Sermons upon the Book of Job

TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE AND HIS SPECIAL GOOD LORD, ROBERT EARL OF LEICESTER, BARON OF DENBIGH, KNIGHT OF THE MOST NOBLE ORDER OF THE GARTER, ONE OF THE QUEENS MAJESTIES MOST Honourable privy Council, &c. Grace, mercy, peace and truth in Christ.

TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE AND HIS SPECIAL GOOD LORD, ROBERT ERLE OF LEYCESTER, BARON OF DENBYGH, KNIGHT OF THE MOST NOBLE ORDER OF THE GARTER, ONE OF THE QVEENES MAIESTIES MOST HOnorable priuie Counsell, &c. Grace, mercie, peace and truthe in Christe.

AL men can skill to complain with Job, that this short life of ours is fraught with many miseries, afflictions, and adversities, and very experience showeth it to be so. For we see daily in others and feel also in ourselves, the continual perils and crosses that besiege us and pierce us to the hart, even from the time of our birth to the giving up of our last gasp. We find them painful, irksome and tedious to us, and therefore we would fain shift them of. But in the mean while, do we look up to the hand that smiteth us? do we consider the causes why they be laid upon us? do we seek out the ends whereunto they tend? or have we an eye to the fruits and effects of them? Nay rather degenerating into a kind of brutishness and hanging our heads grovelling down too the groundward, we either imagine them to grow out of the earth, or impute them to the influence of the skies, or father them upon fortune, or attribute them unto men, or wite them upon the unhappiness of the time, or tie them to the place, or finally stand amazed at the afflictions themselves, surmising any thing rather than the truth, as who should say that God either could not or would not govern all things by his only will and providence, which is as much as to deny that there is any God at all. By reason whereof we seldom or never enter into ourselves to consider our own state and the inestimable goodness of our God, too think how justly we have deserved too be scourged for our sins, and how fatherly he dealeth with us in cleansing the corruption of our infected nature, and in showing the perfectness of his mighty power in these frail earthen vessels of our weak and mortal bodies. None of these things do we take heed of: and therefore much less do we look so far afore us, as too consider that the end why God scourgeth us, is to bring us back again to him by repentance, that he might show himself a merciful father too us, and heap up his benefits and gracious gifts upon us, too our greater comfort. We consider not that the end of worldly afflictions is always happy too such as fear him, and that the short enduring of he troubles of this life, procureth an inestimable weight of glory in the life too come.