I will conclude his sayings with his dying blessing to his surviving children.
"I pray God bless you, and may it please Him to bless you, and to preserve you by his grace from the evil of the world, that you may have no part therein: and, above all, my children, that you may live in the fear and love of God, and yield due obedience to your mother."
Expressions of that weight and moment to the immortal good of man, that they abundantly prove to all sensible readers, that the author was a man of an enlightened mind, and of a soul mortified to the world, and quickened to some tastes of a supernatural life: let his youth, let his quality, adorned with so much zeal and piety, so much self-denial and constancy, become exemplary to those of worldly quality, who may be the readers of this book. Some perhaps will hear that truth from the several authors I have reported, whose names, death, and time have recovered from the envy of mess that would hardly endure it from me, if at all from the living. Be it as it will, I shall abundantly rejoice, if God shall please to make any part of this discourse effectual to persuade any into the love of holiness, without which, certain it is, no man shall see the Lord: but the pure in heart shall behold Him for ever.
To conclude, I cannot pass this reflection upon what is observed of the sayings of dying men, and which to me seems to have great instruction in it, viz.: All men agree, when they come to die, it is best to be religious; to live a holy, humble, strict, and self-denying life; retired, solitary, temperate, and disencumbered of the world. Then loving God above all, and our neighbours as ourselves, forgiving our enemies, and praying for them, are solid things, and the essential part of religion, as the true ground of man's happiness. Then all sin is exceeding sinful, and yields no more pleasure: but every inordinate desire is burthensome, and severely reproved. Then the world, with all the lawful comforts in it, weighs light against that sense and judgment, which such men have between the temporal and the eternal. And since it is thus with dying men, what instruction is it to the living, whose pretence for the most part is a perpetual contradiction? O that men would learn to number their days, that they might apply their hearts to wisdom! of which, the fear of the Lord is the true and only beginning. And blessed are they that fear always, for their feet shall be preserved from the snares of death.
CHAPTER XXII.
1. Of the way of living among the first Christians.—2. An exhortation to all professing Christianity, to embrace the foregoing reasons and examples.—3. Plain dealing with such as reject them.—4. Their recompenses.—5. The author is better persuaded and assured of some: an exhortation to them.—6. Encouragement to the children of light to persevere, from a consideration of the excellency of their reward; the end and triumph of the Christian conqueror. The whole concluded with a brief supplication to Almighty God.
THE CONCLUSION.
I. Having finished so many testimonies as my time would give me leave, in favour of this subject, No Cross, No Crown; no temperance, no happiness; no virtue, no reward: no mortification, no glorification: I shall conclude with a short description of the life and worship of the Christians, within the first century or hundred years after Christ: what simplicity, what spirituality, what holy love and communion, did in that blessed age abound among them! It is delivered originally by Philo Judæus, and cited by Eusebius Pamphilius, in his Ecclesiastical history;[78] that those Christians renounced their substance, and severed themselves from all the cares of this life; and forsaking the cities, they lived solitarily in fields and gardens. They accounted their company who followed the contrary life of cares and bustles, as unprofitable and hurtful unto them, to the end that with earnest and fervent desires, they might imitate them which led this prophetical and heavenly life—"In many places," says he, "this people liveth, for it behoveth as well the Grecians as the Barbarians, to be partakers of this absolute goodness; but in Egypt, in every province, they abound: and especially about Alexandria. From all parts the better sort withdrew themselves into the soil and place of these worshippers, as they were called, as a most commodious place, adjoining to the lake of Mary, in a valley very fit, both for its security and the temperance of the air. They are further reported to have had meeting-houses, where the most part of the day was employed in worshipping God: that they were great allegorizers of the Scriptures, making them all figurative; that the external show of words, or the letter, resembleth the superficies of the body; and the hidden sense or understanding of the words seem in the place of the soul; which they contemplate by their beholding names, as it were, in a glass." That is, their religion consisted not chiefly in reading the letter, disputing about it, accepting things in literal constructions, but in the things declared of the substance itself, bringing things nearer to the mind, soul, and spirit, and pressing into a more hidden and heavenly sense; making religion to consist in the temperance and sanctity of the mind, and not in the formal bodily worship, so much now-a-days in repute, fitter to please comedians than Christians. Such was the practice of those times: but now the case is altered; people will be Christians, and have their worldly-mindedness too; but though God's kingdom suffer violence by such, yet shall they never enter: the life of Christ and his followers hath in all ages been another thing; and there is but one way, one guide, one rest; all of which are pure and holy.