called to sustain. Where piety is superadded to natural fortitude, and the grace of God is in full activity, a man can support any load, however heavy. What an accumulated weight of afflictions came on Job ! yet he not only blessed God for them, but, when his wife urged him to renounce his allegiance to God on account of these visitations, he, with won- derful composure, answered, " Shall we receive good at the Lord's hands, and shall we not receive evil ?"
Yet there are bounds beyond which a man cannot go, without almost miraculous assistance. The spirit, like the body, may be borne down by a weight be- yond its strength : and when the spirit, which ought to support a man under all his other trials, is itself broken, he must fall of course.
Now there are many things which inflict so deep a wound upon the spirit, as to destroy all its energy, and incapacitate it for its proper office : and that we may provide an antidote against them, and afford some consolation under them, we will,
I. Consider the case of a wounded spirit — A spirit may be deeply wounded,
1. By nervous disorders —
[The mind may be disordered, as well as the body, and indeed through the medium of the body : and it is certain that there are disorders which so operate upon the nerves as to weaken and depress the animal spirits, and to sink a man into the very depths of despondency. This is often mistaken for religious melancholy: but it frequently has nothing to do with religion : it is found in persons who never turned their minds at all to the subject of religion : and, as it comes with, and by, a bodily disease, so it ceases with the removal of that disease. But in its effect it is inexpressibly painful, unfitting persons for every duty, indisposing them for all the proper means of relief, and leading them to put away from themselves all man- ner of consolation. They constrain their kindest friends to apply to themselves that proverb, " As vinegar upon nitre, so is he that singe th songs to a heavy heart ^."]
2. By great and long-continued afflictions —
[Job himself, who had so nobly sustained all his compli- cated afflictions, sank at last, and cursed the day of his birth.
a Prov. XXV. 20. VOL. vir. o