creation.

In pursuance of this consideration, I have chosen to serve the purposes of religion by doing assistance to that part of theology which is wholly practical; that which makes us wiser therefore because it makes us better.

II.1–2

‘Preface’ – Christianity and Natural Law

For certain it is, Christianity is nothing else but the most perfect design that ever was to make a man be happy in his whole capacity: and as the law was to the Jews, so was philosophy to the gentiles, a schoolmaster to bring them to Christ, to teach them the rudiments of happiness, and the first and lowest things of reason; that when Christ was come, all mankind might become perfect; that is, be made regular in their appetites, wise in their understandings, assisted in their duties, directed to, and instructed in, their great ends. And this is that which the apostle calls “being perfect men in Christ Jesus;” perfect in all the intendments of nature, and in all the designs of God: and this was brought to pass by discovering, and restoring, and improving the law of nature and by turning it all into religion.

For the natural law being a sufficient and a proportionate instrument and means to bring a man to the end designed in his creation, and this law being eternal and unalterable, (for it ought to be as lasting and as unchangeable as the nature itself, so long as it was capable of a law,) it was not imaginable that the body of any law should make a new morality, new rules and general proportions, either of justice, or religion, or temperance, or felicity; the essential parts of all these consisting in natural proportions, and means toward the consummation of man’s last end, which was first intended and is always the same. It is, as if here were a new truth in an essential and a necessary proposition. For although the instances may vary, there can be no new justice, no new temperance, no new relations, proper and natural relations, and intercourses, between God and us, but what always were; in praises and prayers, in adoration and honour, and in the symbolical expressions of God’s glory and our needs.

II.20

On how Christ perfects Natural Law

Thus the holy Jesus perfected and restored the natural law, and drew it into a system of propositions, and made them to become of the family of religion. For God is so zealous to have man attain to the end to which He first designed him, that those things which He hath put to the natural order to attain that end, He hath bound fast upon us, not only by the order of things by which it was that he that prevaricated did naturally fall short of felicity, but also by bands of religion; He hath now made Himself a party, and an enemy to those that will not be happy. Of old, religion was but one of the natural laws, and the instances of religion were distinct from the discourses of philosophy. Now, all the law of nature is adopted into religion, and by our love and duty to God we are tied to do all that is reason, and the parts of our religion are but pursuances of the natural relation between God and us. And beyond all this, our natural condition is, in all senses, improved by the consequents and adherences of this religion: for although nature and grace are opposite, that is, nature depraved by evil habits, by ignorance, and ungodly customs, is contrary to grace, that is, to nature restored by the gospel, engaged to regular living by new revelations, and assisted by the Spirit; yet it is observable that the law of nature and the law of grace are never opposed. “There is a law of our members,” saith St. Paul; that is an evil necessity introduced into our appetites by perpetual evil customs, examples, and traditions of vanity; and there is a law of sin, that answers to this; and they differ only as inclination and habit, vicious desires and vicious practices. Bt then contrary to these are, first “a law of my mind,” which is the law of nature and right reason, and then the law of grace, that is, of Jesus Christ, who perfected and restored the first law, and by assistances reduced it into a law of holy living: and these two differ as the other; the one is in order to the other, as imperfection and growing degrees and capacity are to perfection and consummation. The law of the mind had been so rased and obliterate, and we, by some means or other, so disabled from observing it exactly, that until it was turned into the law of grace, (which is a law of pardoning infirmities, and assisting us in our choices and elections,) we were in a state of deficiency from the perfective state of man to which God intended us.

II. 28–9

Exhortation to the imitation of Christ

I consider, that the imitation of the life of Jesus is a duty of that excellency and perfection, that we are helped in it, not only by the assistance of a good and great example, which possibly might be too great, and scare our endeavours and attempts; but also by its easiness, compliance, and proportion to us. For Jesus, in His whole life, conversed with men with a modest virtue, which, like a well kindled fire fitted with just materials, casts a constant heat; not like an inflamed heap of stubble, glaring with great emissions, and suddenly stooping into the thickness of smoke. His piety was even, constant, unblamable, complying with civil society, without affrightment of precedent, or prodigious instances of actions greater than the imitation of men. For if we observe our blessed Saviour in the whole story of His life, although He was without sin, yet the instances of His piety were the actions of a very holy, but of an ordinary life; and we may observe this difference in the story of Jesus from ecclesiastical writings of certain beatified persons, whose life is told rather to amaze us and to create scruples, than to lead us in the evenness and serenity of a holy conscience.

