105 TO ALL CHRISTIAN READERS GRACE AND PEACE. THAT in a time when we hear no noise but of drums and trumpets, and talk of nothing but arms and sieges and battles, I should write of devotion, may seem to some of you strange and unseasonable to me contrarily, it seems most fit and opportune: for, when can it be more proper to direct our address to the throne of grace, than when we are in the very jaws of death? or when should we go to seek the face of our God, rather than in the needful time of trouble? Blessed be my God, who in the midst of these woeful tumults hath vouchsafed to give me these calm and holy thoughts, which I justly suppose he meant not to suggest that they should be smothered in the breast wherein they were conceived, but with a purpose to have the benefit communicated unto many. Who is there that needs not vehement excitations and helps to devotion? and when more than now? In a tempest the mariners themselves do not only cry every man to his God, but awaken Jonah, that is fast asleep under the hatches, and chide him to his prayers. Surely, had we not been failing in our devotions, we could not have been thus universally miserable. That duty, the neglect whereof is guilty of our calamity, must, in the effectual performance of it, be the means of our recovery. Be but devout, and we cannot miscarry under judgments. Woe is me! the tears of penitence were more fit to quench the public flame than blood. How soon would it clear up abovehead, if we were but holily affected within! Could we send our zealous ambassadors up to 106 heaven, we could not fail of a happy peace. I direct the way: God bring us to the end. For my own particular practice, God is witness to my soul, that as one the sense of whose private affliction is swallowed up of the public, I cease not daily to ply the Father of Mercies with my fervent prayers, that he would at last be pleased, after so many streams of blood, to pass an act of pacification in heaven. And what good heart can do otherwise? Brethren, all ye that love God, and his church, and his truth, and his anointed, and your country, and yourselves, and yours, join your forces with mine; and let us, by a holy violence, make way to the gates of heaven with our petition for mercy and peace; and not suffer ourselves to be beaten off from the threshold of grace till we be answered with a condescent. He, whose goodness is wont to prevent our desires, will not give denials to our importunities. Norwich, March 10, 1643. Pray and farewell. TIAN; ACTUAL, OR A SPECIAL AND FIXED EXERCISE OF DEVOTION. DEVOTION is the life of religion; the very soul of piety; the highest employment of grace; and no other than the prepossession of heaven by the saints of God here upon earth: every improvement whereof is of more advantage and value to the Christian soul, than all the profit and contentment which this world can afford it. There is a kind of art of devotion, if we can attain unto it, whereby the practice thereof may be much advanced. We have known, indeed, some holy souls, which, out of the general precepts of piety, and their own happy experiments of God's mercy, have, through the grace of God, grown to a great measure of perfection this way; which yet might have been much expedited and completed, |