quent or negligent in his communion with God, should long be owner of much peace or comfort that is true. What if thou dost not pour water of presumptuous sins into the lamp of thy joy, to quench it? it is enough, if thou dost not pour oil of duty to feed and maintain it. Thou art murderer to thy comfort by starving it, as well as by stabbing of it.

VER. 16. Above all, taking the shield of faith, whereby ye shall be able to quench the fiery darts of the wicked.

THE fourth piece in the Christian panoply presents itself in this verse to our consideration; and that is, the shield of faith.' A grace of graces it is, and here fitly placed in the midst of the other her companions. It stands, methinks, among them, as the heart in the midst of the body; or, if you please, as David when Samuel anointed him in the midst of his brethren, 1 Sam. xvi. 13. The apostle, when he comes to speak of this grace, he doth, as it were, lift up its head, and anoint it above all its fellows: Above all, take the shield of faith;' and the words easily fall into these two general parts.

First, An exhortation, Above all, take the shield of faith.'

Secondly, A powerful argument pressing the exhortation, 'Whereby ye shall be able to quench the fiery darts of the wicked.'

CHAPTER I.

THE EXPLICATION OF THE WORDS IN A FOURFOLD INQUIRY.

In the exhortation, these four particulars call for our inquiry towards the explication of the words.

First, What faith it is that is here commended to the Christian soldier. Secondly, Having found the kind, we are to inquire what this faith is as to its nature. Thirdly, Why it is compared to a shield rather than other pieces. Fourthly, What is the importance of this, 'above all.'

SECTION I.-Quest. 1. First, What faith it is that here is commanded? This will soon be known, if we consider the cause and end for which it is commended to the Christian; and that is, to enable him ‘to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked,' i. e. of the wicked one, the devil. Now look upon the several kinds of faith; and that among them must be the faith of this place, which enables the creature to quench Satan's fiery darts; yea, all his fiery darts. Historical faith cannot do this, and therefore is not it: this is so far from quenching Satan's fiery darts, that the devil himself, that shoots them, hath this faith, Jas. ii. 19, 'The devils believe.' Temporary faith cannot do it; this is so far from quenching Satan's fiery darts, that itself is quenched by them. It makes a goodly blaze of profession, and endures for a while,' Matt. xiii. 21, but soon disappears. Miraculous faith; this falls as short as the former. Judas's miraculous faith, which he had with the other apostles, (for aught that we can read,) enabling him to cast devils out of others, left himself possessed of the devil of covetousness, hypocrisy, and treason, yea, a whole legion of lusts that hurried him down the hill of despair into the bottomless pit of perdition. There is only one kind of faith remains, which is it the apostle means in this place, and that is justifying faith. This indeed is a grace that makes him, who hath it, the devil's match. Satan hath not so much advantage of the Christian by the transcendency of his natural abilities, as he hath of Satan in this cause, and this his weapon. The apostle is confident to give the day to the Christian, before the fight is fully over; Ye have overcome the wicked one,' 1 John ii. 13: that is, you are as sure to do it, as if you were now mounted on your triumphant chariot in heaven. The knight shall overcome the giant; the saint, Satan and the same apostle tells us what gets him the day, 1 John v. 4. This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith."

SECTION II.-Quest. The second inquiry is, What this justifying faith is ?— Ans. I shall answer to this, first, negatively; secondly, affirmatively.

First, Negatively, in two particulars. First, Justifying faith is not a naked assent to the truths of the gospel. This justifying faith doth give, but this doth not make it justifying faith. A dogmatical faith, or historical, is comprehended in