II.41

Considerations upon the Annunciation and the Conception: The Incarnation

And if we consider the reasonableness of the thing, what can be given more excellent for the redemption of man than the blood of the Son of God? And what can more ennoble our nature, than that by the means of His holy humanity it was taken up into the cabinet of the mysterious Trinity? What better advocate could we have for us, than He that is appointed to be our judge? And what greater hopes of reconciliation can be imagined, than that God, in whose power it is to give an absolute pardon, hath taken a new nature, entertained an office, and undergone a life of poverty, with a purpose to procure our pardon?

II.52

On the Annunciation

The holy Virgin, when she saw an angel and heard a testimony from heaven of her grace and piety, was troubled within herself at the salutation and the manner of it: for she had learned, that the affluence of divine comforts and prosperous successes should not exempt us from fear, but make it the more prudent and wary, lest it entangle us in a vanity of spirit; God having ordered that our spirits should be affected with dispositions in some degrees contrary to exterior events, that we be fearful in the affluence of prosperous things, and joyful in adversity; as knowing that this may produce benefit and advantage; and the changes that are consequent to the other are sometimes full of mischiefs, but always of danger. But her silence and fear were her guardians; that, to prevent excrescences of joy; this, of vainer complacency.

And it is not altogether inconsiderable to observe, that the holy Virgin came to a great perfection and state of piety by a few, and those modest and even, exercises and external actions. St. Paul travelled over the world, preached to the gentiles, disputed against the Jews, confounded heretics, writ excellently learned letters, suffered dangers, injuries, affronts, and persecutions to the height of wonder, and by these violences of life, action, and patience, obtained the crown of an excellent religion and devotion. But the holy Virgin, although she was engaged sometimes in an active life, and in the exercise of an ordinary and small economy and government or ministries of a family, yet she arrived to her perfections by the means of a quiet and silent piety, the internal actions of love, devotion, and contemplation; and instructs us, that not only those who have opportunity and powers of a magnificent religion, or a pompous charity, or miraculous conversion of souls, or assiduous and effectual preachings, or exterior demonstrations of corporal mercy, shall have the greatest crowns, and the addition of degrees and accidental rewards; but the silent affections, the splendours of an internal devotion, the unions of love, humility, and obedience, the daily offices of prayer and praises sung to God, the acts of faith and fear, of patience and meekness, of hope and reverence, repentance and charity, and those graces which walk in a veil and silence, make great ascents to God, and as sure progress to favour and a crown, as the more ostentatious and laborious exercises of a more solemn religion. No man needs to complain of want of power or opportunities for religious perfections: a devout woman in her closet, praying with much zeal and affections for the conversion of souls, is in the same order to a “shining like the stars in glory,” as he who by excellent discourses puts it into a more forward disposition to be actually performed. And possibly her prayers obtained energy and force to my sermon, and made the ground fruitful, and the seed spring up to life eternal. Many times God is present in the still voice and private retirements of a quiet religion, and the constant spiritualities of an ordinary life, when the loud and impetuous winds, and the shining fires of a more laborious and expensive actions, are profitable to others only, like a tree of balsam, distilling precious liquor for others, not for its own use.

