Use for reproof of several sorts of persons 2/4

  

        

 O friends! be serious.  If you will trade for holi­ness, let it be for ‘true holiness,’ as it is phrased, ‘Put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness,’ Eph. 4:24.  Two phrases are here observable.  Holiness is called the ‘new man after God,’ that is, according to the likeness of God—such a sculpture on the soul or image as is drawn after God, as the picture after the face of a man.  Again, ‘true holiness,’ or holiness of truth, either respecting the word, which is the rule of holi­ness, and then it means a Scripture holiness, not pharisaical and traditional; or else it respects the heart, which is the seat of truth or falsehood.  True holiness in this sense is holiness and righteousness in the heart. 

There must be truth of holiness in the inner parts.  Many a man’s beauty of holiness is but like the beauty of his body, skin deep, all on the outside.  Rip the most beautiful body, and that which was so fair without will be found within, when opened, to have little besides blood, filth, and stench; so this counterfeit holiness, when unbowelled and inside exposed to view, will appear to have hid within it nothing but abundance of spiritual impurities and abominations.  ‘God,’ said Paul to the high priest, ‘shall smite thee, thou whited wall,’ Acts 23:3.  Thus say I to thee, O hypocrite! God shall also smite thee, thou whited wall, or rather painted sepulchre, that thy paint without in thy profession doth not now more dazzle the eyes of others into admiration of thy sanc­tity, than thy rottenness within, which then shall ap­pear without, will make thee abhorred and loathed of all that see thee.

3. Those who are so far from being holy them­selves, that they mock and jeer others for being so. This breastplate of righteousness is of so base an ac­count with them, that they who wear it in their daily conversation do make themselves no less ridiculous to them than if they came forth in a fool's coat, or were clad in a dress contrived on purpose to move laughter.  When some wretches would set a saint most at naught, and represent him as an object of greatest scorn, what is the language he wraps him up in but ‘there goes a holy brother, one of the pure ones!’  His very holiness is that which he thinks to disgrace him with.  This shows a heart extremely wicked.  There is a further degree of wickedness appears in mocking holiness in another, than har­bouring unholiness in a man’s own bosom.  That man hath a great antipathy indeed against a dish of meat who not only himself refuseth to eat of it, but cannot bear the sight of it on another’s trencher without vomiting.  O how desperately wicked is that man with whom the very scent and sight of holiness, at such a distance, works so strange an effect as to make him cast up the gall and bitterness of his spirit against it! The Spirit of God bestows the chair upon this sort of sinners, and sets them above all their brethren in iniquity, as most deserving the place.  ‘Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful,’  Ps. 1:1.  The scorner here is set as chairman at the counsel-table of sinners.  Some read the word for scornful, ‘rhetorical mockers.’ There is indeed a devilish wit that some show in their mocks at holiness; they take a kind of pride in polish­ing those darts which they shoot against the saints.  The Septuagint read it ‘the chair of pestilent ones.’ Indeed, as the plague is the most mortal among dis­eases, so is the spirit of scorning among sins.  As few recover out of this sin as any whatever besides.  The Scripture speaks of this sort of sinners as almost free among the dead.  [There is] as little hope of doing them good for their souls, as of those for their bodies who cannot keep the physic administered to them, but presently cast it up before it hath any operation on them; and therefore we are even bid to save our physic, and not so much as bestow a reproof on them, lest we have it cast on our faces: ‘Reprove not a scorner, lest he hate thee,’ Prov. 9:8.  All we can do is write ‘Lord, have mercy on them,’ upon their door—I mean, rather pray for them than speak to them.

           There hath of old been this sort of mocking sin­ners min­gled amongst the godly.  A mocking Ishmael was in Abraham’s family, Gen. 21:9.  And observable it is, what interpretation the Spirit of God makes of his scornful car­riage towards his brother: ‘As then he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, even so it is now,’ Gal. 4:29.  Pray, mark,