Preface
1. The authority of custom prevails so much more widely than the authority of truth that anyone who ventures to attack custom with truth may be thought not to have properly digested our Savior’s prudent caution: “To sit down and consider whether he be able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh against him with twenty thousand” (Luke 14:31). For no doubt the odds between the supporters of these two parties are as great as that, and much greater. I cannot help foreseeing that the present design is very open to the charge of this unwariness.
2. Gentility long ago refuted Job’s aphorism, “Man is born to labor” (Job 5:7). In its place it has pronounced over its clients the rich man’s requiem: “Soul, take thine ease, eat, drink and be merry” (Luke 12:19). A gentleman is now supposed to be nothing but a thing of pleasure, a creature sent into the world as leviathan is sent into the deep, “to take his pastime therein” (Ps 104:26), and, to complete the parallel, to devour his underlings too. Then it will be no wonder if it is judged a ridiculous absurdity to try to define the calling of one whose very essence is thought to consist in having none. Indeed, the attempt may be thought not only absurd but malicious: a leveling scheme to rob him of his birthright, to degrade him from the privileges that belong to his quality, and to mold him back into that common mass from which divine providence and human laws have distinguished him. But I dare trust the following pages to clear themselves of this suspicion.
3. I have been no unconcerned spectator of the reverses the gentry have suffered in these recent years, still less a gloating one, and I have paid them my due tribute of compassion. Yet I confess I think those reverses hardly worth regretting in comparison with the voluntary descents that too many of the gentry have made from true worth and virtue. It is surely a far less deplorable sight to see a gentleman stripped of his fortune by his conscience than by his luxury, and to see him under the stroke of the headsman than under those more infamous executioners, his lust or his intemperance. Yet I fear that if the roll of martyrs even of these suffering times were examined, Venus and Bacchus would be found to have had many more martyrs than God and loyalty.
4. But I admit it is beside the point to weigh in this way the two evils of doing wrong and suffering wrong. For it is certain that the second must be traced back to the first, and it has no existence of its own except what it derives from that. Punishments are only the results of sins. Therefore whatever malignity is in the effect is wholly chargeable to the cause, and we are to regard our vice not only as our greatest unhappiness but as our only one.
This consideration shows us the source of all our sufferings, and it is itself no less obvious than they are. Yet anyone who merely observed how many other origins are assigned to our calamities, while this one is scarcely dreamed of, would think it as hidden as the source of the Nile. This Jonah is allowed to sleep securely in the ship, while her more innocent cargo is thrown overboard (Jonah 1:5). Every least spark from outside is charged as an arsonist, when alas, like Etna, it is our own bowels that send out the fire that has so nearly reduced us to ashes. But just as in diseases we count the discovery of the cause the first and most necessary step toward the cure, so it certainly is here. Conviction of our guilt is an indispensable preparation for the easing of our afflictions, and we must be heavy laden in the Christian sense (Matt 11:28) before we shall cease to be so in the civil sense.
5. But I fear that in this matter men behave more like quacks than like good physicians. They use some palliative medicines to soothe the effects, or perhaps painkillers to stupefy the patient, and wholly neglect the root of the illness. Nor do I lay this error at the door of the gentry alone. It is all too plain that people of all sorts and ranks have too just a claim to it for any one of them to walk off with sole possession. But because the present design makes the gentry my particular province, I shall pass over all others and address myself at this time to them only, with this most earnest request. I ask that they would not practice on themselves the cruelty for which Amalek stands branded in his treatment of Israel (Deut 25:18): smiting and destroying, by their persistent impieties, the feeble and faint remains of their former happiness.
I ask rather that they would now at last seriously attend to this great and important concern of theirs, and fix on the true Achan who has so long troubled their Israel. Once that is done, the story directs the next step in the process: bringing him to execution, and cutting off that which will otherwise infallibly bring a fatal cutting-off upon themselves. Nor can this be put off. Alas, the disease has risen too high and reached too dangerous a crisis to allow any delay of the remedy.
