RIGHT REJOICING. 375 in, theGod that now beholdeth them, thechange thatthey are near ! How little do they think of the flames that they are hastening to, and the outcries and lamentations that will next ensue ! 3. Your mirth is disingenuous and dishonest as long as you are without a title to heaven. You slight the Lord that can find such matters of rejoicing, when you havenot his favor to rejoice in, and are under his displeasure. While you are refusing Christ, abusing grace, resisting the Spirit, serving the flesh, and undoingyour own souls, it cannot be an honest or ingenuous thing for such as you to live in joy. 4. If your mirth were truly honorable to you, it were the more excusable. But to laugh in sin and misery, and make merry so near the endless woe, is a greater shame to your understandings, than to make sport to set your house on fire. This is the laughter of which Solomon, might well say, " Thou art mad," and themirth of which he saith, " What doth it?" Eccl. ii. 2. 5. Would thy mirth do thee any good,we would not discourage it, yea, if it did not do thee harm. But, O, how many are now in sorrow by the means of their unseasonable, sinful mirth ! They are to jocund to hear the preacher, or their consciences, or to -ob- serve the checks and motions of God's Spirit, or to spendnow and then an hour, in retired, sober thoughts of their everlasting state. Should we but presume to call them to exercise their reason, and mind them of these most needful things, and tell them, ":O, poor, distracted mortals, your time is given you for greater things than to fiddle and dance, and drink, and jest, and prate, and compliment it away ! " should we not be thought morose, or melancholy, or fa- natics ? And shouldwe not have some such answer as their ances- tors in Sodom gave to Lot? (Gen. xix. a.j "Stand back. This one fellow came in to sojourn, and he wilT needs be a judge: now will we deal worse with thee than with them ; " we will take a course with these controllers. Alas ! it is this foolish mirth that casteth men's reason and conscienceasleep, and drowns the voice of sober words, so that God himselfcannot be heard. Could we but get men to retired soberness and seriousness, we should hope that we might find a friend within them, and that we speak to men, and that reason would take part with the most reasonable motions that are made to them from the Lord. 6. Lastly. Would your groundless mirth endure, wewould not say somuch against it. But, alas ! to be merry for a day, and then to lie in misery forever, is a thing deserving no encourage- ment. We see it is a merry world with many that have least cause ofmirth ; but how long will they continue it ? To see a man laugh, and play, and feast in a chariot that driveson so fast to death, in a vessel that is on so swift a stream that ends in the gulf
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