from the misery of despair. Where God hath given us no warrant to hope, there to despair is no sin; it may be a punishment, and to hope also may be presumption.

I shall here end with the most charitable advice I can give to any of my erring brethren. Let no man be so vain as to use all the wit and arts, all the shifts and devices, of the world that he may behold, to enjoy the pleasure of his sin, since it may bring him into that condition, that it will be disputed, whether he shall despair or no. Our duty is to make our calling and election sure; which certainly cannot be done but by a timely and effective repentance. But they that will be confident in their health, are sometimes pusillanimous in their sicknesss, presumptuous in sin, and despairing in the day of their calamity. "Cognitio de incorrupto Dei judicio in multis dormit; sed excitari solet circa mortem,” said Plato". For though men give false sentences of the Divine judgments, when their temptations are high, and their sin is pleasant, yet about the time of their death, their understanding and notices are awakened,' and they see what they would not see before, and what they cannot now avoid.

Thus I have given account of the design of this book to you, most reverend fathers and religious brethren of this church; and to your judgment I submit what I have here discoursed of; as knowing that the chiefest part of the ecclesiastical office is conversant about repentance; and the whole government of the primitive church was almost wholly employed in ministering to the orders, and restitution and reconciliation of penitents; and therefore you are not only by your ability, but by your employment and experiences, the most competent judges, and the aptest promoters of those truths, by which repentance is made most perfect and irreprovable. By your prayers and your authority, and your wisdom, I hope it will be more and more effected, that the strictnesses of a holy life be thought necessary, and that repentance may be no more that trifling little piece of duty, to which the errors of the late schools of learning, and the desires of men to be deceived in this article, have reduced it. I have done thus much of my part toward it, and I humbly desire it may be accepted by God, by you, and by all good men.

JER. TAYLOR.

De Repub. 1.

THE

DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE

OF

REPENTANCE.

CHAP. I.

THE FOUNDATION AND NECESSITY OF REPENTANCE.

SECTION I.

Of the indispensable Necessity of Repentance in Remedy to the unavoidable transgressing the Covenant of Works.

In the first intercourse with man, God made such a covenant as he might justly make out of his absolute dominion, and such as was agreeable with those powers which he gave us, and the instances in which obedience was demanded. For, 1. Man was made perfect in his kind, and God demanded of him perfect obedience. 2. The first covenant was the covenant of works; that is, there was nothing in it, but man was to obey or die: but God laid but one command upon him that we find; the covenant was instanced but in one precept. In that he failed, and therefore he was lost. There was here no remedy, no second thoughts, no amends to be made. But because much was not required of him, and the commandment was very easy, and he had strengths more than enough to keep it,-and therefore he had no cause to complain: God might, and did, exact at first the covenant of works; because it was, at first, infinitely tolerable. But,

2. From this time forward this covenant began to be hard, and, by degrees, became impossible; not only because man's fortune was broken, and his spirit troubled, and his passions disordered and vexed by his calamity and his sin,— but because man, upon the birth of children and the increase

of the world, contracted new relations, and consequently had new duties and obligations; and men hindered one another, and their faculties, by many means, became disordered, and lessened in their abilities; and their will becoming perverse, they first were unwilling, and then unable, by superinducing dispositions and habits, contrary to their duty. However, because there was a necessity that man should be tied to more duty, God did, in the several periods of the world, multiply commandments, first to Noah, then to Abraham, and then to his posterity; and by this time they were very many and still God held over man's head the covenant of works.

3. Upon the pressure of this covenant all the world did complain, "tanta mandata sunt, ut impossibile sit servari ea," said St. Ambrose: "the commandments were so many and great, that it was impossible they should be kepti." For, at first, there were no promises at all of any good, nothing but a threatening of evil to the transgressors; and after a long time they were entertained but with the promise of temporal good things, which to some men were performed by the pleasures and rewards of sin; and then there being a great imperfection in the nature of man, it could not be that man should remain innocent; and for repentance, in this covenant there was no regard, or provisions made. But I said,

