CHAPTER XIII.

Fuller's Triple Reconciler.

ULLER, in 1654, put forth two sermons dedicated to the Lady Elizabeth Newton, of Charlton, in Kent; as a memorial of his friendship, and of his intention ere this to have visited her, and to have preached these two sermons before her. The first, entitled Comfort in Calamity, was preached on a special occasion, in St. Clement's Church, London, near East Cheap. In this sermon, he thus alludes to the times. "Come

we now to that point which we conceive both pertinent to the text, and profitable for our times, namely, to give advice how people should behave themselves, if God should for their sins condemn them to live in a time and place wherein the foundations of religion (so far as they are destroyable) should be destroyed.*

"Be it here premised, that nothing herein is spoken out of reflection to the present times, to fill

*The text being Psalm xi. 3.

the heads or hearts of people with jealousies of any design, as intended at the present, to blow up the foundations of religion. And yet, give me leave to say, that some months since, had we gone on the same pace we began, a few steps farther would have brought all to a sad condition; so that the lawyers might even have drawn up the will of expiring divinity, and the divines performed the funerals of dying law in this nation. But, blessed be God that, since that time, confusion is confounded, and some hopes given of a better condition. In a word, if religion be no whit the nearer to the making, in all probability it is something the farther from the undoing."*

In this sermon, which is evidently tinctured with the regrets of the author, is a remark, not without its application to our own day; in which so many think it enough to decide their judgments, to allege that this or the other excellent person is their precedent. 66 Secondly, we except such (from willing consenting) as have been fraudulently circumvented instrumentally to concur to the destroying of foundations, clean contrary to their own desires and intents, as erroneously conceiving they supported the foundations, when really they destroyed them. This commonly cometh to pass by having men's persons in admiration: (Jude 16.) so that possessed with the opinion of their piety, they deliver up their judgments as their act and deed, signed and sealed to them, to believe and practise,

pp. 26, 27.

without denial, doubt, or delay, whatsoever the others shall prescribe.".

The second sermon had been preached at St. Mary's, Cambridge, probably as an Assize Sermon, from Rev. xx. 12, "And the books were opened." He treats first of the doom of heathens, then of Christians. This little treatise (for so it may be called) discovers the reverence and holy modesty of its ingenious author; his unwillingness to define and decide, where scripture itself is silent, or where only probable reasons can be urged. He was indeed no friend to enlarging consequential divinity, a defect but too common to theologians of very opposite opinions. He condemns that false and immodest fear which some evince of not vindicating all the ways of God to sight; a fear, in short, lest God should be unjust. Such, he says, are "jealous over God with an unholy jealousy, fearing where no fear is; and it proceedeth from a principle of atheism, seeing it springeth from the same root, to deny a God, and to doubt that God will appear just in manifesting his own proceedings."+

After a notice of the heathen, any thing but disparaging, Fuller concludes that, "yet even the best of these, in the strictness of God's justice, may be condemned when the books are opened. For, grant that in some particular actions they may be said morally to supererogate, yet in other things they were defective, and fell short of the just measure of God's commands, according to the moral light manifested unto them.

"Had pride been the weapon whereat a duel had been fought betwixt Alexander and Diogenes, probably the conqueror of the world had been worsted by a poor philosopher.

"Who hath more golden sentences than Seneca against the contempt of gold? Yet, (if Tacitus and other of his contemporaries may be credited) none more rich, none more covetous than he; as if out of design he had persuaded others to cast away their money, that he himself might come and gather up again."

it

He concludes then in the following page, "they are left under the wrath of God, and weight of their sin, and without any ordinary way to a Saviour.

"I say ordinary. I confess it is a gospel-truth that in the name of Jesus only salvation is to be expected; and it is a maxim no less sound than generally received, extra ecclesiam nulla salus, Out of God's church no hope to be saved; if both be confined to common dispensations and the regular known way of God's manifesting himself. But how far forth it might please God to reveal Christ to such heathens on their death-beds, by peculiar favour, out of the road of his common kindness, and how far forth God, as an universal creator, may be pleased to indulge unto some eminent heathen persons, is curious for man to inquire, and impossible to determine. Leave we them, therefore, to stand or fall to their own master;

* Pp. 60, 61.

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only adding this, that it will be far better at the last day of judgment for these Christian Pagans, as I may term them, than for many Pagan Christians amongst us now-a-days, who are worse under the sunshine of grace in the gospel, than they be by the dim candle-light of nature.

"Come we now to Christians; where the difficulty is the less to prove, that they all shall be arraigned, and may justly be condemned, when the books are opened: which will plainly appear on the serious perusal of the following particulars.

"First, that to all persons living within the pale of the church, Christ hath really and cordially, sine fuco et dolo, without any fraud or deceit, been tendered unto them under the conditions of faith and repentance, that whosoever believeth on him should have everlasting life: and this will appear when the books shall be opened.

Secondly, that even the worst of men living under the light of the gospel, have at one time or another their heads filled with good notions, and their hearts with good motions; Grace illuminating, wooing, and courting them, as I may say, to lay hold on God in his promises: on the truth whereof their own consciences will be deposed; and so this will appear when the books are opened.

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Thirdly, that God standeth ready, on man's good improvement of the aforesaid illuminating grace, (though not for the merit of man's performances, but for his own mere mercy and promise sake) to crown their endeavours with the addition and accession of farther degrees of grace, even