justifying faith; but dogmatical faith doth not infer justifying faith. Justifying faith cannot be without a dogmatical; it implies it, as the rational soul in man doth the sensitive. But the dogmatical may be without the justifying, as the sensitive soul in the beast is without the rational. Judas knew the Scriptures, and, without doubt, did assent to the truth of them, when he was so zealous a preacher of the gospel; but he never had so much as one grain of justifying faith in his soul, John vi. 64: There are some of you which believe not; for Jesus knew from the beginning who they were that believed not, and who should betray him;' yea, Judas's master, the devil himself, one far enough, I suppose, from justifying faith, yet he assents to the truth of the word. He goes against his conscience when he denies them: when he tempted Christ he did not dispute against the Scripture, but from the Scripture, drawing his arrows out of this quiver, Matt. iv. 6. And at another time he makes as full a confession of Christ (for the matter) as Peter himself did, Matt. viii. 22, compared with Matt. xvi. 17. Assent to the truth of the word is but an act of the understanding, which reprobates and devils may exercise. But justifying faith is a compounded habit, and hath its seat both in the understanding and will; and therefore called a believing with the heart, Rom. x. 10; yea, a believing with all the heart, Acts viii. 37: Philip said, If thou believest with all thy heart, thou mayest.' It takes in all the powers of the soul. There is a double object in the promise; one proper to the understanding, to move that; another proper to the will, to excite and work upon that. As the promise is true, so it calls for an act of an assent from the understanding; and as it is good as well as true, so it calls for an act of the will to embrace and receive it: therefore he which only notionally knows the promise, and speculatively assents to the truth of it, without clinging to it and embracing of it, he doth not believe savingly, and can have no more benefit from the promise than the nourishment from the food he sees, and acknowledgeth to be wholesome, but eats none of it. Secondly, Faith is not assurance. If it were, John might have spared his pains, who wrote to them that believed on the name of the Son of God, that they might know that they had eternal life,' 1 John v. 13. They might then have said, We do this already; what else is our faith, but a believing that we are such as through Christ are pardoned, and shall through him be saved? But this cannot be so: if faith were assurance, then a man's sins would be pardoned before he believes; for he must necessarily be pardoned before he can know he is pardoned. The candle must be lighted before I can see it is lighted. The child must be born before I can be assured it is born. The object must be before the act. Assurance is rather the fruit of faith, than faith itself: it is in faith as the flower is in the root: faith, in time, after much communion with God, acquaintance with the word, and experience of his dealings with the soul, may flourish into assurance; but, as the root truly lives before the flower appears, and continues when that hath shed its beautiful leaves, and is gone again; so doth true justifying faith live before assurance comes, and after it disappears. Assurance is, as it were, the cream of faith. Now you know there is milk before there is cream : this riseth not but after some time standing, and there remains milk after it is skimmed off. How many, alas! of the precious saints of God must we shut out from being believers, if no faith but what amounts to assurance! We must needs offend against the generation of God's children, among whom some are babes not yet come to the use of their reflex act of faith, so as to own the grace of God in them to be true, upon the review that they take of their own actings: and must not the child be allowed to be a child till he can speak of himself, and say he is so? Others there are in Christ's family who are of higher stature and greater experience in the ways of God, yet have lost those apprehensions of pardoning mercy which once they were (through the goodness of God) able to have shewn. Shall we say their faith went away in the departure of their assurance? How oft then in a year may a believer be no believer! even as often as God withdraws and leaves the creature in the dark. Assurance is like the sunflower, which opens with the day, and shuts with the night. It follows the motion of God's face; if that looks smilingly on the soul, it lives; if that frowns or hides itself, it dies. But faith is a plant that can grow in the shade,-a grace that can find the way to heaven in a dark night. It can walk in darkness, and yet trust in the name of the Lord,' Isa. 1. 10. In a word, by making the essence

of faith to lie in assurance, we should not only offend against the generation of God's children, but against the God and Father of these children, for at one clap we turn the greater number of those children he hath here on earth out of doors; yea, we are cruel to those that he is most tender of, and make sad the hearts of those that he would have chiefly comforted. Indeed, if this were true, a great part of gospel provision laid up in the promises is of little use. We read of promises to those that mourn, they shall be comforted;' to the contrite, they shall be revived;' to him that walks in darkness, Isa. 1., and the like. These belong to believers, and none else; surely then there are some believers that are in the dark, under the hatches of sorrow, wounded and broken with their sins, and temptation for them, but they are not such as are assured of the love of God; their water is turned into joy, their night into light, their sighs and sobs into joy and praise.

