A Following Holy Life. Kenneth Stevenson

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СКАЧАТЬ indigent, and necessitous. And this consideration is apt and natural to produce great affections of love, duty, and obedience, desires of union and conformity to His sacred person, life, actions, and laws; that we resolve all our thoughts, and finally determine all our reason and our passions and capacities, upon that saying of St. Paul, “He that loves not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be accursed.” [1 Cor. 16.22]

      II.68

      The great and glorious accidents happening about the birth of Jesus

      The wise men . . . “fell down and worshipped Him,” after the manner of the easterlings when they do veneration to their kings, not with an empty Ave and gay blessing of fine words, but “they bring presents and come into His courts;” for “when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto Him gifts, gold, frankincense, and myrrh.” And if these gifts were mysterious, beyond the acknowledgment of Him to be the king of the Jews, and Christ, that should come into the world; frankincense might signify Him to be acknowledged a God, myrrh to be a man, and gold to be a king: unless we choose by gold to signify the acts of mercy; by myrrh, the chastity of minds and purity of our bodies, to the incorruption of which myrrh is especially instrumental; and by incense we intend our prayers, as the most apt presents and oblations to the honour and service of this young king. But however the fancies of religion may represent variety of ideas, the act of adoration was direct and religious, and the myrrh was medicinal to His tender body: the incense possibly no more than was necessary in a stable, the first throne of His humilty: and the gold was a good antidote against the present indigencies of His poverty: presents such as were used in all the Levant (especially in Arabia and Saba, to which the growth of myrrh and frankincense were proper) in their addresses to their God and to their king; and were instruments with which, under the veil of flesh, they worshipped the eternal Word; the wisdom of God, under infant innocency; the almighty power, in so great weakness; and under the lowness of human nature, the altitude of majesty and the infinity of divine glory.

      II.86–7

      Considerations upon the apparition of the angels to the shepherds

      But the angels also had other motions: for besides the pleasures of that joy, which they had in beholding human nature so highly exalted, and that God was man, and man was God; they were transported with admiration at the ineffable counsel of God’s predestination, prostrating themselves with adoration and modesty, seeing God so humbled, and man so changed, and so full of charity, that God stooped to the condition of man, and man was inflamed beyond the love of seraphim, and was made more knowing than cherubim, more established than thrones, more happy than all the orders of angels. The issue of this consideration teaches us to learn their charity, and to exterminate all the intimations and beginnings of envy, that we may as much rejoice at the good of others as of ourselves: for then we love good for God’s sake, when we love good wherever God has placed it: and that joy is charitable which overflows our neighbours’ fields when ourselves unconcerned in the personal accruements; for so we are “made partakers of all that fear God,” when charity unites their joy to ours, as it makes us partakers of their common sufferings.

      And now the angels, who had adored the holy Jesus in heaven, come also to pay their homage to Him upon earth; and laying aside their flaming swords, they take into their hands instruments of music, and sing, “Glory be to God on high:” first signifying to us that the incarnation of the holy Jesus was a very great instrument of the glorification of God, and those divine perfections in which He is chiefly pleased to communicate Himself to us were in nothing manifested so much as in the mysteriousness of this work: secondly; and in vain doth man satisfy himself with complacencies and ambitious designs upon earth, when he sees before him God in the form of a servant, humble, and poor, and crying, and an infant full of need and weakness.

      II.88

      Considerations upon the Circumcision: our fault not all Adam’s

      For though the fall of Adam lost to him all those supernatural assistances which God put into our nature by way of grace, yet it is by accident that we are more prone to many sins than we are to virtue. Adam’s sin did discompose his understanding and affections: and every sin we do does still make us more unreasonable, more violent, more sensual, more apt still to the multiplication of the same or the like actions: the first rebellion of the inferior faculties against the will and understanding, and every victory flesh gets over the spirit, makes the inferior insolent, strong, tumultuous, domineering, and triumphant upon the proportionable ruins of the spirit; blinding our reason and binding our will; and all these violations of our powers are increased by the perpetual ill customs and false principles and ridiculous guises of the world, which make the later ages to be worse than the former, unless some other accident do intervene to stop the ruin and declension of virtue; such as are God’s judgments, the sending of prophets, new imposition of laws, messages from heaven, diviner institutions, such as in particular was the great discipline of Christianity. And even in this sense here is origination enough for sin and impairing of the reasonable faculties of human souls, without charging our faults upon Adam.

      II.191

      Discourse of obedience: free will

      If you will be secure, remove your tent, dwell farther off. God hath given us more liberty than we may safely use; and although God is so gracious as to comply much with our infirmities, yet if we do so too, as God’s goodness in indulging liberty to us was to prevent our sinning, our complying with ourselves will engage us in it: but if we imprison and confine our affections into a narrower compass, then our extravagancies may be imperfect, but will not easily be criminal. The dissolution of a scrupulous and strict person is not a vice, but into a less degree of virtue. He that makes a conscience of loud laughter, will not easily be drawn into the wantonness of balls and revellings, and the longer and more impure carnivals. This is the way to secure our obedience; and no men are so curious of their health as they that are scrupulous of the air they breathe in.

      II.115

      Considerations upon the Presentation in the Temple: Purification and sexual relations

      The turtle-doves were offered also with the signification of another mystery. In the sacred rites of marriage, although the permissions of natural desires are such as are most ordinate to their ends, the avoiding fornication, the alleviation of economical cares and vexations, and the production of children, and mutual comfort and support; yet the apertures and permissions of marriage have such restraints of modesty and prudence, that all transgression of the just order to such ends is a crime: and besides these, there may be degrees of inordination or obliquity of intention, or too sensual complacency, or unhandsome preparations of mind, or unsacramental thoughts; in which particulars, because we have no determined rule but prudence, and the analogy of the rite, and the severity of our religion, which allow in some cases more, in some less, and always uncertain latitudes, for aught we know there may be lighter transgressions, something that we know not of: and for these at the purification of the woman, it is supposed, the offering was made, and the turtles, by being an oblation, did deprecate a supposed irregularity; but by being a chaste and marital emblem, they professed the obliquity (if any were) was within the protection of the sacred bands of marriage, and therefore so excusable as to be expiated by a cheap offering. And what they did in hieroglyphic, Christians must do in the exposition; be strict observers of the main rites and principal obligations, and not neglectful to deprecate the lesser unhandsomenesses of the too sensual applications.

      II.127

      Discourse of meditation

      Note here the threefold process of memory, understanding, and will.

      For meditation is an attention and application of spirit to divine things; a searching out all instruments to a holy life, a devout consideration of them, and a production of those affections which are in a direct order to the love of God and a pious conversation. Indeed meditation is all СКАЧАТЬ