in Lam. iv. 10, "The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children."

But why speak I of these extremities? How many parents, yea, some godly ones too, have lived to see their children dying in profaneness, and some by the hand of justice, lamenting their rebellions with a rope about their necks!

Ah reader, little do you know what stings there are in the afflictions of others! Surely you have no reason to think the Lord has dealt more bitterly with you than any. It is a gentle stroke, a merciful dispensation, if you compare it with what others have felt.

18. If God be your God, you have really lost nothing by the removal of any creature-comfort.

God is the fountain of all true comfort; creatures, the very best and sweetest, are but cisterns to receive and convey to us what comfort God is pleased to communicate to them; and if the cistern be broken or the pipe cut off, so that no more comfort can be c conveyed to us that way, he has other ways and mediums to do it by, which we think not of; and if he please he can convey his comforts to his people without any of them. And if he does it more immediately, we shall be no losers by that; for no comforts in the world are so delectable, and ravishingly sweet, as those that flow immediately from the fountain.

It is the sensuality of our hearts that causes us to desire earthly comforts so inordinately, and grieve for the loss of them so immoderately, as if we had not enough in God, without these creature supplements.

Is the fulness of the fountain yours? and yet do you cast down yourselves, because the broken cistern is removed?" The best creatures are no better than cisterns." Cisterns have nothing but what they receive, and broken ones cannot hold what is put into them. Why then do you mourn, as if your life were bound up in the creature? You have as free an access to the fountain as you had before. It is the advice of a heathen, to repair, by a new earthly comfort, what we have lost in a former. "Thou hast carried forth him whom thou lovedst," says

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Seneca," seek one whom thou mayest love in his stead. It is better to repair than to bemoan thy loss." But if God never repair your loss in things of the same kind, you know he can abundantly repair it himself. Ah Christian, is not one kiss of his mouth, one glimpse of his countenance, one seal of his Spirit, a more sweet and substantial comfort, than the sweetest relation in this world can afford you? If the stream fail, repair to the fountain; there is enough still; God is where he was, and what he was, though the creature be not.

19. Though you may want a little comfort in your life, yet surely it may be recompensed to you by a more easy death.

The removal of your friends before you may turn to your great advantage, when your hour is come that you must follow them. O how have many good souls been clogged and ensnared in their dying hour, by the loves, cares, and fears they have had about those they must leave behind them in a sinful, evil world!

Your love to them might have proved a snare to you, and caused you to hang back, as loth to go hence; for these are the things that make e men loth to die. Thus it might have been with you, except God had removed them beforehand, and given you such sights of heaven and tastes of divine love, as should master and mortify all your earthly affections to these things."

I knew a gracious person, now in heaven, who for many weeks in her last sickness, complained that she found it hard to part with a dear relation, and that there was nothing proved a greater clog to her soul than this. It is much more easy to think of going to our friends who are in heaven before us, than of parting with them, and leaving our desirable and dear ones behind us.

And who knows what cares and distracting thoughts you might then have been pestered and distracted with on their account? What shall become of these when I am gone? I am now to leave them, God knows to what wants, miseries, temptations, and afflictions in the midst of a deceitful, defiling, dangerous world.

I know it is our duty to leave our fatherless children, and friendless relations with God, to trust them with him who gave them to us; and some have been enabled

cheerfully to do so when they were parting from them? Luther could say, "Lord, thou hast given me a wife and children; I have little to leave them; nourish, teach, and keep them, O thou Father of the fatherless, and Judge of the widow." But every Christian has not a Luther's faith. Some find it a hard thing to disentangle their affections at such a time. But now, if God has sent all yours before you, you have so much the less to do; death may be easier to you than others.

20. But if nothing that has been yet said will prevail with you, then, lastly, remember that you are near that state and place which admits no sorrows nor sad reflec tions, on any such accounts as these.

Yet a little while, and you shall not miss your friends; you shall not need them; but you shall live as the angels of God. We now live partly by faith, partly by sense, partly upon God and partly upon the creature; our state is mixed, therefore our comforts are so too. But when God shall be all in all, and we shall be as the angels of God in the way and manner of our living; how much will the case be altered with us then, from what it is now! Angels neither marry nor are given in marriage, neither shall the children of the resurrection. When the days of our sinning are ended, the days of our mourning shall be so

too.

