362 RIGHT REJOICING. God, and saving of your souls. Alan! how many, called valiant, are the basest cowards in the warfare that their everlasting life de- pendeth on ! How many, that are renowned for their victories by men, are wretches, despised and abhorred. by the Lord! What - Christian so poor and despicable in the world that would change his state with a Catiline or Sejanus, yea, with a CEsar or Al- exander, if he might! Could you see the inside of a glittering gallant, or an adored prince, that is a stranger to the life of faith, what a sad disparity would you see! The vermin of the most filthy lusts continually crawling in the soul, while the body is set out by the most exquisite ornaments that pride can invent, and their purses can procure, for the increasing of their esteem in the eyes of such as judge of souls by the color and cover of the bodies. To see the same man sumptuously feasted, attended, honored, magnified by men, and at the same time dead in sin, unacquainted with the life and comforts of believers, and under the curse and condemnation of the law of God, would tell you, that such a wretch is far from the state in which a reasonable man is allowed to rejoice. There are not more naked, leprous souls in the world, than some that are covered with a silken, laced, painted case ; nor gny more poor and sordid than such as abound with earthly riches. And for such a one to rejoice is as unseemly as for a man to glory that his gangrened foot bath a handsome shoe ; or that his diseased, pained flesh doth suffer in the fashion ; or that his wounds and ulcers aresearched with a silver instrument. God seeth the rottenness and filth that is within these painted sepul- chres, and therefore judgetb not of them as the ignorant spectator, that seeth no farther than the smoothed, polished, gilded outside. And, therefore, we find his language of such to differ so much from the language of the world. He calls those poor, and misera- ble, and blind, and naked, and foolish, and mad, and dead, and cursed, that, perhaps, hear nothing lower from the world than hon- orable, worshipful, rich, and wise ; and men are admiring them, while God is loathing them ; and men are applauding them while .God coirdemneth them. And hence it is that the servants of the Lord do lament the case of those that worldlings count most hap- py. What Paul speaks of those " whose God is their belly, whose glory is their shame, and who mind earthly things," he doth it weeping ; (Phil. iii. 18, 19.) when a frantic sensualist would have derided his compassionate tears, and bid him keep them for himself. 2. Rejoice not in these outward, common things, comparative- ly, or for themselves, because they are not only consistent with most deplorable misery, but also are the strong and ordinary means of making men miserable, and fixing them in it, and increasing it.
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