This may be our comfort, that we serve and worship God in the same way that the primitive confessors and martyrs, and all good Christians in the succeeding ages did.

We have a Liturgy conform to this law and rule of prayer laid down by the apostle in my text, and observed by the catholic church. We have good and wholesome supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgiving, not only for ourselves, but for all men.

Those excellent men, our first reformers, took care to retain and preserve what was primitive and good in the Liturgies of other churches, and to pare off all excrescences and adventitious corruptions of aftertimes. We have no prayers to saints or angels, but all our prayers are directed, as they ought to be, to God alone, through Jesus Christ the only Mediator between God and man. We have no fabulous legends imposed on us; but we have the holy Scriptures, both of the Old and New Testament, in an excellent order and method daily read unto us. Our prayers are in a tongue and language that we all understand. We have an entire sacrament, the cup of blessing in the holy eucharist, which was sacrilegiously taken from us by the church of Rome, being happily restored to us. The ridiculous pageantry and fopperies of that church are laid aside, and we have the holy sacrament purely, reverently, and decently administered.

Let us bless and praise God for these his great mercies, and make a good use of them. Let us constantly resort to the prayers of our church, and neglect no opportunity of receiving the holy sacrament. And in our daily prayers let us be serious, reverent, and devout, shaking off that coldness and indiffer

ency which is sadly observable in too too many, and which is enough to render the best of Liturgies ineffectual and contemptible.

In a word, let our practice answer to our prayers; let us live like Christians, and as becomes the members of so excellent a church. And if we do so, our prayers will be acceptable to God, and bring down a blessing, not only upon ourselves, but upon our church and state too, and we shall see peace in Sion, and prosperity in our Israel.

Which God of his infinite mercy grant, through our Lord Jesus Christ: to whom, with the Father and the Holy Ghost, be given all honour and glory, adoration and worship, now and for evermore.

SERMON XIV.
XIV.

THAT THE DOCTRINE OF THE RECOMPENSE OF REWARD TO BE BESTOWED ON THE RIGHTEOUS AFTER This life, was UNDERSTOOD AND BELIEVED BY THE PEOPLE OF GOD BEFORE THE LAW WAS GIVEN; AND THAT IT IS LAWFUL TO SERVE GOD WITH RESPECT TO, OR IN HOPE OF, THE FUTURE HEAVENLY RECOMPENSE.

HEBREWS xi. 26.

For he had respect unto the recompense of the reward. THIS chapter throughout is an encomium or commendation of faith; the efficacy and virtue whereof the divine author declares and sets forth by very many examples of those saints and holy men, that were the ancestors of the Jews to whom he wrote, and who by faith did and suffered many great and wonderful things. Wherein the design of the author is to animate and encourage the Christian Jews to a constant perseverance in the profession and obedience of Christ's Gospel, notwithstanding the persecutions which they suffered from their unbelieving brethren for the sake thereof. Which indeed were so severe, that some of those Christian Jews, to avoid them, had already shrunk from and deserted the church assemblies, as we learn from the 25th verse of the preceding chapter, and were in danger of a total apostasy from Christianity: the dreadful consequence whereof the author excellently sets forth in the following verses of the same chapter to the

It is lawful to respect the Recompense, &c. 347

end. But to fortify them against those persecutions, the most effectual means being a steadfast faith and belief of the future reward, he therefore in this chapter exemplifies such a faith in very many most illustrious instances thereof, recorded in the Scriptures of the Old Testament.

The paragraph, of which my text is part, concerns Moses the great prophet and legislator of the Jews, whom above all others they admired; and therefore the divine writer dwells longer upon his example.

He begins with the nativity of Moses, and therein takes occasion to set forth the faith of the religious parents of so excellent a son, ver. 23. By faith Moses, when he was born, was hid three months of his parents, because they saw him a proper (or goodly) child, and they were not afraid of the king's commandment. Which words some very learned interpreters think have reference to an ancient tradition among the Jews, delivered us by Josephus a, "That God appeared to Amram the father of Mo

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ses by dream, and promised him a son, who should "in due time deliver the Hebrews from the Egyp"tian bondage." Which oracle both Amram and his wife, to whom he communicated it, firmly believing, and observing the goodliness and admirable features of Moses, when he was born, promising something extraordinary in him, they concluded that this was the happy child which the oracle had promised them; and therefore they did the best they could to preserve him, notwithstanding the cruel edict of Pharaoh, which they feared not so much, as they confided in the divine prediction, and expected some

miraculous providence in the case.

Indeed that

there was some oracle of God delivered concerning Moses, that he should be the redeemer of the Israelites, long before God appeared to him in the bush, (though the sacred history of the Old Testament is silent therein,) is evident enough from the words of St. Stephen concerning him, Acts vii. Where the protomartyr having mentioned Moses's going forth from Pharaoh's court to visit his brethren the Hebrews, and appearing in the behalf of one of them so far as to slay the Egyptian that injured and oppressed him, ver. 23, 24; he presently adds, ver. 25, for he supposed his brethren would have understood, how that God by his hands would deliver them.

If he supposed his brethren would have understood this, it is beyond all question he understood it himself. And how could he understand it, but by some divine prediction concerning him to that purpose, antecedent to God's illustrious appearing to him in the bush? Nor is it any contradiction to this, what we read in the third and fourth chapters of Exodus, that when God appeared to Moses in the bush, and commanded him to go to Pharaoh and demand from him the freedom of the Israelites, he a first and second time refused the embassy, or at least was unwilling to undertake it. For this he did, because he looked upon it as impossible by way of treaty to obtain the liberty of God's people from the proud, stubborn, cruel, and inexorable tyrant; at least impossible for him in the ill circumstances he was now in; his life being sought by Pharaoh and the Egyptians for the life of the Egyptian whom he had slain: upon which account he con