Christ shall be their accuser, not only upon the stock of those direct
injuries (which I before reckoned) of crucifying the Lord of
Life, once and again, etc., but upon the titles of contempt and
unworthiness, of unkindness and ingratitude; and the accusation will
be nothing else but a plain representation of those artifices and
assistances, those bonds and invitations, those constrainings and
importunities, which our dear Lord used to us to make it almost
impossible to lie in sin, and necessary to be saved. For it will, it
must needs be, a fearful exprobration of our unworthiness, when the
Judge Himself shall bear witness against us that the wisdom of God
Himself was strangely employed in bringing us safely to felicity. I
shall draw a short scheme which, altho it must needs be infinitely
short, of what God hath done for us, yet it will be enough to shame
us. God did not only give His Son for an example, and the Son gave
Himself for a price for us, but both gave the Holy Spirit to assist
us in mighty graces, for the verifications of faith, and the
entertainments of hope, and the increase and perseverance of charity.
God gave to us a new nature, He put another principle into us, a third
part of a perfective constitution; we have the spirit put into us, to
be a part of us, as properly to produce actions of a holy life, as the
soul of man in the body does produce the natural. God hath exalted
human nature, and made it in the person of Jesus Christ, to sit above
the highest seat of angels, and the angels are made ministering
spirits, ever since their Lord became our brother. Christ hath by a
miraculous sacrament given us His body to eat and His blood to drink;
He made ways that we may become all one with Him. He hath given us an
easy religion, and hath established our future felicity upon natural
and pleasant conditions, and we are to be happy hereafter if we suffer
God to make us happy here; and things are so ordered that a man must
take more pains to perish than to be happy. God hath found out rare