from some formalities he performs above others in religion, which fume up from his deceived heart, like so many pleasing vapours, from the stomach to the head, and bind up his spiritual senses into a kind of stupidity, yea, cause many pleasing dreams to entertain him with vain hopes and false joys, which vanish as soon as he wakes and comes to himself. The Pharisees, the most notorious hypocrites of their age, how fast asleep were they in pride and carnal confidence, despising all the world in comparison of themselves, not afraid to commend themselves to God, yea, prefer themselves before others : ' God, I thank thee, I am not like this publican ;' as if they would tell God they did look to find some more respect from him than others, so far beneath them, had at his hand. Therefore Christ, in his dealing with this proud generation of men, useth an luuisual strain of speech; his voice, which to othei's was still and soft, is heard like thunder breaking out of the clouds when he speaks to them : how many dreadful claps have we almost together in the same chapter fall on their heads, out of the mouth of our meek and sweet Saviour, Matt, xxiii. : ' Woe unto you, scribes and pharisees.' No less than eight woes doth Christ discharge upon them, as so many case-shot together, that by multiplying the woes he might shew not only the certainty of the hypocrite's damnation, but precedency also; and yet how many of that rank do we read of to be awakened and converted by these sermons I Some few there were indeed, that the disease might appear not incurable, but very few, that we may tremble the more of falling into it, or letting it grow upon us. Peter learned of his Master how to handle the hypocrite, who, having to do with one fiir gone in this disease, Simon Magus, Acts. viii. 21, he steeps his words as it were in vinegar and gall : * Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter, for thy heart is not right in the sight of God;' there he lays the weight of his charge, that he carried a hypocritical heart in his bosom, which was a thousand times worse than his simoniacal fact, though that was foul enough ; it was not barely that fact, but proceeding from a heart inwardly rotten and false, which God gave Peter an extraordinary spirit to discern, that proved him to be in ' the gall of bitterness, and bond of iniquity ;' only in this better than the damned souls in hell, they were in the fire, he in the bond of iniquity, like a faggot bound up, fit for it, but not cast in : they past hope, and he so much left as might amount to a 'perhaps' if the thought of his heart might be forgiven. To give but one instance more, and that is of a whole church, hypocritical Laodicea ; the Spirit of God takes her up more sharply than all the rest, which though he charged with some particular miscarriages, yet finds something among them he owns and commends. But in her, because she was conceited already, as this leaven of hypocrisy naturally pufts up, he mentions nothing that was good in her, lest it should feed that humour that did so abound already, and take away the smartness of the reproof, which was the only probable means left of recovering her. All that inclines to sleep is deadly to a lethargic ; and all that is soothing and cockering dangerous to hypocrites. Some say, the surest way to ciu'e a lethargy, is to turn it into a fever. To be sure the safest way to deal with the hypocrites is to bring them from their false peace to a deep sense of their true misery. Let this then be thy first work ; aggravate thy sin and put thy soul into mourning for it. When a person who was by the priest, who was to judge in case of leprosy, pronounced luiclean, the leper thus convicted ' was to rend his clothes, go bareheaded, and put a covering upon his upper lip,' all ceremonies used by mourners, and to cry, ' Unclean, unclean !' Lev. xiii. 45. Thus do thou, as a true mourner, sit down and lament the plague of thy heart ; cry out bitterly, ' Unclean ! unclean I am !' not fit by reason of thy hypocritical heart to come near God or his saints, but to be, like the leper, separate from both. If thou liadst such a loathsome disease reigning on thee as did pollute the very seat thou sittest on, bed tliou liest on, and drop such filthiness on every thing thou comest near, even to the meat thou eatest, and cup thou drinkest from, that should make all abandon thy company, how great would thy sorrow be, as thou didst sit desolate and musing alone of thy doleful condition ? Such a state thy hypocrisy puts thee into, a plague it is, more offensive to God than such a disease could make thee to men ; it runs like a filthy sore through all the duties and goodly coverings that you can put over it, and defiles them and thee so, that God will take an oflTering out of the devil's hand as soon as out of thine while thou continuest a hypocrite ; and did the
GIRT ABOUT WITH TRUTH. 2(33