[3.] Thirdly, God does sometimes save his people from persecutions by passing a sentence of death upon their persecutors : and thus by his sudden and fearful judgment upon Herod he gave rest, liberty, and quiet to his people, Acts xii. 23, 24. And so by his vengeance on persecuting emperors he gave rest to his people. When Julian the apostate had vowed to make an oblation of all the lives of the- surviv- ing Christians, as Gregory Nazianzen reports,^ God struck him with an arrow from heaven, so that he died reviling of Christ, and casting up his blood to heaven as if he would have cast it into the very face of
^ Gen. xli. 32, xi. 33, iv., and xxxi. 29,'compared.
' 2 Chron. xx. 22-24; Judges i. 22, and ix. 55-57, compared. ^ (jrat. iv,, in Jul.
HeB. XII. 14.] AND BEAUTY OF HOLINESS. 297
Christ. And when Eugenius the t}Tant endeavoured to destroy the armies of the Christians under the emperor Theodosius, God gave the very winds a command to wrest the weapons out of their enemies' hands, and so preserved his people. And in '88, how did God make the very winds to fight for his people, and so saved them from that bloody invasion, by causing his winds to blow, and their enemies to sink as lead in the mighty waters ! i And by giving Ahithophel rope enough, he preserved David from perishing. But,
[4.] Fourthly, God does this sometimes by altering and changing the very hearts and natures of their persecutors. And thus by chang- ing Paul's nature, by turning that wolf into a lamb, that devil into a saint, he gave the churches rest throughout all Judea, Galilee, and Samaria, Acts ix. 31 ; and this is one of the most desirable things in the world, that God would save his people from outward ruin by ruin- ing their persecutors' sins, and by changing their hearts and saving their souls. This way God has taken, and this way God may take, being a free agent to work when and where and how and on whom he pleases, but I cannot turn to a promise wherein he has engaged himself to make converts of persecutors. His common way of dealing with such is to give them up to blindness of mind, and hardness of heart, and searedness of conscience, and perverseness of spuit, that so their hell may be the hotter at last. But,
[5.] Fifthly, God does this sometimes by taking persecutors' feet in the same snares that they have laid for others: Ps. ix. 16, 'The wicked is snared in the work of his own hands. Higgaion. Selah ; ' Ps. Ivii. G. Higgaion selah signifies matter of great admiration, and of deep meditation ; that the wicked should be snared in the work of his own hands is matter of perpetual admiration, and of most serious medi- tation. Who will not admire that Goliath should be slain with his own sword, and that proud Haman should hold Mordecai's stirrup, and be the herald of his honour : Ps. vii. 15, 16, ' He made a pit and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which he hath made. His mischief shall return upon his own head, and his violent dealing shall come down upon his own pate.' 2 The wicked shall be undone by their own do- ings ; all the arrows that they shoot at the righteous shall fall upon their own pates. Maxentius built a false bridge to drown Constantino, but was drowned himself. Henry the Third of France was stabbed in the very same chamber where he had helped to contrive the cruel massacre of the French Protestants. 3 And his brother Charles the Ninth, who delighted in the blood of the saints, had blood given him to di'ink, for he was worthy. Soon after Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, had condemned Sir John Oldcastle,^ a godly knight, it pleased the Lord to strike the archbishop so in his tongue that he could neither swallow down any food nor speak a word before his death, and so he was starved to death. The Duke of Somerset, in King Edward the Sixth's days, by consenting to his brother's death, made way for his own, by the same axe and hand that beheaded his brother.
^ 1588, ' The Armada.'— G.
' Histories would furnish us with many hundred instances of this nature.
^ Murdered by Jacques Clement, August 1, 1589. — G.
* Afterwards he was made Lord Cobham.
298 THE NECESSITY, EXCELLENCY, RARITY, [Heb. XII. 14.
It is usual with God to take persecutors in the snares and pits that they have laid for liis people, as many thousands in this nation have experienced; and though Rome and her confederates are this day a-laying of snares and traps, and a-digging of pits for the righteous, who will rather burn than bow to their Baal, yet do but wait and weep, and weep and wait a little, and you shall see that the Lord will take them in the very snares and pits that they have laid and digged for his people. But,
[6.] Sixthly and lastly, God sometimes preserves his people from persecuting hands, by providing cities of refuge to shelter them, and by providing hiding-places to hide them in : Mat. x. 23, ' If they per- secute you in one city, flee to another.' God has always found one city of refuge or another to shelter his persecuted people in. And so when bloody persecuting Jezebel had cut off many of the Lord's pro- phets, God provided an Obadiah to hide a hundred of them by fifty in a cave, 1 Kings xviii. 4, 13. . God never wants a chamber of pre- sence, a chamber of providence, a chamber of protection, a chamber of salvation to hide his people in, Isa. xxvi. 20. i I have read of one that, in the time of the massacre at Paris, crept into a hole to hide himseK, and as soon as he was in there came a spider and weaved a web before the hole ; the next morning the murderers came to search for him. Search in that hole, said one, and see if he be not there ! 0 no, said another, he can't be there, for there is a cobweb at the hole's mouth ; upon which they did not suspect his being there, by which means he was preserved from the rage and fury of those men of blood. 2 Con- stantius the emperor promised a reward to those captains or soldiers that should bring Athanasius' head to him, but God hid him in a pit, and fed him there a long time by the hand of a friend ; but being at last discovered by a maid-servant, the very night before his adversaries searched for him, the providence of God opened a way for his escape, and sent him into the west, by which means he was preserved from the rage and fury of his adversaries. I think no men under heaven have had larger experience of this truth than Englishmen. Ah, what cities of refuge, what hiding-places has God provided for them to hide them from the wrath and rage of their persecutors for many years ! And thus I have given you a brief account of some of those ways which God takes to deliver his people out of persecuting hands. But,