And after all this, add a continual, a fervent, a hearty, a never-ceasing prayer for thy children, ever remembering, when they beg a blessing, that God hath put much of their fortune into your hands; and a transient formal God bless thee will not outweigh the load of a great vice, and the curse which scatters from thee by virtual contact, and by the channels of relation, if thou beest a vicious person: nothing can issue from thy fountain but bitter waters. And, as it were a great impudence for a condemned traitor to beg of his injured prince a province for his son for his sake: so it is an ineffective blessing we give our children, when we beg for them what we have no title to for ourselves; nay, when we convey to them nothing but a curse. The prayer of a sinner, the unhallowed wish of a vicious parent, is but a a poor donative to give a child who sucked poison from his nurse, and derives cursing from his parents. They are punished with a double torture in the shame and pain of the damned, who, dying enemies to God, have left an inventory of sins and wrath to be divided amongst their children. But they that can truly give a blessing to their children, are such as live a Blessed life, and pray holy prayers, and perform an integral repentance, and do separate from the sins of their progenitors, and do illustrious actions, and begin the blessing of their family upon a new stock. For as from the eyes of some persons there shoots forth an evil influence, and some have an evil eye, and are infectious, some look healthfully as a friendly planet, and innocent as flowers; and as some fancies convey private effects to confederate and allied bodies; and between the very vital spirits of friends and relatives there is a cognation, and they refresh each other like social plants; and a good man is a * friend to every good man: and (they say) that an Διαμένει ουν η τουτων φιλιά, έως αν αγαθό ωσιν. ή δ' αρετη μονιμον. ARISTOT.

*

usurer knows an usurer, and one rich man another, there being by the very manners of men contracted a similitude of nature, and a communication of effects: so in parents and their children there is so great a society of nature and of manners, of blessing and cursing, that an evil parent cannot perish in a single death and holy parents never eat their meal of blessing alone, but they make the room shine like the fire of a holy sacrifice; and a father's or a mother's piety makes all the house festival and full of joy from generation to generation. Amen.

SERMON V.

THE INVALIDITY

OF

A LATE OR DEATH-BED REPENTANCE.

JEREMY xiii. 16.

Give glory to the Lord your God, before he cause darkness, and before your feet stumble upon the dark mountains; and while ye look for light, (or, lest while ye look for light) he shall turn it into the shadow of death, and make it gross darkness.

GOD is the eternal fountain of honour and the spring of glory; in him it dwells essentially, from him it derives originally; and when an action is glorious, or a man is honourable, it is because the action is pleasing to God, in the relation of obedience or imitation, and because the man is honoured by God, and by God's vicegerent: and therefore God cannot be dishonoured, because all honour comes from himself; he cannot but be glorified, because to be himself is to be infinitely glorious. And yet he is pleased to say, that our sins dishonour him, and our obedience does glorify him. But as the sun, the great eye of the world, prying into the recesses of rocks and the hollowness of valleys, receives species or visible forms from these objects, but he beholds them only by that light which proceeds from

himself: so does God, who is the light of that eye; he receives reflexes and returns from us, and these he calls glorifications of himself, but they are such which are made so by his own gracious acceptation. For God cannot be glorified by any thing but by himself, and by his own instruments, which he makes as mirrors to reflect his own excellency; that by seeing the glory of such emanations, he may rejoice in his own works, because they are images of his infinity. Thus when he made the beauteous frame of heaven and earth, he rejoiced in it, and glorified himself; because it was the glass in which he beheld his wisdom and almighty power. And when God destroyed the old world, in that also he glorified himself; for in those waters he saw the image of his justice, they were the looking-glass for that attribute; and God is said to laugh at and rejoice in the destruction of a sinner, because he is pleased with the economy of his own laws, and the excellent proportions he hath made of his judgments consequent to our sins. But, above all, God rejoiced in his holy Son; for he was the image of the Divinity, the character and express image of his person; in him he beheld his own essence, his wisdom, his power, his justice, and his person; and he was that excellent instrument designed from eternal ages to represent, as in a double mirror, not only the glories of God to himself, but also to all the world; and he glorified God by the instrument of obedience, in which God beheld his own dominion and the sanctity of his laws clearly represented; and he saw his justice glorified, when it was fully satisfied by the passion of his Son; and so he hath transmitted to us a great manner of the divine glorification, being become to us the author and the example of giving glory to God after the manner of men, that is by well-doing and patient suffering,

by obeying his laws and submitting to his power, by imitating his holiness and confessing his goodness, by remaining innocent or becoming penitent; for this also is called in the text Giving glory to the Lord our God.

For he that hath dishonoured God by sins, that is, hath denied by a moral instrument of duty and subordination to confess the glories of his power, and the goodness of his laws, and hath dishonoured and despised his mercy which God intended as an instrument of our piety, hath no better way to glorify God, than by returning to his duty, to advance the honour of the divine attributes, in which he is pleased to communicate himself, and to have intercourse with man. He that repents, confesses his own errour, and the righteousness of God's laws, and by judging himself confesses that he deserves. punishment, and therefore that God is righteous if he punishes him: and, by returning, confesses God to be the fountain of felicity, and the foundation of true, solid, and permanent joys, saying in the sense and passion of the diciples, Whither shall we go? for thou hast the words of eternal life: and by humbling himself, exalts God, by making the proportions of distance more immense and vast. And as repentance does contain in it all the parts of holy life which can be performed by a returning sinner, (all the acts and habits of virtue being but parts, or instances, or effects of repentance :) so all the actions of a holy life do constitute the mass and body of all those instruments whereby God is pleased to glorify himself. For if God is glorified in the sun and moon, in the rare fabrick of the honey-combs, in the discipline of bees, in the economy of pismires, in the little houses of birds, in the curiosity of an eye, God being pleased to delight in those little images and reflexes himself from those pretty