II.54–5

Considerations concerning the circumstances of the interval between the conception and the nativity

When the holy Virgin had begun her journey she made haste over the mountains, that she might not only satisfy the desires of her joy by a speedy gratulation, but lest she should be too long abroad under the dispersion and discomposing of her retirements; and therefore she hastens to an enclosure, to her cousin’s house, as knowing that all virtuous women, like tortoises, carry their house on their heads, and their chapel in their heart, and their danger in their eye, and their souls in their hands, and God in all their actions. And indeed her very little burden, which she bare, hindered her not but she might make haste enough; and as her spirit was full of cheerfulness and alacrity, so even her body was made airy and vegete, for there was no sin in her burden to fill it with natural inconveniences. And there is this excellency in all spiritual things, that they do no disadvantage to our persons, nor retard our just temporal interests: and the religion by which we carry Christ within us, is neither so peevish as to disturb our health, nor so sad as to discompose our just and modest cheerfulness, nor so prodigal as to force us to needs and ignoble trades; but recreates our body by the medicine of holy fastings and temperance, fills us full of serenities and complacencies by the sweetnesses of a holy conscience and joys spiritual, promotes our temporal interests, by the gains and increases of the rewards of charity, and by securing God’s providence over us while we are in the pursuit of the heavenly kingdom. And as in these dispositions she climbed the mountains with much facility, so there is nothing in our whole life of difficulty so great, but it may be managed by those assistances we receive from the holiest Jesus, when we carry Him about us; as the valleys are exalted, so the mountains are made plain before us.

II.58–9

Considerations upon the birth of our Blessed Saviour Jesus Christ

Here then are concentred the prodigies of greatness and goodness, of wisdom and charity, of meekness and humility, and march all the way in mystery and incomprehensible mixtures; if we consider Him in the bosom of His Father, where He is seated by the postures of love and essential felicity; and in the manger, where love also placed Him, and an infinite desire to communicate His felicities to us. As he is God, His throne is in the heaven, and He fills all things by His immensity: as He is man, He is circumscribed by an uneasy cradle, and cries in a stable. As He is God, He is seated upon a super-exalted throne; as man, exposed to the lowest estate of uneasiness and need. As God clothed in a robe of glory, at the same instant when you may behold and wonder at His humanity, wrapped in cheap and unworthy cradle-bands. As God, He is encircled by millions of angels; as man, in the company of beasts. As God, He is the eternal Word of the Father, eternal, sustained by Himself, all-sufficient, and without need: and yet He submitted Himself to a condition imperfect, inglorious, indigent, and necessitous. And this consideration is apt and natural to produce great affections of love, duty, and obedience, desires of union and conformity to His sacred person, life, actions, and laws; that we resolve all our thoughts, and finally determine all our reason and our passions and capacities, upon that saying of St. Paul, “He that loves not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be accursed.” [1 Cor. 16.22]

II.68

The great and glorious accidents happening about the birth of Jesus

The wise men . . . “fell down and worshipped Him,” after the manner of the easterlings when they do veneration to their kings, not with an empty Ave and gay blessing of fine words, but “they bring presents and come into His courts;” for “when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto Him gifts, gold, frankincense, and myrrh.” And if these gifts were mysterious, beyond the acknowledgment of Him to be the king of the Jews, and Christ, that should come into the world; frankincense might signify Him to be acknowledged a God, myrrh to be a man, and gold to be a king: unless we choose by gold to signify the acts of mercy; by myrrh, the chastity of minds and purity of our bodies, to the incorruption of which myrrh is especially instrumental; and by incense we intend our prayers, as the most apt presents and oblations to the honour and service of this young king. But however the fancies of religion may represent variety of ideas, the act of adoration was direct and religious, and the myrrh was medicinal to His tender body: the incense possibly no more than was necessary in a stable, the first throne of His humilty: and the gold was a good antidote against the present indigencies of His poverty: presents such as were used in all the Levant (especially in Arabia and Saba, to which the growth of myrrh and frankincense were proper) in their addresses to their God and to their king; and were instruments with which, under the veil of flesh, they worshipped the eternal Word; the wisdom of God, under infant innocency; the almighty power, in so great weakness; and under the lowness of human nature, the altitude of majesty and the infinity of divine glory.

II.86–7

Considerations upon the apparition of the angels to the shepherds

But the angels also had other motions: for besides the pleasures of that joy, which they had in beholding human nature so highly exalted, and that God was man, and man was God; they were transported with admiration at the ineffable counsel of God’s predestination, prostrating themselves with adoration and modesty, seeing God so humbled, and man so changed, and so full of charity, that God stooped to the condition of man, and man was inflamed beyond the love of seraphim, and was made more knowing than cherubim, more established than thrones, more happy than all the orders of angels. The issue of this consideration teaches us to learn their charity, and to exterminate all the intimations and beginnings of envy, that we may as much rejoice at the good of others as of ourselves: for then we love good for God’s sake, when we love good wherever God has placed it: and that joy is charitable which overflows our neighbours’ fields when ourselves unconcerned in the personal accruements; for so we are “made partakers of all that fear God,” when charity unites their joy to ours, as it makes us partakers of their common sufferings.

