(_THE MISERY OF MERE WORLDLY HOPE--EARNESTNESS ABOUT SALVATION._)
WORTHY SIR,--Grace, mercy, and peace be to you.--I long to hear from
you. Our Lord is with His afflicted kirk, so that this Burning Bush is
not consumed to ashes. I know that submissive on-waiting for the Lord
will at length ripen the joy and deliverance of His own, who are truly
blessed on-waiters. What is the dry and miscarrying hope of all them
who are not in Christ, but confusion and wind? Oh, how pitifully and
miserably are the children of this world beguiled, whose wine cometh
home to them water, and their gold brass and tin! And what wonder,
that hopes builded upon sand should fall and sink? It were good for us
all to abandon the forlorn, and blasted, and withered hope which we
have had in the creature; and let us henceforth come and drink water
out of our own well, even the fountain of living waters, and build
ourselves and our hope upon Christ our Rock. But, alas! that that
natural love which we have to this borrowed home that we were born in,
and that this clay city, the vain earth, should have the largest share
of our heart! Our poor, lean, and empty dreams of confidence in
something beside God are no farther travelled than up and down the
noughty[314] and feckless creatures. God may say of us, as He said,
"Ye rejoice in a thing of nought" (Amos vi. 13). Surely we spin our
spider's web with pain, and build our rotten and tottering house upon
a lie, and falsehood, and vanity.
[314] In which there is nothing. Other editions read "_naughty_,"
_i.e._ evil.
Oh, when will we learn to have thoughts higher than the sun and moon!
and learn our joy, hope, confidence, and our soul's desires to look up
to our best country, and to look down to clay tents, set up for a
night's lodging or two in this uncouth land! and laugh at our childish
conceptions and imaginations that suck our joy out of creatures--wo,
sorrow, losses, and grief! O sweetest Lord Jesus! O fairest Godhead!
O Flower of men and angels! why are we such strangers to, and far-off
beholders of, Thy glory? Oh, it were our happiness for evermore, that
God would cast a pest, a botch, a leprosy, upon our part of this great
whore, a fair and well-busked world, that clay might no longer deceive
us! But oh that God may burn and blast our hope here-away, rather than
that our hope should live to burn us! Alas! the wrong side of Christ
(to speak so), His black side, His suffering side, His wounds, His
bare coat, His wants, His wrongs, the oppressions of men done to Him,
are turned towards men's eyes; and they see not the best and fairest
side of Christ, nor see they His amiable face and His beauty, that men
and angels wonder at.
Sir, lend your thoughts to these things, and learn to contemn this
world, and to turn your eyes and heart away from beholding the masked
beauty of all things under time's law and doom. See Him who is
invisible, and His invisible things. Draw by the curtain, and look in
with liking and longing to a kingdom undefiled, that fadeth not away,
reserved for you in the heaven. This is worthy of your pains, and
worthy of your soul's sweating, and labouring, and seeking after,
night and day. Fire will fly over the earth and all that is in it;
even destruction from the Almighty. Fy, fy, upon that hope, that shall
be dried up by the root! Fy upon the drunken night-bargains, and the
drunken and mad covenants that sinners make with death and hell after
cups, and when men's souls are mad and drunken with the love of this
lawless life. They think to make a nest for their hopes, and take
quarters and conditions of hell and death, that they shall have ease,
long life, peace; and in the morning, when the last trumpet shall
awake them, then they rue the block. It is time, and high time, for
you to think upon death and your accounts, and to remember what ye
are, and where ye will be before the year of our Lord 1700. I hope ye
are thinking upon this. Pull at your soul, and draw it aside from the
company that it is with and round, and whisper into it news of
eternity, death, judgment, heaven, and hell. Grace, grace be with you.
Yours, in his sweet Lord Jesus,