Herod Agrippa was a great persecutor of the saints, and he was eaten up of worms. Acts xii. In the third year of his reign, as Josephus observes, he went to Caesarea to keep certain plays in the honour of Caesar.s The gown he was in, as the same author relates, was a gown of silver wonderfully wrought, and the beams of the sun reflecting upon it, made it so glister that it dazzled the eyes of the beholders ; when he had made an end of his starched oration in this his bravery, his flatterers extolled him as a god, crying out, * It is the voice of a god, and not of a man,' Acts xii. 21-23 ; whereupon he was presently smitten by the angel of the Lord, and so died vrith worms that ate up his very entrails. The blow the angel gave him was an inward blow, and so not visible to others, and his torments more and more increasing upon him, the people put on sackcloth and made supplication for him, but all in vain, for his pains and torments growing stronger and stronger ever}' day upon him, they separated his wretched soul from his loathsome body within the compass of five days ; and it is very pro-
^ Eusebius. ' Ibid. > Josephus : Antiq., lib. xiic cap. 7.
272 THE NECESSITY, EXCELLENCY, RARITY, [Heb. XII. 14.
bable that the prayers of the persecuted church did help to speed this persecutor out of the world. Caiaphas, the high priest who gathered the council and suborned false witnesses against the Lord Christ, was shortly after put out of his office, and one Jonathan substituted in his room, whereupon he killed himself.^
Not long after Pontius Pilate had condemned our Lord Christ, he lost his deputyship and Caesar's favour, and being fallen into disgrace with the Roman emperor, and banished by him, he fell into such misery that he hanged himself.^
Nero, that monster of men, who raised the first bloody persecution, to pick a quarrel with the Christians, set the city of Rome on fire, and then charged it upon them ; under which pretence he exposes them to the fury of the people, who cruelly tormented them, as if they had been common burners and destroyers of cities, and the deadly enemies of mankind ; yea, Nero himself caused them to be apprehended and clad in wild beasts' skins, and torn in pieces with dogs ; others were crucified ; some he made bonfires of, to light him in his night-sports ; to be short, such horrid cruelty he used towards them, as caused many of their enemies to pity them ; but God found out this wretched per- secutor at last, for, being adjudged by the senate an enemy to mankind, he was condemned to be whipped to death ; for the prevention whereof he cut his own throat.
Domitian, the author of the second persecution against the Christians, was, by the consent of his wife, slain by his own household servants with daggers in his privy chamber, his body was buried without honour, his memory cursed to posterity, and his arms and ensigns were thrown down and defaced.
Trajan raised the third persecution against the church, and the vengeance of God followed him ; for first he fell into a palsy, then lost the use of his senses, afterwards he fell into a dropsy, and died in great anguish.
There was not one of those persecuting emperors that carried on the ten bloody persecutions against the saints, but came to miserable ends ; yea, histories tell us of three and forty persecuting emperors, who fell under the revenging hand of God, and came to untimely ends. Among the many thousand thousands of instances that might be given of the judgments of God that have fallen upon the perse- cutors of the people of God in these latter days, I shall only give you a few. Faelix Earl of Wartenburge^ was a great persecutor of the saints, and swore that ' ere he died he would ride up to the spurs in the blood of the Lutherans ; ' but the very same night wherein he had thus sworn and vowed, he was choked with his own blood : nothing would serve him but the blood of God's people, and God makes him drunk with his own blood. Sir Thomas More, once Lord Chancellor of England, was a sworn enemy to the gospel, and persecuted the saints with fire and faggot ; and amongst all his praises, he reckons this the chief estj that he had been a persecutor of the Lutherans, i.e.,
^ Josephus : Antiq., lib. xviii. cap. 7. Thales Milesius, the prime wise man of Greece, being demanded what he had observed to be of most difficulty in the world, answered, Tyranmim senem, To see a tyrant live to be an old man.
* Euseb. Hist., lib, ii. cap. 7. ' Qu. ' Wurtemburg ' ?— G.
HeB. XII. 14.] AND BEAUTY OF HOLINESS. 273
the saints ; but what became of him ? He was first accused of treason, and then condemned, and at last beheaded. Judge Morgan was a great persecutor of the people of God ; but shortly after he had passed the sentence of condemnation upon that virtuous lady, the Lady Jane Grey, he fell mad, and in his mad raving fits he would continually cry out, ' Take away the Lady Jane, take away the Lady Jane from me ; ' and in that horror he ended his wretched life. Drahomira, after the death of her husband, usurped the government of Bohemia, and was a cruel persecutor of the people of God ; but by a righteous hand of God it so fell out, that on that very place where the minister's bones lay unburied, the earth opened of itself, and swallowed her up alive, with her chariot and those that were in it, which place is now to be seen before the castle of Prague. The Arch- bishop of Tours was an earnest suitor for the erection of a court called Chamber-Ardent, for the condemning of the French Pro- testants to the fire, but before he died he had fire enough, for he was stricken with a disease called ' the fire of God,' which began at his feet, and so ascended upward, which occasioned one member to be cut off after another, and so he ended his miserable days.i Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, was a grievous persecutor of the people of God, and a great suspender and silencer of good ministers ; he made use of his tongue, brains, and power to stop the mouths and tie up the tongues of God's faithful ministers ; but God in his righteous judgment so struck him in his tongue, that it swelled so big that he could neither swallow nor speak for some days before his death, and so he was starved, choked, and killed by tliis strange
tumour of his tongue. I have read of one Mr W , who was veiy