A treatise of faith divided into two parts. The first showing the nature, the…A treatise of faith diuided into two parts. The first shewing the nature, the…

Ninthly, Faith believeth one contrary in another,¹ and out of deepest distresses gathereth assurance of sweetest deliverances. For the Lord shall judge his people, ²and repent himself for his servants, when he seeth that their power is gone, and there is none shut up or left. The Lord will be a refuge for the oppressed: a refuge in times, or due time of trouble. Mans extremity is Gods opportunity: Deepest misery is the fittest season for deliverance. Men often like to Swallows, will be with us in Summer, but leave us in winter. The Devil, when he hath drawn his into the briars will give them leave to look for themselves. But God hath ever stood nearest to his, when their exigences have been greatest. The experience of misery & calamity is made the sure ground of such joyful hopes, as the Lord hath promised.³ The greater sorrows the people of God suffered, the more undoubted experience they had of divine truth contained in Mosaical threatenings: the more undoubted the experience of their truth, upon consciousness of their own transgressions, the greater motives they had upon hearty and sincere repentance, to apprehend the stability of his sweetest promises for ⟨p. 344⟩their good. No depression of this people, but served as a countersway to hasten, intend, or enlarge the measure of their wonted exaltation, so long as they rightly weighed all their actions and proceedings in Moses balances, and compared their permanent sorrow for sin past with their wonted delight in their permanent sorrow for sin past, with their wonted delight in transient pleasures.⁴ This that the Lord had stricken Jacob with the wound of an enemy, and with a sharp chastisement for the multitude of his iniquities, is propounded as an argument of consolation: for because the Lord had killed, they must believe, he would make alive again. The present wounds inflicted contrary to the rules of politic defence, were the best pledges of their future health, beyond all hope of State-Surgeons. And when Jeremiah more admired, then distrusted Gods mercies, in tendering the purchase of his Kinsman's field to him, when the Kings and Princes of Judah had no assurance of so much possession in the promised Land, as to inherit the Sepulchres of their Fathers: