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Mercy magnified on a penitent prodigal, or A brief discourse, wherein Christs parable of…
Mercy magnified on a penitent prodigal, or A brief discourse, wherein Christs parable of the lost son found, is opened and applied, as it was delivered in sundry sermons, / by Samuel Willard teacher of a church in Boston in New-England. ; [Two lines from Luke]
printed by Samuel Green for Samuel Philips, 1684
Title page typeset from the transcription.
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
DOCT. IV. Satan exposeth his Vassals to all mean, ignoble, and sordid services.
This our Saviour aims at, by the Citizens setting him to keep swine: Swine were of old by the Ceremonial Law reckoned among unclean beasts, and still they are of brutes the most brutish: A swineherd among men is accounted the most low, sordid and contemptible employment: Such and so vile; yea, and incomparably more base are those services which Satan employs wicked men about: we may conceive of thi• if we consider wha• […] is he puts them upon doing: It is called in the Scripture, a fulfilling of his lusts, Joh. 8. 44. and those are vile lusts so called, Rom. 1. 26. If we should examine in particular, what it is that wicked men do, in obedience to Satan's will, we shall find it all to be filthy and swinish: ⟨p. 117⟩What is the drunkards employment, but swilling himself, and turning his body into a living cask, and so losing that little of man which he had in him, and wholly becomes a beast? What doth the lewd and voluptuous man follow, but the giving scope to his lustful humour, and so throws himself into the perpetration of those base and obscene actions of which it is a shame to make any mention? As for the Epicure, Philosophy it self calls him not a swine-herd, but a very swine: Epicuri de grige porcum. And in truth all lusts are brutish; it hath its seat in the sensitive part of man, and its highest aspirings are but to give content to the body and senses, with a total neglect of the soul. Let us but consider what man was made for, viz. the service of God, those high and noble employments which Angels delight in, and account their glory, and then look and see what a world of men are doing, one courting his pleasures, another chasing after honours, a third heaping up wealth, a fourth studying his revenge, &c. unto any of which (in a true judgment) keeping of swine is a noble and honourable employment: And yet these are the things with which Satan seeks to divert men, and in the pursuit after which he makes them to hope that they shall get a living in this famine.