6. When Egypt had smarted under a succession of miraculous plagues for detaining the Israelites, Pharaoh’s servants urged him to release them. They closed their advice with this moving appeal: “Knowest thou not yet that Egypt is destroyed?” (Exod 10:7). And God knows I may all too fittingly give the same edge to mine. For alas, gentlemen, are not your estates wasted, your privileges violated, your splendor eclipsed, your persons confined, your families broken and shattered, your dignities trampled on by the meanest of the common people? And are you not, finally, wholly displaced from your station, now made the tail who were once the head (Deut 28:44)? Is it not yet time to dismiss the sins that are the authors of all this?
If you are still of Pharaoh’s mind and resolve to keep them, you are certainly no less obstinate than he was, but much more irrational. He had some visible advantage to tempt him to detain the Israelites: they were his slaves, they worked hard at his tasks, they built him cities. How far that is from the case here! The things you are so unwilling to part with are not your slaves but your taskmasters. They set you to the vilest and most servile drudgery, and they are so far from bringing you any profit that I may boldly issue the Apostle’s challenge: “What fruit have you had of those things?” (Rom 6:21). I have no doubt that the only account you can give of your harvest must be the inventory of your miseries. We have witnessed many houses and many cities that your sins have demolished and laid waste, but we have no structure of theirs to show except a Babel of confusion.
7. But alas, these secular ruins of yours are only the modest and petty outrages of your sins. Take another look at them, and like Ezekiel’s vision (Ezek 8:6), they will show you more and “greater abominations than these,” even “the abomination of desolation in the holy place” (Matt 24:15). Your sins have laid waste not only your own houses but God’s. That “beauty of his ornament” which he “set in majesty” (Ezek 7:20) has been exposed to spoil and pollution by these detestable things of yours.
We have not yet grown so old in our miseries that we have outlived the added pain of remembering our happier state. How sad, how wounding a reflection it is to compare the past and present condition of this Church! When the Temple was being rebuilt, the joy of that restoration could not suppress the grief of those who remembered the far more glorious building of the first Temple; they laid the foundation in tears. The text says, “They wept with a loud voice” (Ezra 3:12). But what tears, what wailing can be bitter or loud enough for us? We have to lament not partial and imperfect repairs but total ruin and devastation. We see the materials of our Zion now reduced to dust and rubbish, though we once saw them happily joined together, built as a “city at unity in itself” (Ps 122:3)!
8. And while we thus “remember Zion” and are ourselves “by the waters of Babylon,” it is surely only fitting that we “sit down and weep” and, like those captives (Ps 137), bid a solemn farewell to every entertainment of joy and pleasure. Would to God that all of us, and particularly you to whom I now speak, matched them as exactly in this sad and pious feeling as we match them in its causes! Then your quarrel with sin might be kindled to its full height, since sin robs you not only of your spiritual joys but also of your carnal ones, which many of you relish more.
It is your sins (I wish I could say yours alone) that have been the persecuting Sauls who have so “made havoc of the Church” (Acts 8:3). The complacency, profaneness and licentiousness of your prosperous days made the first breaches in her walls. Now the impenitence and incorrigibility of your days of calamity, like the Edomites, cry, “Down with her, down with her even to the ground” (Ps 137:7). Among the Jews it was a capital crime to curse a parent. Shall it now pass for a slight crime, or none at all, not only to curse but to destroy our common mother, and to abet and maintain the troops that thus defy her, and even invade her? Oh, why will you not at last recall your exiled piety, and take up a holy and fitting indignation against these cruel, these implacable enemies of hers?
9. But you cannot be supposed to do this while you arraign only other men’s sins and leave your own out of the indictment. I do not doubt that many of you, with displeasure (perhaps more than enough), charge her ruin to its immediate instruments. You accuse the bold intrusion of ignorant teachers of having corrupted her doctrine; the ambition and envy of impatient inferiors of subverting her discipline; the pride and faction of meddling spirits of disturbing her peace; and the greedy avarice of sacrilegious persons of devouring her patrimony. I shall not deny that these were the weapons that have so mortally wounded her. But let it be remembered that these weapons were wielded and sharpened by the more general impieties, from which they borrowed their destructive power. Therefore to shift the guilt onto them is only the trick of slaying Uriah “with the sword of the children of Ammon” (2 Sam 12:9), which, as you know, did not acquit David of being a murderer. No, God knows, here lies the corpse of a poor bleeding Church. Which of you, our elders, is qualified for the purification the law prescribes in such a case (Deut 21:7)? Which of you can say, “Our hands have not shed this blood, neither have our eyes seen it”?
