sed rod, which buds and blossoms with such fruits as these! Let this be written among your best mercies; for you will have cause to adore and bless God eternally for this beneficial affliction.

17. Suffer not yourselves to be transported by impatience and swallowed up of grief, because God has exercised you under a smart rod; for smarting as it is, it is comparatively a gentle stroke to what others as good as yourselves have felt.

Your dear relation is dead; be it so. Here is but a single death before you; but others have seen many deaths contrived into one upon their relations, to which yours is nothing. Zedekiah saw his children murdered before his eyes, and then had those eyes (alas, too late) put out. The worthy author of the excellent book before mentioned, tells us of a godly woman in the north of Ireland, who, when the rebellion broke out there, fled with three children, one of them upon the breast. They had not gone far before they were stripped naked by the Irish, who, to their admiration, spared their lives, concluding probably that cold and hunger would kill them. Afterwards going on at the foot of a river which runs to Lochneach, others met them, and

would have cast them into the river; but this godly woman, not dismayed, asked a little liberty to pray, and as she lay naked on the frozen ground, got resolution not to go on her own feet to so unjust a death; upon which, being called and refusing to go, she was dragged by the heels along that rugged way, to be cast in with her little ones and company. But she then turned, and on her knees said, "You should, I am sure, be Christians, and men I see you are. In taking away our miser. able lives, you do us a pleasure; but know, that as we never wronged you nor yours, you must remember to die also yourselves, and one day give an account of this cruelty to the Judge of heaven and earth." Hereupon they resolved not to murder them with their own hands, but turn them all naked upon a small island in the river, without any provisions, there to perish. The next day the two boys having crept aside, found the hide of a beast which had been killed, at the root of a tree, which the mother cast over them as they were lying upon the snow. The next day a little boat goes by; to the men in which she calls for God's sake to take them in; but they being Irish, refused; she desired a little bread, but they

said they had none; then she begged a coal of fire, which she obtained; and thus, with some fallen chips made a little fire; and the children, taking a piece of the hide, laid it on the coals, and began to gnaw the leather; but without an extraordinary divine support, what could this do? Thus they lived ten days, without any visible means of help, having nothing to eat but ice and snow, and no drink except water. The two boys being nearly starved, she pressed them to go out of her sight, not being able to see their death; yet God delivered them as miraculously at last, as he had supported them all that while. But judge whether a natural death, in an ordinary way, be comparable to such a trial as this; and yet thus the Lord acted by this choice and eminently gracious woman.

And Mr. Wall, in his "None but Christ," relates as sad a passage of a poor family in Germany, who were driven to that extremity in the famine, that at last the parents made a motion one to the other, to sell one of the children for bread, to sustain themselves and the rest; but when they came to consider which child it should be, their hearts so relented and yearned upon every one, that they re

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solved rather all to die together. Yea, we read in Lam. iv. 10, "The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children."

But why speak I of these extremities? How many parents, yea, some godly ones too, have lived to see their children dying in profaneness, and some by the hand of justice, lamenting their rebellions with a rope about their necks!

Ah! reader, little do you know what stings there are in the afflictions of others! Surely you have no reason to think the Lord has dealt more bitterly with you than any. It is a gentle stroke, a merciful dispensation, if you compare it with what others have felt.

18. If God be your God, you have really lost nothing by the removal of any creature-comfort.

God is the fountain of all true comfort; creatures, the very best and sweetest, are but cisterns, to receive and convey to us what comfort God is pleased to communicate to them; and if the cistern be broken, or the pipe cut off, so that no more comfort can be conveyed to us that way, he has other ways and mediums to do it by, which we think not of; and if he please, he can convey his comforts to

his people without any of them. And if he does it more immediately, we shall be no losers by that; for no comforts in the world are so delectable and ravishingly sweet, as those that flow immediately from the fountain.

It is the sensuality of our hearts, that causes us to desire earthly comforts so inordinately, and grieve for the loss of them so immoderately, as if we had not enough in God, without these creature supplements.

Is the fulness of the fountain yours? and yet do you cast down yourselves, because the broken cistern is removed? "The best creatures are no better than cisterns," cisterns having nothing but what they receive, and broken ones cannot hold what is put into them. Why, then, do you mourn, as if your life were bound up in the creature! You have as free an access to the fountain as you had before. It is the advice of a heathen, to repair, by a new earthly comfort, what we have lost in a former. "Thou hast carried forth him whom thou lovedst," says Seneca ;" seek one whom thou mayest love in his stead. It is better to repair than to bemoan thy loss." But if God never repair your loss in things of