own.

TRINITY. 291

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N LII.

UNDAY AFTER TRINITY.

SECOND PART.

ST. MATTHEW, ix. 2.

Jesus, seeing their faith, saith unto the sick of the palsy; Son, be of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven thee.

IN my last sermon, it was my it was my wish to explain to you the former of the two main truths to be inferred from the present text; namely, that our Lord was moved to perform the cure of the paralytic man, not by his faith, but by that of his friends and supporters; to which it followed as a necessary consequence that it is the duty, or, to speak more properly, the glorious privilege of every Christian to assist his sinful or afflicted brethren, not by advice alone, or the outward acts of money, food, or physic, but by a frequent mention of their names in prayer, and interceding in their behalf at the throne of grace. And it also followed, that the greatest treasure, which this world could offer, the surest earthly defence against all the evils of life, was the

prayer of faithful and religious friends: while, on the other hand, those who really wish well to their connections, or neighbours, are called upon, by every possible motive of affection, and of reason, to make their love effectual, and their prayers acceptable at the hands of God, by a devout and holy life.

From the means, by which our Saviour's promise of mercy was obtained, I now pass on to the terms in which it was given, which, according to my promise, I shall now explain as clearly as I can. "Son," said our Saviour to the man who was sick of the palsy; “Son, be of good cheer, thy sins are forgiven thee."

It may seem, at first, that this assurance, however mercifully spoken, and however comfortable to that, or to any other sinner, was yet by no means an answer to the immediate wants of the sufferer, or to the request first made by his friends. They brought him to the feet of Christ, for the relief of his bodily pains; and it was no answer to their prayer, to absolve him from the diseases of the soul.- The pardon of his sins was, indeed, a greater act of mercy than the giving ease to his body; but this pardon was, still, not the thing desired; and it is even as if we should give new clothes, or expensive physic, to a man perishing with hunger, and who asked us for a morsel of bread. Nor is it enough to say, that he, who grants the greater

of two favours, we may be sure, will not refuse to grant us the less; for, though this is a very natural and Christian ground of hope,-to those who reflect, that, as Christ gave Himself for the sins of the world, so He certainly will not disdain to care for our bodily wants,—yet, in the present case, we are reduced, I think, from the connection and circumstances of the story, to suppose, that the sins of the paralytic man were, in some way, connected with his palsy and that, the cause, or occasion, of such chastisement being removed, it would follow, that their bitter consequences might also pass away. That is, if we apply the case of this particular man to the general sins and misfortunes of the world,— sickness and affliction of every sort, are, if not always, at least very often, the consequence of sin, and, in part, its punishment.

That all our sorrows and misfortunes are the consequence of sin, is, to a certain extent, deducible from the doctrine of the fall of Adam ; and the bitter train of death and sufferings, which that fatal disobedience introduced on earth. And, as the sin of Adam brought death and disease, so have the sins of every particular man a plain and direct tendency to increase and aggravate the misfortunes incident to our nature, and the evils which we inherit from our first parent. Poverty, ill-will, bad fare, and disappointment, are the natural and unavoidable

fruits of certain particular sins; and, among diseases, how many are there which God has sent, as guards and executioners in the gate of indulgence; to drive, with their hideous and pallid aspect, unwary and unpractised sinners from the forbidden path; and to execute some portion of His righteous vengeance on those, whom the example of their suffering fellow creatures has not been able to deter from like offences.

But, besides all these, which bear in their very nature the mark of the sin which gave them birth, there are doubtless many other instances,

how many is known to God only who sends them, -wherein the patient himself, if his eyes were open to his spiritual state; may read the anger of God, written in characters of sorrow and of pain, against some darling sin, which is, in some distant way, connected with his present suffering. That this was often the case, under the Jewish dispensation, is plain from a host of passages in Scripture, out of which it will be "When Thou" said the

sufficient to name two. Psalmist to Jehovah, "when Thou with rebukes doth chasten man for sin, Thou makest his beauty to consume away, like as it were a moth fretting a garment.' "Foolish men" he asserts in like manner," are plagued for their offence, and because of their wickedness. Their soul

1 Psalm xxxix. 12. Common Prayer.

abhorred all manner of meat; and they were even hard at death's door." 1

Nor is this the language of the Old Testament alone; or is it applicable to those only who, like the Jews, were under the visible government of God as an earthly and temporal sovereign. Our Saviour, too, exhorts him, whom He had healed, to "sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto him":" and St. Paul, in addressing the Christian society at Corinth, declares, that, in punishment for their disrespect to the Lord's Table, many were weak and sickly among them: or, in the language of our Church, that they were plagued with divers diseases and sundry kinds of death. That all diseases are sent from God is plain from reason itself; that many of them are brought upon us on account of our sins, is no less plain from the express words of Scripture; but that all diseases are thus brought upon us, will not therefore necessarily follow; and it is very important to attend to these distinctions, because the neglect of them may lead us into very uncharitable and very groundless opinions, as to the spiritual state of our neighbours; or sometimes into a very foolish and fatal confidence in our own health and prosperity: or, undercircumstances of suffering and distress, into a despair and abjectness of spirit altogether as 1 Psalm cvii. 17, 18. 2 John, v. 14.

3 1 Cor. xi. 30.