10. Yet the less able you are to wash your hands in innocence in this way, the greater your need to wash them in penitence. And since you are sons of this mother, the office of avenger of blood falls to you. Oh, bring forth fruits of repentance by carrying out that part faithfully! Drag out these criminals that have taken sanctuary in your breasts and dwell there securely, as in a city of refuge, and hew them in pieces, as Samuel did Agag before the Lord. And just as your incentives to this are infinitely greater and more pressing than in other murders, so its effects will also vastly exceed those of common justice. Common justice only avenges the harm, but this may repair it. It may recall the vital spirits and reunite the scattered limbs of this mangled body. Such omnipotence is there in sincere repentance that it can even bring about a resurrection. Oh, that you would be ambitious to work this miracle, and by this pious wonder beget your own mother! Oh, that you would weep over her ashes until your tears made them fruitful, and you saw her spring up out of her urn!
11. This, this is your only way of reversing the decree of extermination that these Hamans, your sins, have obtained. If you neglect it, Mordecai’s warning to Esther will apply all too well to you. Should God in his unfathomable mercy cause deliverance and relief to arise for this poor desolate Church from some other place, you yourselves can still expect nothing but destruction. You may have no feeling for the desolations of Zion, and no pity to see her in the dust, but still choose to cherish the impieties that have brought her there. Yet even those impieties will at last avenge her quarrel, and bring on you miseries whose pain you will find it impossible either to avoid or to deaden.
12. For alas, to present your sins to you merely as the origins of temporal ruin, whether private or public, is to give you too fair and flattering a portrait of them. These ruins are only the light preliminary skirmishes before a more dreadful slaughter, the prologue to the fatal tragedy. Take the fuller character of your sins from the Apostle: “The end of these things is death” (Rom 6:21), even eternal death. Our usual comfort against the persecutions of men is that they can pursue us no further than the grave, where, as Job says, “the weary be at rest” (Job 3:17). But this tyrant in our own breasts sets no such limits to its malice. On the contrary, it begins in earnest just when all other cruelties cease, and it torments without end by the gnawing of that worm which never dies and the scorching of that fire which never shall be quenched (Mark 9:43-44).
13. And now who can sufficiently wonder at the infatuation that makes you hesitate to dismiss so treacherous a guest? You cherish this viper in your bosoms. You already feel it eating your bowels and devouring all your temporal happiness, and yet it takes these only on its way to your heart, your more precious and eternal part. It is a common maxim, even among those who gain by other men’s treachery, to love the treason but hate the traitor. But here that rule is quite reversed. You hate the treason and chafe at the painful consequences of your sin, yet you love the traitor and hug it in your closest embraces. The Apostle indeed forewarns us of “the deceitfulness of sin” (Heb 3:13), but surely this goes beyond that. This is not deceit but enchantment. It must be some powerful love potion that can make men fall in love not only with deformity but with disease.
14. But all the magicians of Egypt are powerless to stand before Moses. This magic is not so irresistible that reason and religion cannot supply you with countercharms able to disenchant you, if only you will let them come to your aid. Just step once out of the devil’s circle, the dizzying, headlong pursuit of your sinful appetites. Give your faculties some respite, enough breathing space from that hot chase to fit them for a calm and considered view of other things. Then you will certainly see that virtue has a far more ravishing appearance, infinitely more delightful and lovable, than all the devil’s lenses could lend to your highest and most relished sensual pleasures. Only bestow some attentive looks on her. Once let her in at your eyes, and then leave her to make her own way to your heart.
And surely this is a very moderate request: that you would only deign to look on what is so lovely. On what pretext can you refuse it? To gaze on those passing beauties which are only your snares, you balk at no difficulty. Those of you who have no other motive are content to come even to church on that errand. Oh, do not lay aside your curiosity here, where alone it can do you good, but rather take this opportunity of hallowing that hitherto profane part of your disposition.
