Now to return to the point in hand, if upon all or any of these, or the like principles, any of this kingdom shall join in the removal of corruptions out of the church, which yet they do not conceive to be in themselves, and intrinsically corruptions in religion, in this case I say with the Apostle, “I therein do rejoice, yea, and will rejoice,” Phil. i. 18, because every way reformation is set forward. But let such an one look to himself, how the doctrine drawn from this text falleth upon him, that he who only ceaseth to do evil, but repenteth not of the evil,—he who applieth himself to reformation, but is not ashamed of former defilements, is in danger both of God's displeasure, and of miscarrying in his judgment about reformation. It is far from my meaning to discourage any who are, with humble and upright hearts, seeking after more light than yet they have; I say it only for their sake, who, through the presumption and unhumbledness of their spirits, will acknowledge no fault in anything they have formerly done in church matters.
I cannot leave this application to the kingdom till I enlarge it a little farther. There are four considerations which may make England ashamed and confounded before the Lord.
1. Because of the great blessings which it hath so long wanted. Your flourishing estate in the world could not have countervailed the want of the purity and liberty of the ordinances of Christ. That was a heavy word of the Prophet, “Now for a long season Israel hath been without the true God, and without a teaching priest, and without law,” 2 Chron. xv. 3. It hath not been altogether so with this land, where the Lord hath had not only a true church, but many burning and shining lights, many gracious preachers and professors, many notable defenders of the Protestant cause against Papists, many who have preached and written worthily of practical divinity, and of those things which most concern a man's salvation. Nay, I am persuaded, that all this time past, there have been in this kingdom many thousands of his secret and sealed ones, who have been groaning under that burden and bondage which they could not help, and have been “waiting for the consolation of Israel,” Luke ii. 25. Nevertheless, the reformation of the church of England hath been exceedingly deficient, in government, discipline and worship; yea, and many places of the kingdom have been “without a teaching priest,” and other places poisoned with false teachers. It is said (1 Sam. vii. 2), that all the house of Israel lamented after the Lord, when they wanted the ark twenty years. O let England lament after the Lord, until the ark be brought into the own place of it!
2. There is another cause of this great humiliation, and that is, the point in the text, to be ashamed “of all that you have done.” Sin, sin is that which blacketh our faces, and covereth us with confusion as with a mantle, and then most of all when we may read our sin in some judgment of God which lieth upon us; therefore the Septuagint here, instead of being “ashamed of all that they have done,” read—“accept their punishment for all that they have done,” which agreeth to that word in the law:[1382] “If then their uncircumcised hearts be humbled (the Greek readeth there ashamed) and they then accept of the punishment of their iniquity,” Lev. xxvi. 41. This is now England's case, whose sin is written in the present judgment, and graven in your calamity as “with a pen of iron, and with a point of a diamond” (Jer. [pg 6-019] xvii. 1), to make you say, “The Lord our God is righteous in all his works which he doeth: for we obeyed not his voice,” Dan. ix. 14. Did not the land make idol gods of the court, and of the prelatical clergy, and feared them, and followed them more than God, and obeyed them rather than God, so that their threshold was set by God's threshold, and their posts by God's posts? as it is said, ver. 7. I speak not now of lawful obedience to authority. Is it not a righteous thing with the Lord to make these, your idols, his rods to correct you? Hath not England harboured and entertained Papists, priests, and Jesuits in its bosom? Is it not just that now you feel the sting and poison of these vipers? Hath there not been a great compliance with the prelates, for peace's sake, even to the prejudice of truth? Doth not the Lord now justly punish that Episcopal peace with an Episcopal war? Was not that prelatical government first devised, and since continued, to preserve peace and to prevent schisms in the church? And was it not God's just judgment that such a remedy of man's invention should rather increase than cure the evil? So that sects have most multiplied under that government, which now you know by sad experience. Hath not this nation, for a long