Secondly, I shall answer affirmatively, what justifying faith is; and in the description of it I shall consider it solely as justifying. And so take it in these few words: it is that act of the soul whereby it rests on Christ crucified for pardon and life, and that upon the warrant of the promise. In the description, observe, First, The subject where faith is seated; not any single faculty, but the soul. Of this I have spoken something before. Secondly, Here is the object of faith as justifying, and that is Christ crucified. The whole truth of God is the object of justifying faith; it trades with the whole word of God, and doth firmly assent unto it; but in its justifying act it singles out Christ crucified for its object. First, The person of Christ is the object of faith as justifying Secondly, Christ as crucified. First, The person of Christ, not any axiom or proposition in the word; this is the object of assurance, not of faith. Assurance saith, I believe my sins are pardoned through Christ: faith's language is, I believe on Christ for the pardon of them. The word of God doth direct our faith to Christ, and terminates it upon him; called therefore a coming to Christ, Matt. xi. 28; a receiving of him, John i. 12; a believing on him, John xvii. 20. The promise is but the dish, in which Christ, the true food of the soul, is served up; and if faith's hand be on the promise, it is but as one that draws the dish to him, that he may come at the dainties in it. The promise is the marriage ring on the hand of faith. Now we are not married to the ring, but with it unto Christ. All promises,' saith the apostle, are yea and amen in him;' they have their excellency from him, and efficacy in him: I mean in a soul's union to him. To run away with a promise, and not to close with Christ, and by faith become one in him, is as if a man should rend a branch from a tree, and lay it up in his chest, expecting it to bear fruit there. Promises are dead branches severed from Christ: but when a soul by faith becomes united to Christ, then he partakes of all his fatness: not a promise but yields sweetness to it. Secondly, As Christ is the primary object of faith, so Christ as crucified. Not Christ in his personal excellences: so he is the object rather of our love than faith; but as bleeding, and that to death, under the hand of divine justice, for to make an atonement by God's own appointment for the sins of the world. As the handmaid's eye is on her mistress's hand for direction, so faith's eye is on God's revealing himself in his word; which way God by it points the soul, thither it goes. Now there faith finds God, intending to save poor sinners, pitched on Christ, and Christ alone, for the transacting and effecting of it; and him whom God chooseth to trust with the work, him and him alone will faith choose to lay the burden of her confidence on. Again, faith observes how Christ performed this great work; and accordingly how the promise holds him forth to be applied for pardon and salvation. Now faith finds, that then Christ made the full payment to the justice of God for sin, when he poured out his blood to death upon the cross; all the preceding acts of his humiliation were but preparatory to this. He was born to die; he was sent into the world as a lamb bound with the bonds of an irreversible decree for a sacrifice. Christ himself, when he came into the world, understood this to be the errand he was sent on, Heb. x. 5: When he cometh into the world, he saith, Sacrifice and burnt-offering thou wouldst not, but a body thou hast prepared me,' i. e., to be an expiatory sacrifice; without this, all he had done would have been labour undone. No redemption, but by his blood, Eph. i. 7: 'In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our sins.'

No church without his blood, Acts xx. 28: "The church of God, which he hath purchased with his blood: E latere Christi morientis extitit ecclesia. The church is taken out of dying Jesus's side, as Eve out of sleeping Adam's. Christ did not redeem and save poor souls by sitting in majesty on his heavenly throne, but by hanging on the shameful cross, under the tormenting hand of man's fury, and God's just wrath. And therefore the poor soul, that would have pardon of sin, is directed to place his faith not only on Christ, but on bleeding Christ, Rom. iii. 25: Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood.' Thirdly, The act of faith upon this object: and that is, resting on Christ crucified for pardon and life. I know there are many acts of the soul antecedent to this, without which the creature can never truly exercise this. As knowledge, especially of God and Christ, upon whose authority and testimony it relies: I know whom I have believed,' 2 Tim. i. 12. None will readily trust a stranger, that he is wholly unacquainted with. Abraham went indeed he knew not whither, but he did not go with he knew not who. The great thing that God laboured to instruct Abraham in, and satisfy him with, was the knowledge of his own glorious self, who he was; that he might take his word, and rely on it, how harsh and improbable, yea, impossible soever it might sound in sense or reason's ear: 'I am the Almighty God; walk before me, and be thou perfect.' Secondly, Assent to the truth of the word of God. If this foundation-stone be not laid, faith's building cannot go on. Who will trust him that he dares not think speaks true? Thirdly, A sense of our own vileness and emptiness. By the one to see our demerit, what we deserve, hell and damnation; by the other our own impotency, how little we can contribute, yea, just nothing, to our own reconciliation. I join them together, because the one ariseth out of the other; sense of this emptiness comes from the deep apprehension a soul hath of the other's fulness in him. You never knew a man full of self-confidence and self-abasement together. The conscience cannot abound with the sense of sin, and the heart with self-conceit at the same time. 'When the commandment came, sin revived, and I died,' Rom. vii. 9. That is, when the commandment came in the accusations of it to his conscience, sin, that like a sleepy lion had lain still, and he secure and confident by it, when that began to roar in his conscience, then he died; that is, his vain confidence of himself gave up the ghost. Both these are necessary to faith: sense of sin, like the smart of a wound, to make the creature think of a plaster to cure it and sense of emptiness and insufficiency in himself or any creature to do the cure, necessary to make him go out to Christ for cure. We do not go abroad to beg what we have of our own within doors. These, with some other, are necessary to faith; but the receiving of Christ, and resting on Christ, is that act of faith to which justification is promised, John iii. 18: He that believeth on him is not condemned, but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. Now every one that assents to the truth of what the Scripture saith of Christ, doth not believe on Christ. No, this believing on Christ implies an union of the soul to Christ, and fiduciary recumbency on Christ. Therefore we are bid to take hold of Christ, Isa. xxvii. 5, (who is there called God's strength, as elsewhere his arm,) that we may make peace with God, and we shall make peace with him.' It is not the sight of a man's arm stretched out to a man in the water will save him from drowning, but the taking hold of it. Christ is a stone; faith builds upon Christ for salvation; and how, but by laying its whole weight and expectation of mercy on him? What Paul, i. 12, calls believing, in the former part of the verse, he calls, in the latter part, a committing to him to be kept against that day. The fourth and last branch in the description, is the warrant and security that faith goes upon in this act. And this it takes from the promise: indeed there is no way how God can be conceived to contract a debt to his creature, but by promise. There are ways for men to become debtors one to another, though never any promise passed from them. The father is a debtor to his child, and owes him love, provision, and nurture. The child a debtor to his parent, and owes him honour and obedience, though neither of them promised this to each other. Much more doth the creature stand deep in God's debt-book, and owes himself, with all he