15. Not the least or least successful of the devil’s arts has been to instill prejudices into men’s minds against Christian practice by representing it in the most repellent forms. He exchanges shapes with it: as he transforms himself into an angel of light, so he transforms Christian practice into an angel of darkness. He makes it appear a state of the most dismal sadness and horror, a region at the opposite pole from all joy and cheerfulness. Christ declares his yoke easy and his burden light. Yet men are far readier to take the devil at his word than Christ at his, as is all too plain in the general aversion to piety among those who have never so much as tried it. They take up vague, confused prejudices against it and hold them as fast as if they were the fruit of many years of costly experience. It is to be feared that these prejudices have taken the deepest root in the richest soil, for they seem to flourish nowhere more than among you of the highest quality. Yet surely you, of all people, are most obliged to root them out, since they imply so gross an injustice that any honorable mind must be ashamed of it.
16. You will yourselves readily declare that a judge who condemns a person whose plea he has never heard is not only corrupt but shameless. Yet if you will only reflect, you will find your own verdict rebounding on yourselves with a “Thou art the man” (2 Sam 12:7), for this is plainly your case here. It is time, therefore, for you to be just enough, if not to virtue, then at least to your own reputations, to retract the condemning sentence you have passed on her. Adopt at least so much of the form of justice as to give her a fair trial. But you cannot do this by hearing the tongues of men and angels plead for her. No one but she herself can conduct her case. You must admit her into your company and conversation, and take her into such familiarity as brings her within range of your observation, before you pass judgment on her. In short, if you would truly make yourselves competent judges of whether a virtuous life is a pleasant or a dismal thing, enter on it, and let your own experience inform you.
17. I cannot think the age so degenerate as to doubt that there are a number of individual persons among you who have made the experiment. To their testimony I dare appeal, and I do not doubt that they will turn from judges into advocates and recommend virtue to you. Surely in this instance you will have no cause to waive your accustomed privilege of being tried by your peers. Nor will you have cause to object to the judgment of those who, being placed in circumstances equal to yours, must be supposed to understand your strongest temptations to vice. From those temptations alone arise all the apparent difficulties and discomforts of virtue.
18. It would take many volumes to describe the various distinct advantages toward a pleasant existence that are wrapped up in this one comprehensive happiness. I shall give only one instance, the one to which the following treatise particularly relates: virtue furnishes you with a succession of very agreeable and cheerful employments. Virtue is busy and active by nature. Just as in its various operations it stands opposed to all the various sorts of vice, so in its very constitution and principle it bears a declared antipathy to that one fertile seedbed of most other sins, idleness. Surely rescuing you from idleness is no contemptible benefit.
For you seem to claim it as a considerable part of your inheritance that you may live and do nothing, and you cling hard to that claim. Yet it is most evident that what you contend for as your privilege you yourselves count as your burden. You count it so heavy a burden that, to be rid of it, you throw away estate, health, soul and all for the sake of company, and employ yourselves in the most ruinous ways rather than endure being idle. Indeed, you quite refute your own claims to ease by those laborious and toilsome vices which, to make them tolerable, you are forced to call pleasures. Yet they certainly have no right to that title on any other ground than that they keep you doing something.
19. And now what more welcome service could possibly be done for men in this condition than to show them how they may free themselves of this load without taking on a worse one? By a worse one I mean the guilt of those sins which, like Rehoboam, turn whips into scorpions, and yet must now be resorted to as the only instruments of relief. A Christian life will be sure to do this for you. It will constantly provide you with innocent diversions. Much more, it will give you business so excellent and so worthy of the dignity of your natures, so noble and so suited to the splendor of your quality, so agreeable in every way to the aims of rational men, that you will have cause to acknowledge with our Church that God’s service is “perfect freedom.”
20. I shall not undertake to give you a detailed view of every one of those employments. The precepts of the Gospel that assign your tasks sufficiently inform you of their nature and excellence. My whole scheme is contained in the one precept which directs men to attend to the calling in which God has placed them. I am therefore to treat only of those particular duties which are incumbent on you as gentlemen. In doing so I shall show you that, considered as gentlemen, you have a calling, and so free you from the reproach and misery of being unprofitable burdens on the earth. Then I shall also prove to you that this calling is so far from implying any real toil or discomfort that it is only an art of refining and elevating your pleasures, making them more savory and exquisite. And so, if you attend to it, it will make good to you in earnest your mistaken claim to a life of sensuality and delight.
