REVEREND AND MUCH HONOURED PRISONER OF HOPE,--Grace, mercy, and peace be to you.-- It was not my part (whom our Lord hath enlarged) to forget you His prisoner.
When I consider how long your night hath been, I think Christ hath a mind to put you in free grace's debt so much the deeper, as your sufferings have been of so long continuance. But what if Christ mind you no joy but public joy, with enlarged and triumphing Zion. I think, Sir, that ye would love best to share and divide your song of joy with Zion, and to have mystical Christ in Britain halfer and copartner with your enlargement. I am sure that your joy, bordering and neighbouring with the joy of Christ's bride, would be so much the sweeter that it were public. I thought if Christ had halved my mercies, and delivered His bride and not me, that His praises should have been double to what they are; but now two rich mercies conjoined in one have stolen from our Lord more than half-praises. Oh that mercy should so beguile us, and steal away our counts and acknowledgment!
Worthy Sir, I hope that I need not exhort you to go on in hoping for the salvation of God. There hath not been so much taken from your time of ease and created joys, as eternity shall add to your heaven. Ye know when one day in heaven hath paid you (yea, and overpaid your blood, bonds, sorrow, and sufferings), that it would trouble angels' understanding to lay the count of that surplus of glory which eternity can and will give you. Oh but your sand-glass of sufferings and losses cometh to little, when it shall be counted and compared with the glory that abideth you on the other side of the water! Ye have no leisure to rejoice and sing here, while time goeth about you, and where your psalms will be short; therefore, ye will think eternity, and the long day of heaven that shall be measured with no other sun, nor horologe, than the long life of the Ancient of Days, to measure your praises, little enough for you. If your span-length of time be cloudy, ye cannot but think that your Lord can no more take your blood and your bands without the income and recompense of free grace, than He would take the sufferings of Paul and His other dear servants, that were well paid home beyond all counting (Rom. viii. 18). If the wisdom of Christ hath made you Antichrist's eyesore and his envy, ye are to thank God that such a piece of clay, as ye are, is made the field of glory to work upon. It was the Potter's aim that the clay should praise Him, and I hope it satisfieth you that your clay is for His glory. Oh, who can suffer enough for such a Lord! and who can lay out in bank, enough of pain, shame, losses, and tortures to receive in again the free interest of eternal glory! (2 Cor. iv. 17). Oh, how advantageous a bargaining is it with such a rich Lord! If your hand and pen had been at leisure to gain glory on paper, it had been but paper glory: but the bearing of a public cross so long, for the now controverted privileges of the crown and sceptre of free King Jesus, the Prince of the kings of the earth, is glory booked in heaven. Worthy and dear brother, if ye go to weigh Jesus, His sweetness, excellency, glory, and beauty, and lay foregainst Him your ounces or drachms of suffering for Him, ye shall be straitened two ways. 1. It will be a pain to make the comparison, the disproportion being by no understanding imaginable: nay, if heaven's arithmetic and angels' were set to work, they should never number the degrees of difference. 2. It would straiten you to find a scale for the balance to lay that high and lofty One (that over-transcending Prince of excellency) in. If your mind could fancy as many created heavens as time hath had minutes, trees have had leaves, and clouds have had raindrops, since the first stone of the creation was laid, they should not make half a scale in which to bear and weigh boundless excellency. And, therefore, the King whose marks ye are bearing, and whose dying ye carry about with you in your body, is, out of all cry and consideration, beyond and above all our thoughts.