And now the angels, who had adored the holy Jesus in heaven, come also to pay their homage to Him upon earth; and laying aside their flaming swords, they take into their hands instruments of music, and sing, “Glory be to God on high:” first signifying to us that the incarnation of the holy Jesus was a very great instrument of the glorification of God, and those divine perfections in which He is chiefly pleased to communicate Himself to us were in nothing manifested so much as in the mysteriousness of this work: secondly; and in vain doth man satisfy himself with complacencies and ambitious designs upon earth, when he sees before him God in the form of a servant, humble, and poor, and crying, and an infant full of need and weakness.

II.88

Considerations upon the Circumcision: our fault not all Adam’s

For though the fall of Adam lost to him all those supernatural assistances which God put into our nature by way of grace, yet it is by accident that we are more prone to many sins than we are to virtue. Adam’s sin did discompose his understanding and affections: and every sin we do does still make us more unreasonable, more violent, more sensual, more apt still to the multiplication of the same or the like actions: the first rebellion of the inferior faculties against the will and understanding, and every victory flesh gets over the spirit, makes the inferior insolent, strong, tumultuous, domineering, and triumphant upon the proportionable ruins of the spirit; blinding our reason and binding our will; and all these violations of our powers are increased by the perpetual ill customs and false principles and ridiculous guises of the world, which make the later ages to be worse than the former, unless some other accident do intervene to stop the ruin and declension of virtue; such as are God’s judgments, the sending of prophets, new imposition of laws, messages from heaven, diviner institutions, such as in particular was the great discipline of Christianity. And even in this sense here is origination enough for sin and impairing of the reasonable faculties of human souls, without charging our faults upon Adam.

II.191

Discourse of obedience: free will

If you will be secure, remove your tent, dwell farther off. God hath given us more liberty than we may safely use; and although God is so gracious as to comply much with our infirmities, yet if we do so too, as God’s goodness in indulging liberty to us was to prevent our sinning, our complying with ourselves will engage us in it: but if we imprison and confine our affections into a narrower compass, then our extravagancies may be imperfect, but will not easily be criminal. The dissolution of a scrupulous and strict person is not a vice, but into a less degree of virtue. He that makes a conscience of loud laughter, will not easily be drawn into the wantonness of balls and revellings, and the longer and more impure carnivals. This is the way to secure our obedience; and no men are so curious of their health as they that are scrupulous of the air they breathe in.

II.115

Considerations upon the Presentation in the Temple: Purification and sexual relations

The turtle-doves were offered also with the signification of another mystery. In the sacred rites of marriage, although the permissions of natural desires are such as are most ordinate to their ends, the avoiding fornication, the alleviation of economical cares and vexations, and the production of children, and mutual comfort and support; yet the apertures and permissions of marriage have such restraints of modesty and prudence, that all transgression of the just order to such ends is a crime: and besides these, there may be degrees of inordination or obliquity of intention, or too sensual complacency, or unhandsome preparations of mind, or unsacramental thoughts; in which particulars, because we have no determined rule but prudence, and the analogy of the rite, and the severity of our religion, which allow in some cases more, in some less, and always uncertain latitudes, for aught we know there may be lighter transgressions, something that we know not of: and for these at the purification of the woman, it is supposed, the offering was made, and the turtles, by being an oblation, did deprecate a supposed irregularity; but by being a chaste and marital emblem, they professed the obliquity (if any were) was within the protection of the sacred bands of marriage, and therefore so excusable as to be expiated by a cheap offering. And what they did in hieroglyphic, Christians must do in the exposition; be strict observers of the main rites and principal obligations, and not neglectful to deprecate the lesser unhandsomenesses of the too sensual applications.