No graves were opened till sin entered, and no more shall be opened when sin is excluded. Our glorified relations shall live with us for ever; they shall complain no more, die no more. Yea, this is the happiness of that state to which you are passing on, that your souls being in the nearest conjunction with God, the fountain of joy, you shall have no concernment out of him. You shall not be put upon these excercises of patience, nor subjected to such sorrows as you now feel, any more. It is but a little while, and the end of all these things will come. O therefore bear up, as persons who expect such a day of jubilee at hand.

And thus I have finished the second general head of this discourse, which is a dissuasive from the sin of immoderate sorrow.

III. I now proceed to the third thing proposed-to remove the pleas and excuses for this immoderate grief.

It is natural to men, yea, to good men, to justify their excesses, or at least to extenuate them, by pleading for their passions, as if they wanted not cause and reason enough to excuse them. If these be fully answered, and the soul once convinced and left without apology for tits sin, it is then in a fair way for its cure, which is the last thing designed in this, treatisea

My present business therefore is, to satisfy those objections and answer those reasons, which are commonly pleaded in this case to justify our excessive grief for lost relations. And though I shall earry it in that line of relation to which the text directs, yet it is equally capplicable to all others. gadges aboon

1. You press me by many great considerations to meekness and quiet submission under this heavy stroke of God; but you little know what stings my soul feels now in it. The child was a child of many prayers; it was a Samuel begged of the Lord; and I concluded, when I had it, that it brought with it the returns and answers of many prayers. But now I see it was nothing of the kind. God had no regard to my prayers about it, nor was it given me in that special way of mercy, as I imagined it to be. My child is not only dead, but my prayers in the same day shut out and denied.ct on E-B

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That you prayed for your children before you had them was your duty; and if you prayed not for them submissively, referring it to the pleasure of God to give or deny them, to continue or remove them, as should seem good to him, that was your sin. You ought not to limit the Holy One of Israel, nor prescribe to him, or capitulate with him for what term you shall enjoy your outward comforts. If you did so, it was your evil, and God has justly rebuked it by this stroke. If you did pray conditionally, and submissively referring both the mercy asked and continuance of it to the will of God, as you ought to do; then there is nothing in the death of your child that crosses the true scope and intent in your prayer al

Again; your prayers may be answered, though the thing prayed for be with held, yea, or though it should be given for a little while, and snatched away from you

again. There are four ways of God's answering prayers, by giving the thing prayed for presently, Dan. ix. 23; or by suspending the answer for a time, and giving it afterwards, Luke xviii. 7; or by withholding from you that mercy which you ask, and giving you a much better mercy in the room of it, Deut. iii, 24, compared with Deut. xxxiv. 4, 5; or, lastly, by giving you patience to bear the loss, or want of it, 2 Cor. xii. 9. Now if the Lord has taken away your child or friend, and in lieu thereof giving you a meek, quiet, submissive heart to his will, you need not say he has shut out your cry.

2 But I have lost a lovely, obliging, and most endearing child; one that was beautiful and sweet. It is a stony heart that would not dissolve into tears for the loss of one so desirable, so engaging. Ah! it is no common loss.

The more lovely and engaging your relation was, the more excellent will your patience and contentment with the will of God in its death be: the more loveliness, the more self-denial, the more grace. Had it been a thousand times more endearingly sweet than it was, it was not too good to be given up for God. If therefore obedience to the will of God do indeed master natural affections, and that you look upon patience and contentment as much more beautiful than the sweetest and most desirable enjoyment on earth; it may turn to you for a testimony of the truth and strength of grace, that you can, like Abraham, part with a child whom you so dearly love, in obedience to the will of your God, whom you love infinitely more.

The loveliness and beauty of our children and relations, though it must be acknowledged a good gift from the hand of God, yet is but a common gift, and often becomes a snare, and is, in its own nature, but a transitory, vanishing thing, and therefore no such great aggravation of the loss as is pretended. I say, it is but a common gift. Eliab, Adonijah, and Absalom had as lovely presences as any in their generation. Yea, it is not only common to the wicked with the godly, but to the brute animals as well as men, and to most that excel in it, it becomes a temptation. The souls of some had