DIRECTIONS how to use the sword of the word AGAINST PERSECUTORS 2/3

           DIRECTION SECOND.  Improve those scriptures which teach us to dread God more and fear man less. Every man is most loath to fall into his hands whom he fears most.  So that, if God hath once gained the supremacy of thy fear, thou wilt rather skip into the hottest fire the persecutor can make, than make God thy enemy.  ‘Princes have persecuted me without a cause: but my heart standeth in awe of thy word,’ Ps. 119:161.  David had put, it seems, man’s wrath and that which God threatens in his word into the scales, and finding God’s hand to be without compare the heavier, trembles at that, and ventures the worst that the other can do against him.  Hence it is the Scripture is so much in depressing the power of man, that we may not be scared at his big looks or threats; in depressing the power of man, and representing his utmost rage to be so contemptible and inconsiderable a thing, as none that knows who God is needs fear the worst he can do.  ‘Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein is he to be accounted of?’ Isa. 2:22.  ‘Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell,’ Matt. 10:28.  Pueri timent larvas, sed non timent ignem —children are afraid of bugbears that cannot hurt them, but can play with fire that will burn them.  And no less childish is it to be frighted into a sin at the frowns of a sorry man, who comes forth with a vizard of seeming dread and terror, but hath no power to hurt us more than our own fear gives him, and to play with hell-fire, into which God is able to cast us for ever.  Truly this is to be scared with painted fire in the picture, and not in the furnace where it really burns.  What was John Huss the worse for his fool’s cap that his enemies put on his head, so long  as under it he had a helmet of hope which they could not take off?  Or how much the nearer hell was the same blessed martyr for their committing his soul to the devil?  No nearer than some of their own wicked crew are to heaven for being sainted in the pope’s calendar.  Melancthon said some are anathema secundum dici —to be doubly cursed, as Luther and other faithful servants of Christ whom the pope cursed.  But what saith David?  ‘Let them curse, but bless thou,’ Ps. 109:28.  He that hath God’s good needs not fear the world’s bad.  The dog’s barking doth not make the moon change her colour.  Nor needs the saint change his countenance for the rage of his persecutors.