4. The covenant of works was still kept on foot;-how justly, will appear in the sequel; but the reasonableness of it was in this, that men, living in a state of awfulness, might be under a pedagogy or severe institution, restraining their loosenesses, recollecting their inadvertences, uniting their distractions. For the world was not then prepared by spiritual usages and dispositions to be governed by love and an easy yoke, but by threatenings and severities. And this is the account St. Paul gives of it, ó vóμos waidaɣwyos, “ the law was a schoolmaster;" that is, had a temporary authority serving to other ends, with no final concluding power. It could chastise and threaten, but it could not condemn : it had not power of eternal life and death; that was given by other measures. But because the world was wild and barbarous, good men were few, the bad potent and innumerable,

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and sin was conducted and helped forward by pleasure and impunity, it was necessary that God should superinduce a law, and shew them the rod, and affright and check their confidences, lest the world itself should perish by dissolution. The law of Moses was still a part of the covenant of works. Some little it had of repentance: sacrifice and expiations were appointed for small sins; but nothing at all for greater. Every great sin brought death infallibly. And as it had a little image of repentance, so it had something of promises, to be as a grace and auxiliary to set forward obedience. But this would not do it. The promises were temporal, and that could not secure obedience in great instances; and there being for them no remedy appointed by repentance, the law could not justify; it did not promise life eternal, nor give sufficient security against the temporal; only it was brought in as a pedagogy for the present necessity.

5. But this pedagogy or institution was also a manyduction to the Gospel. For they were used to severe laws, that they might the more readily entertain the holy precepts of the Gospel, to which eternally they would have shut their ears, unless they had had some preparatory institution of severity and fear: and therefore St. Paul also calls it, waidaywyíav eis Xploròv, "a pedagogy," or institution leading γωγίαν Χριστὸν, "unto Christ."

6. For it was this which made the world of the godly long for Christ, as having commission to open the KoUπTÒV κρυπτόν άπò Twν aiwvwv, the hidden mystery' of justification by faith and repentance. For the law called for exact obedience, but ministered no grace but that of fear, which was not enough to the performance or the engagement of exact obedience. All, therefore, were here convinced of sin; but by this covenant they had no hopes, and therefore were to expect relief from another and a better; according to that şaying of St. Paul, "The Scripture concludes all under sin (that is, declares all the world to be sinners), that the promise by the faith of Jesus Christ might be given to them that believe." This St. Bernard expresses in these words; "Deus nobis hoc fecit, ut nostram imperfectionem ostenderet, et Christi avidiores nos faceret:" "Our imperfection was suffi

! Gal. iii. 22.

ciently manifest by the severity of the first covenant, that the world might long for salvation by Jesus Christ."

7. For since mankind could not be saved by the covenant of works, that is, of exact obedience, they must perish for ever; or else hope to be saved by a covenant of ease and remission, that is, such a covenant as may secure man's duty to God, and God's mercy to man; and this is the covenant which God made with mankind in Christ Jesus, the covenant of repentance.

8. This covenant began immediately after Adam's fall. For as soon as the first covenant, the covenant of works, was broken, God promised to make it up by an instrument of mercy, which himself would find out. The seed of the woman' should make up the breaches of the man. But this should be acted and published in its own time, not presently. In the meantime, man was, by virtue of that new covenant or promise, admitted to repentance.

9. Adam confessed his sin and repented. Three hundred years together did he mourn upon the mountains of India; and God promised him a Saviour, by whose obedience his repentance should be accepted. And when God did threaten the old world with a flood of waters, he called upon them to repent; but because they did not, God brought upon them the flood of waters. For one hundred and twenty years together, he called upon them to return, before he would strike his final blow. Ten times God tried Pharaoh, before he destroyed him. And in all ages, in all periods, and with all men, God did deal by this measure; and (excepting that God in some great cases, or in the beginning of a sanction to establish it with the terror of a great example) he scarce ever destroyed a single man with temporal death for any nicety of the law, but for long and great prevarications of it: and when he did otherwise, he did it after the man had been highly warned of the particular, and could have obeyed easily; which was the case of the man that gathered sticks upon the sabbath; and was like the case of Adam, who was upon the same account judged by the covenant of works.

10. This, then, was an emanation both of God's justice mercy.

and his

Until man had sinned, he was not the sub