^ Pliny speaks of a golden vine which never withereth, but is ahvays flourishing. Oh that this might be the mercy of all those Christians who have been burnt up !
48 London's lamentations on [Isa. XLII. 24, 25.
and breaks them with breach upon breach ; lie strips them of all, and turns them out of house and home, as he did Job, chap. xx. 21 ; and yet this people, with Job, will still worship the Lord, and bless a tak- ing God, as well as a t;iving God. They will still keep close to the Lord and his Avays, whatever God doth with them or against them. Ps. xliv. 17-19, 'All this is come upon us,' [it is a terrible 'all,' as you may see from the 9th to the 17th verse;] 'yet have we not forgotten thee, neither have we dealt falsely in thy covenant. Our heart is not turned backpneither have our steps declined from thy way; though thou hast sore broken us in the place of dragons, and covered us with the shadow of death.' In spite of all the wrath and rage of Antiochu.s Epiphanes, that cruel and bloody persecutor of the saints, these servants of the Lord shew their sincerity by tlieir constancy in keeping close to the Lord and his ways in the face of the greatest opposition and hottest persecution that they met withal. When the emperor sent to BasiU to subscribe to the Arian heresy, the messenger at first gave him good language, and promised him great preferment, if he would turn Arian; to which Basil rei)lied, x\las, these speeches are fit to catch little chil- dren withal tliat look after such things; but we that are nourished and taught by the Holy Scriptures, are readier to suffer a thousand deaths than to suffer one syllable or tittle of the Scripture to be altered. The same Basil affirms that many of the heathens, seeing the heroic zeal, courage, and constancy of the primitive Christians in the face of all oppositions and persecutions, turned Christians. Justin Martyr con- fesseth that the constancy of the Christians in their sufferings was the chief motive that converted him to Cliristianity ; for I myself, saith he, was once a Platonist, and did gladly hear the Christians reviled ; but when I saw they feared not death, nor any of those miseries which most frighten all other men, I began to consider with myself that it was impossible for such men to be lovers of pleasure more than lovers of piety, and that made mefii'st think of tin-ning Christian.^ Now by these means and methods God convinceth the blind world of the integ- rity and sincerity of his people. When they see those whom they have severely judged for hypocrites shall own the Lord and his ways, and cleave to the Lord and his ways, and continue to follow the Lord and his ways, and hold on in a high honouring of the Lord and his ways, when their hedge is broken down, and God has stripped them as naked as in the day wherein they were born, oh now they begin to change their note, and to conclude, surely these are the servants of the Most High God, Dan. iii. 26, and Acts xvi. 17; these are no hypocrites nor dissemblers, but true Nathanaels in whom there is no guile, John i. 47. How have the people of God in London been judged hyi)ocrites, dissemblers, deceivers, factious, and what not ! Now God, by burning up their substance, and by turning them out of house and home, and destroying all their pleasant things, doth certainly design to give those that have so deeply censured them a i)roof of their integrity and sin- cerity, by letting them see that all the changes that have passed upon them can never work them to change their ]\Iaster Christ, nor to change his ways for the ways of sin, nor to change his worship for the worship of the world, nor to change their religion for the religion of Eome.
' Hist. Tripart., lib. vii. cap. 36. " As before.— G.
ISA. XLII. 24, 25.] THE LATE FIERY DISPENSATION. 49