II.127

Discourse of meditation

Note here the threefold process of memory, understanding, and will.

For meditation is an attention and application of spirit to divine things; a searching out all instruments to a holy life, a devout consideration of them, and a production of those affections which are in a direct order to the love of God and a pious conversation. Indeed meditation is all that great instrument of piety whereby it is made prudent, and reasonable, and orderly, and perpetual: for supposing our memory instructed with the knowledge of such mysteries and revelations as are apt to entertain the spirit, the understanding is first and best employed in the consideration of them, and then the will in their reception, when they are duly prepared and so transmitted; and both these in such manner, and to such purposes, that they become the magazine and great repositories of grace, and instrumental to all designs of virtue.

II.130

Considerations upon the disputation of Jesus with the doctors in the Temple: Jesus ‘removed’ from his own

But we often give God cause to remove and for a while to absent Himself, and His doing of it sometimes upon the just provocations of our demerits makes us at other times with good reason to suspect ourselves even in our best actions. But sometimes we are vain, or remiss, or pride invades us in the darkness and incuriousness of our spirits, and we have a secret sin which God would have us to enquire after; and when we suspect every thing, and condemn ourselves with strictest and most angry sentence, then, it may be, God will with a ray of light break through the cloud; if not, it is nothing the worse for us: for although the visible remonstrance and face of things in all the absences and withdrawings of Jesus be the same, yet if a sin be the cause of it, the withdrawing is a taking away His favour and His love: but if God does it to secure thy piety and to enflame thy desires, or to prevent a crime, then He withdraws a gift only, nothing of His love, and yet the darkness of the spirit and sadness seem equal. It is hard in these cases to discover the cause, as it is nice to judge the condition of the effect; and therefore it is prudent to ascertain our condition by improving our care and our religion, and in all accidents to make no judgment concerning God’s favour by what we feel, but by what we do.

II.162

The history of the baptism and temptation of Jesus: John’s baptism transformed all three Persons of the Trinity

But the holy Jesus, who came (as Himself, in answer to the Baptist’s question, professed) “to fulfil all righteousness,” would receive that rite which His Father had instituted in order to the manifestation of His Son. For although the Baptist had a glimpse of Him by the first irradiations of the Spirit, yet John professed that he therefore came baptizing with water, that “Jesus might be manifested to Israel;” and it was also a sign given to the Baptist himself, that “on whomsoever he saw the Spirit descending and remaining,” He is the person “that baptizeth with the holy Ghost.” And God chose to actuate the sign at the waters of Jordan, in great and religious assemblies convened there at John’s baptism; and therefore Jesus came to be baptized, and by his baptism became know to John, who, as before he gave to Him an indiscriminate testimony, so now he pointed out the person in his sermons and discourses, and by calling Him the Lamb of God, prophesied of His passion, and preached Him to be the world’s Redeemer and the sacrifice for mankind. He was now manifest to Israel: He confirmed the baptism of John; He sanctified the water to become sacramental and ministerial in the remission of sins: He by a real event declared, that to them who should rightly be baptized the kingdom of heaven should certainly be opened: He inserted Himself by that ceremony into the society and participation of holy people, of which communion Himself was head and prince; and He did in a symbol purify human nature, whose stains and guilt He had undertaken.

As soon as John had performed his ministry, and Jesus was baptized, He prayed, and the heavens were opened, and the air clarified by a new and glorious light; “and the holy Ghost, in the manner of a dove, alighted upon” His sacred head, and God the Father gave “a voice from heaven, saying, Thou art My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” This was the inauguration and proclamation of the Messias, when He began to be the great prophet of the new covenant. And this was the greatest meeting that ever was upon earth, where the whole cabinet of the mysterious Trinity was opened and shewn, as much as the capacities of our present imperfections will permit: the second Person in the veil of humanity, the third in the shape or with the motion of a dove: but the first kept His primitive state; and as to the Israelites He gave notice by way of caution, “Ye saw no shape, but ye heard a voice,” so now also God the Father gave testimony to His holy Son and appeared, only in a voice without any visible representment.

II.190–1

The significance of the transformation: the Spirit consecrates the waters