Divine providence has made it my [illegible] and a calling has induced me (who am less than the least of all the servants of Christ) to appear among others in this cloud of public witnesses. The scope of the sermon is to endeavor the removal of the obstructions both of humiliation and reformation; two things which ought to lie very much in our thoughts at this time: concerning both I shall preface but little. Reformation has many unfriends, some upon the right hand, and some upon the left: while others cry up that detestable indifference or neutrality, abjured in our solemn Covenant, in so much that Gamaliel and Gallio, men who regarded alike the Jewish and the Christian Religion, are highly commended, as examples for all Christians, and as men walking by the rules not only of policy, but of reason and religion. Now let all those that are either against us, or not with us, do what they can, the right hand of the most High shall perfect the glorious begun Reformation: can all the world keep down the Sun of Righteousness from rising or being risen? Can they spread a veil over it? And though they dig deep to hide their counsels; is not this a time of God's over-reaching and befooling all plotting wits? They have conceived iniquity, and they shall bring forth vanity: they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: therefore we will wait upon the Lord that hides his face from the house of Jacob, and will look for him: and though he slay us, yet will we trust in him. The Lord has commanded to proclaim, and to say to the daughter of Zion, Behold your salvation comes: rejoice with Jerusalem all you that mourn for her; for behold now is the accepted time; behold now is the day of salvation: but I have more to say: mourn, O mourn with Jerusalem all you that rejoice for her; this day is a day of trouble, and of rebuke and of blasphemy; for the children are come to the birth, and there is not strength to bring forth. It is an interwoven time, warped with mercies, and woofted with judgments; say not you in your heart, the days of my mourning are at an end. Oh, we are to this day an unhumbled and an unprepared people; and there are among us both many cursed Achans, and many sleeping Jonahs, but few wrestling Jacobs, even the wise Virgins are slumbering with the foolish. Surely unless we be timely awaked, and more deeply humbled, God will punish us yet seven times more for our sins: and if he have chastised us with whips, he will chastise us with scorpions: and he will yet give a further charge to the sword, to avenge the quarrel of his Covenant. In such a case I cannot say according to the now Oxford Divinity, that *Preces & Lachrymae* — prayers and tears — must be our only shelter and fortress, and that we must cast away defensive arms as unlawful in any case whatever, against the supreme magistrate; (that is, by interpretation, they would have us do no more than pray, to the end themselves may do no less than prey:) wherein they are contradicted not only by Pareus, and by others that are eager for a Presbytery, (as a Prelate of chief note has lately taken, I should say mistaken, his mark) but even by those that are eager Royalists: (pardon me that I give them not their right name; I am sure when all is well reckoned we are better friends to royal authority than themselves.) Yet herein I do agree with them, that prayers and tears will prove our strongest weapons, and the only *tela divina*, the weapons that fight for us from above. O then fear the Lord, you his saints; O stir up yourselves to lay hold on him; keep no silence and give him no rest, till he establish, and till he make Jerusalem a praise in the earth. O that we could all make wells in our dry and desert-like hearts, that we may draw out water, even buckets full, to quench the wrath of a sin-revenging God, the fire which still burns against the Lord's inheritance. God grant that this sermon be not as water spilt on the ground but may drop as the rain, and distill as the dew of heaven upon your soul.
