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SERMON VI.

ii. TIм. iv. 5.

ENDURE AFFLICTIONS.

H

APPY is the man, who lives and

dies in the fear of GOD, whatever be his present portion! Be it poverty, difgrace, fickness, or captivity; yet, if it fecures to him an inheritance with GOD, his lot is above princes, and all their tranfitory glories!

FOR nothing is good or evil to any creature, but as it promotes or obftructs his principal end. If, by the indifpofition of a day, you could fecure to yourself the comforts of a long and happy old age; you would hardly con

fider it as an evil, you would embrace it as a bleffing rather than a misfortune. If, then, a life of fuffering tends certainly to fecure to you a happy eternity; why should you not, in parity of reafoning and prudence, bear it with patience, rather than murmur under it as an infupportable affliction ?

AFFLICTIONS, difagreeable as they are to our animal feelings, have the happiest influence upon our tempers and better interefts. When the judgements of the Lord are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteoufness. Ifa. xxvi. 9. There is no clafs of mankind, to which they are not adapted they tend to reform the vicious -to improve the careless-and to perfect the virtuous.

WHILE the world fmiles around us,' while the weather is fair, and a favourable breeze drives us along, on we fail careless and secure: we refign ourselves to sport and pleasure: Loft in the enjoyment,

joyment, we think not of the author of our happiness: we dread no change: it is not, till the windy form arifeth, that we learn to know ourselves and call upon the Lord. An even courfe of things, an uninterrupted flow of fuccefs, lulls us into fecurity: we abandon ourselves to a fottish forgetfulness of GOD. Whereas the corrections of the Almighty make us ferious, vigilant, and attentive. Reafon awakes from its flumbers: confcience, beguiled before by a fucceffion of amusements or stupified by intemperance, begins to speak the honest language of truth.

Ir was good for me, fays David, that I was, afflicted, that I might learn thy ftatutes: for before I was afflicted, I went aftray, but now have I kept thy word. Pf. cxix. 67, 71. And this he spoke from the happiest experience. He had paffed through the feveral ftages of adverfity with firmnefs and integrity. Temptations affailed him in vain his I

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trials were his happiness: they but confirmed his innocence; they gave double luftre to his virtues.-Alas! how little do we know of our true happinefs! Profperity, the great object of his wishes, was his greatest fnare. Softened by the charms and blandishments of a profperous fortune, he fell into the worst of crimes, from which nothing but the vifitation of GOD awakened him again.

MANASSEH is an example of a fimilar reformation. He was, as we read, more wicked than all the Kings of Judah and Ifrael. But, carried away into capt tivity, his errors appeared in all their horrors his eyes were opened: he returned as eminently good, out of the school of affliction, as he was abandoned before, in the thoughtless gaiety of abundance.

WHEN the world, then, has this effect upon any man, the greatest bleffing GOD can fhew him, is to vifit him with fome

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