366, RIGHT REJOICING. joy. But if heaven lie the matter of your joy, you may go on in your rejoicing, and every day may be your festival; for God is the same both yesterday, and to-day, and forever. You only have the day that hath no night, and the feast that hath, no end, or intermission, unless as it is caused' byyour errors and misap- prehensions. There can nothing fall out of so hurtful a nature as to turn your feast into gall and wormwood; for God will be still God, and Christ still your Head, and heaven will be heaven; and nothing is of anyconsiderable moment to put into the scales against your happiness. If once you have a God, a Christ, a heaven to rejoice is, you mayrationally indulge a constant joy, and may rationally rejoice in poverty, reproach, contempt, and calumny, in imprisonment, banishment, sickness, or in death, as a prosperous state ; and you transgress the laws of reason ifyou do not. . 3. Rejoice if your names are written in heaven ; for this is a . divine, a pure, a profitable, and a warrantable joy. When God and his ministers rebuke your mirth, it is not this holy mirth that they rebuke, but your dreaming mirth, or waking folly. As we beat down your presumption, but to set Itp your faith ; and beat down men's deceitful hopes, to prepare them for the hopes that will not fail them, and not to bring them to despair, so do we call you from your frothy, foolish, childish mirth, that we may lead you to the highest joys. Here is joy that you need not be ashamed of; of which you can scarcely take too much; of which you need not to repent. Be as joyful and merryas you will, if this may but be the matter of your joy. The more you are thus joyful, the more acceptable to God. It is Satan, and not God, that is the enemy of this joy ; that pleads against it, and fills a Christian's mind with groundless scruples, and doubts, and objections against it. O that our souls and our assemblies did more abound with this holy joy ! And O that Christians understood the excellency and usefulness of it, and would set themselves more constantly to the promoting and maintaining of it in themselves ! Whoever of you that is most joyful in the Lord, I dare persuade you to be more joyful yet; and so far should you be from checking yourselves for this holy joy, that the rest of your duties should intend it, and you should make it your work by the help of all God's ordinances and mercies to increase it. He is the best Christian that hath most love, and joy, and gratitude ; and he that is best at this, is like to be best in the performance of his other duties, and in the conquest of remaining sins. But more of this in the application. And now I am approaching to a closer application, I' hope I may suppose that I have removed the objection That met me in the beginning, and that by this time you see that I am not unsea- sonably suppressing your warrantable joy; but, 1. Preventing
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