time, taken the name of the Lord in vain, by a formal worship and empty profession? Is it not a just requital upon God's part, that your enemies have all this while taken God's name in vain, and taken the Almighty to witness of the integrity of their intentions for religion, law and liberty, thus persuading the world to believe a lie? What shall I say of the book of sports, and other profanations of the Lord's day? This licentiousness was most acceptable to the greatest part, and they “loved to have it so,” Jer. v. 31. Doth not the great famine of the word almost everywhere in the kingdom, except in this city, make the land mourn on the Sabbath, and say, “I do remember my faults this day?” Gen. xli. 9. Yea, doth not the land now enjoy her Sabbaths, while men are constrained not only to cease from sports on that day, but from labouring the ground, and from other works of their calling upon other days? What should I speak of the lusts and uncleanness, gluttony and drunkenness, chambering and wantonness, prodigality and lavishness, excess of riot, masking, and balling, and sporting, when Germany and [pg 6-020] the Palatinate, and other places, were wallowing in blood, yea, when there was so much sin and wrath upon this same kingdom? Will not you say now, that for this the Lord God hath caused your “sun to go down at noon,” and hath turned your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentations? (Amos viii. 9, 10.) Or what should I say of the oppressions, injustice, cozenage in trading and in merchandise, which yourselves know better than I can do how much they have abounded in the kingdom? Doth not God now punish the secret injustice of his people by the open injustice of their enemies? Do ye not remember that mischief was framed by a law? And now, when your enemies execute mischief against law, will you not say, Righteous art thou, O Lord, and just are thy judgments. One thing I may not forget, and that is, that the Lord is punishing blood with blood, the blood of the oppressed, the blood of the persecuted, the blood of those who have died in prisons, or in strange countries, suffering for righteousness' sake. He that departed from evil did even make himself a prey, Isa. lix. 15. There was not so much as one drop of blood spilt upon the pillory for the testimony of the truth but it crieth to heaven, for precious is the blood of the saints, (Psal. lxxii. 14.) Doth not all the blood shed in Queen Mary's days cry? And doth not the blood of the Palatinate and of Rochel cry? And doth not the blood of souls cry? which is the loudest cry of all. God said to Cain, “The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground,” Gen. iv. 10. The Hebrew hath it, “Thy brother's blood,” which is well expounded both by the Chaldee Paraphrase and the Jerusalem Targum, the voice of the blood of all the generations and the righteous people which thy brother should have begotten crieth unto me. I may apply it to the thing in hand: The silencing, deposing, persecuting, imprisoning, and banishing of so many of the Lord's witnesses, of the most painful and powerful preachers, and the preferring of so many either dumb dogs or false teachers, maketh the voice of bloods to cry to heaven, even the blood of many thousands, yea, thousands of thousands of souls, which have been lost by the one, or might have been saved by the other. God will require the blood of the children which those righteous Abels might have begotten unto him. There is, beside all this, more [pg 6-021] blood-guiltiness, which is secret, but shall sometime be brought to light. O blood! blood! O let the land tremble, while the righteous Judge makes “inquisition for blood,” Psal. ix. 12; O let England cry, “Deliver me from blood-guiltiness, O God”! Psal. li. 14.
But you will say, peradventure, many of these things whereof I have spoken ought not to be charged upon the kingdom, they were only the acts of a prevalent faction for the time.
I answer, First, God will impute them to the kingdom, unless the kingdom mourn for them. God gives not a charge to the destroying angel (Ezek. ix. 4) to spare those who have not been actors in the public sins and abominations, but to spare those only who cry and sigh for those abominations.
Secondly, When the ministers of state, or others having authority in church or commonwealth, take the boldness to do such acts, the kingdom is not blameless; for they durst not have done as they did, had the Lord but disclaimed, discountenanced, and cried out against them. It is marked both of John Baptist (Matt. xiv. 5), and of Christ (Matt. xxi. 46), and of the apostles (Acts iv. 21), that so long as the people did magnify them, and esteem them highly, their enemies durst not do unto them what else they would have done.