Tim.

hath, to God his maker, though he hath not the grace voluntarily to make these over to God by promise and covenant. But the great God is so absolute a Sovereign, that none can make a law to bind him but himself: till he be pleased to pass an act of grace, of his own good-will, to give this, or do that good thing, to and for his poor creatures, no claim can be laid to the least mercy at his hands. There are two things therefore that are greatly to be heeded by the soul that would believe.

First, He must inquire for a promise to bear his faith out and warrant him to expect such a mercy at God's hand. And then, secondly, when he hath found a promise and observed the terms well on which it runs, not to stay for any further encouragement, but upon the credit of the naked promise to set his faith on work. First, To inquire out a promise, and observe well the terms on which it runs. Indeed upon the point it comes all to one, to believe without a promise, or to believe on a promise but not observe the terms of it. Both are presumptuous, and speed alike. A prince hath as much reason to be angry with him that doth not keep close to his commission, as with another that acts without any commission. O how little considered is this by many, who make bold of God's arm to lean on for pardon and salvation, but never think, that the promise which presents Christ to be leaned on as a Saviour, presents him at the same time to be chosen as a Lord and Prince! Such were the rebellious Israelites, who durst make God and his promise a leaning-stock for their foul elbows to rest upon: They call themselves of the holy city, and stay themselves upon the God of Israel,' Isa. xlviii. 2. But they were more bold than welcome. God rejected their confidence, and loathed their sauciness. Though a prince would not disdain to let a poor wounded man, faint with bleeding, and unable to go alone, upon his humble request, make use of his arm, rather than he should perish in the streets; yet he would with indignation reject the same motion from a filthy drunkard, that is besmeared with his vomit, if he should desire leave to lean on him, because he cannot go alone. I am sure, how welcome soever the poor humble soul, that lies bleeding for his sins at the very mouth of hell in his own thoughts, is to God, when he comes upon the encouragement of the promise to lean on Christ; yet the profane wretch that emboldens himself to come to Christ, shall be kicked away with infinite disdain and abhorrency by a holy God for abusing his promise.

Secondly, When a poor sinner hath found a promise, and observes the terms with a heart willing to embrace them, now he is to put forth an act of faith upon the credit of the naked promise, without staying for any other encouragement elsewhere. Faith is a right pilgrim-grace; it travels with us to heaven, and when it sees us safe got within our Father's doors, (heaven I mean,) it takes leave of us. Now the promise is this pilgrim's staff, with which it sets forth, though (like Jacob on his way to Padan-Aram) it hath nothing else with it. 6 Remember thy word unto thy servant,' saith David, 'upon which thou hast caused me to hope,' Psa. cxviii. 49. The word of promise was all he had to shew; and he counts that enough to set his faith on work. But, alas! some make comfort the ground of faith, and experience their warrant to believe. They will believe when God manifests himself to them, and sends in some sensible demonstration of his love to their souls; but till this be done, the promise hath little authority to silence their unbelieving cavils, and quiet their misgiving hearts into a waiting on God for the performance of what there is spoke from God's own mouth. Like old Jacob, who gave no credit to his children, when they told him Joseph was yet alive, and governor over all the land of Egypt. This news was too good and great to enter into his belief, who had given him up for dead so long; it is said, His heart fainted, for he believed them not,' Gen. xxv. 6. But when he saw the waggons that Joseph had sent to carry him thither, then, it is said, the spirit of Jacob revived,' ver. 27. Truly thus, though the promise tells the poor humbled sinner, Christ is alive, Governor of heaven itself, with all power there and on earth put into his hand, that he may give eternal life to all that believe on him, and he be therefore exhorted to rest upon Christ in the promise; yet his heart faints, and believes not: it is the waggons he would fain see, some sensible expressions of God's love that he listens after; if he did but know that he was an elect person, or were one that