A guide to godliness or a Treatise of a Christian life showing the dutiesA guide to godlynesse or a Treatise of a Christian life shewing the duties

§. 7 The former point illustrated by examples.

This also is clear and evident by the examples of former times; for thus the old World, and Sodom and Gomorrah, living securely in ¹their sins without repentance, eating and drinking, buying and selling, building and planting, marrying and giving in marriage; were destroyed with Gods fearful Judgements of Fire and Water. So the Jews, when they securely blessed themselves in their prosperity, and drowned the voice of the Lords Heralds, denouncing war, with ²their louder cry of peace, peace, were vanquished by their enemies, and led into a miserable captivity. Thus Belshazzar was attached in ³the middest of his cups, and being in his chief polity, feasting his Princes and Concubines, and far off from all danger, his ruin is written by a finger upon the Wall, and soon after executed and accomplished. And as this hath been the condition of secure men in time past; so is it now, and shall be to the end of the World, and even at the end of it; For when they shall say peace and safety, then sudden destruction shall come upon them, as travail upon a Woman with ⁴child, and they shall not escape, as the Apostle telleth us. In which regard the estate of secure men, flourishing in prosperity, is like the state of the fatted Ox that is led to slaughter, who is as secure and far from fear, as he was in fore-times, when he was led to the pasture; or of the silly Bird, which feedeth securely on the bait, when the Net is ready to be pulled upon her; or of the Drunkard, of which the wise Man speaketh, who sleepeth securely in the midst of the Sea, or as he lieth upon the top of the Mast, ready to be blown over Hatches