3. A third consideration concerning the kingdom is this. Notwithstanding of all the happiness and gospel-blessings which it hath wanted in so great a measure, and notwithstanding of all the sins which have so much abounded in it, yet the servants of God have charged it with great presumption,[1383] that the church of England hath said with the church of Laodicea, “I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing,” Rev. iii. 17. It hath been proud of its clergy, learning, great revenues, peace, plenty, wealth, and abundance of all things, and as the Apostle chargeth the Corinthians, “Ye are puffed up, and have not rather mourned,” that the wicked ones “might be taken away from among you,” 1 Cor. v. 2. And would God this presumption had taken an end when God did begin to afflict the land. It did even make an idol of this Parliament, and trusted to its own strength and armies, which hath provoked God so much, [pg 6-022] that he hath sometimes almost blasted your hopes that way, and hath made you to feel your weakness even where you thought yourselves strongest. God would not have England say, “Mine own hand hath saved me,” Judg. vii. 2; neither will he have Scotland to say, “My hand hath done it:” but he will have both to say, His hand hath done it, when we were lost in our own eyes. God grant that your leaning so much upon the arm of flesh be not the cause of more blows. God must be seen in the work, and he will have us to give him all the glory, and to say, “Thou also hast wrought all our works in us,” Isa. xxvi. 12. O that all our presumption may be repented of, and that the land may be yet more deeply humbled! Assuredly God will arise and subdue our enemies, and command deliverances for Jacob; but it is as certain God will not do this till we be more humbled and (as the text saith) ashamed of all that we have done.
4. There is another motive more evangelical: Let England be humbled even for the mercy, the most admirable mercy which God hath showed upon so undeserving and evil-deserving a kingdom. See it in this same prophecy, “I will establish my covenant with thee; and thou shalt know that I am the Lord: that thou mayest remember, and be confounded, and never open thy mouth any more because of thy shame, when I am pacified toward thee for all that thou hast done, saith the Lord God,” Ezek. xvi. 62, 63. And again: “Not for your sakes do I this, saith the Lord God, be it known unto you: be ashamed and confounded for your own ways, O house of Israel,” Ezek. xxxvi. 32; “O my God (saith Ezra), I am ashamed and blush to lift up my face to thee,” Ezra. ix. 6. And what was it that did so confound him? You may find it in that which followeth: God had showed them mercy, and had left them a remnant to escape, and had given them a nail in his holy place, and had lightened their eyes: “And now (saith he), O our God, what shall we say after this? for we have forsaken thy commandments,” Ezra. ix. 10. Let us this day compare, as he did, God's goodness and our own guiltiness. England deserved nothing but to get a bill of divorce, and that God should have said in his wrath, Away from me, I have no pleasure in you; but now he hath received you into the bond of his covenant, he rejoiceth over you to do you good, and to dwell among you; his banner [pg 6-023] over you is love. O let our hard hearts be overcome and be confounded with so much mercy, and let us be ashamed of ourselves, that after so much mercy we should be yet in our sins and trespasses.
There is a third application, which I intend for the ministry, who ought to go before the people of God in the example of repentance and humiliation. You know the old observation, Raro vidi clericum poenitentem,—I have seldom seen a clergyman penitent. As Christ saith of rich men (Mark x. 24, 25), I may say of learned men, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a man that trusts in his learning to enter into the kingdom of heaven. He will needs maintain the lawfulness of all which he hath done, and will not be, as this text would have him, ashamed of all that he hath done. Yet it is not impossible with God to make such an one deny himself, and that whatsoever in him exalts itself against Christ should be brought into captivity to the obedience of Christ (2 Cor. x. 5). Among all that were converted by the ministry of the apostles, I wonder most at the conversion of a great company of priests, Acts vi. 7. I do not suspect, as two learned men have done,[1384] that the text is corrupted in that place, and that it should be otherwise read. I am the rather satisfied, because there is nothing there mentioned of the conversion of the high priest, or of the chief priests, the heads of the twenty-four orders which were upon the council, and had condemned Christ: the place cannot be understood but of a multitude of common or inferior priests, even as, by proportion, in Hezekiah's reformation, the Levites were more upright in heart than the priests, 2 Chron. xxix. 34.