pains by the immediate agency of evil spirits, but hath wholly deposited it in the hands of the temporal powers, who are now his sole ministers and revengers, to execute wrath upon those that do evil. But yet still upon occasion he so far makes use of the ministry of the devils in correcting us, as to permit them to excite wicked men, and especially wicked princes and governors, to plague and persecute us. When he sees his church, or any particular part of it, degenerating from the purity of his religion, or waxing cold and remiss in their love and duty to him, he many times gives a loose to these malignant spirits, who always burn with inveterate rancour against it, and permits them to provoke and stimulate its enemies to exert and employ their power against it: so that whatsoever mischiefs wicked princes or men do to the church of Christ, or to any part of it, they do it only as the instruments of these evil angels, and by their mischievous suggestions and instigations; for so Christ tells the church of Smyrna, in Rev. ii. 10. The Devil shall cast some of you into prison; that is, The wicked governors there shall do it by the instigation of the Devil, to whom I will certainly give permission to instigate them thereunto : for so Christ is said to have the keys of the bottomless pit, Rev. i. 18. that is, power to confine or let loose those evil spirits that inhabit it, at his pleasure and when he thinks fit to confine them, we find the church enjoys peace, and rest, and prosperity, Rev. xx. 1—4. But no sooner doth he let them loose again, but they are immediately instigating the wicked powers of the earth to fight against it and persecute it, ibid. ver. 7-9. From whence it is evident, that the power of these evil spirits to excite

evil princes or men to persecute his church, is under the restraint and determination of our Saviour; that they can proceed no farther in this their mischievous design, than he thinks meet to permit them; and consequently, that in all those persecutions to which they excite their instruments, they are but the ministers and executioners of Christ, even as the dog is the shepherd's in worrying the straying sheep into the fold.

III. Another instance of the ministry of evil spirits to Christ is, their hardening and confirming incorrigible and obstinate sinners in their wicked purposes: for when, notwithstanding all those powerful methods, which, in the administration of his government, Christ uses to reduce and reclaim men, they still persist in their rebellion; when they have conquered his grace, quenched his Spirit, broke through all his persuasions, and baffled all his arts of saving them, he many times withdraws from them those powerful aids of his Spirit and of his holy angels, which they have wilfully neglected, and utterly abandons them to the powers of darkness, whom from thenceforth he freely permits to tempt and seduce them, and to toll them on at their pleasure from sin to sin, and from one degree of sin to another, till they have filled up the measure of their iniquities : and this, without doubt, is the severest punishment that Christ inflicts upon sinners on this side hell: for this is a kind of damnation above ground, to be delivered up alive to those restless furies, who, having free leave to back and ride us at their pleasure, to be sure will never cease stimulating and spurring us on from wickedness to wickedness, till they have leaped us headlong into the everlasting burnings.

And this, I conceive, is the meaning of God's hardening sinners, so often mentioned in the holy scripture, which doth not at all imply, that God, by any positive act of his own, infuses any sinful quality into men's wills, to excite or stimulate them to sin, as some men have blasphemously enough asserted; for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man: but when men have a long while hardened themselves against all the powerful impressions of his grace, and in the pursuit of their wicked courses have turned a deaf ear to all his persuasions to the contrary, then, as a just punishment of their incorrigible obstinacy, he many times withdraws from them the influences of his grace, and delivers them up to Satan, or, which is the same thing, permits him to seize them as his own, and to take possession of them, and, as a wicked soul, to animate and act them in all their wickedness: for so the Devil is said évepyeïv, to work in the children of disobedience, so that these children of disobedience are a sort of everyoúμevol, or persons that are possessed and acted by the Devil. And too many deplorable instances there are of wicked men that sin on at that rate, as if they were really acted by some diabolical genius, that are hurried into such monstrous extravagancies of wickedness, as are neither pleasant, nor profitable, nor reputable; so that they gratify no passion or appetite in human nature by committing them, but do seem to sin merely for the sake of sinning, out of a kind of preternatural malice, when they can scarce give any other reason to themselves why they do such an action, but only this, because it is wicked; so truly diabolical is their love of wickedness, so abstract from all those motives which are wont to af

And

fect the passions and appetites of men, that it is hardly resolvable into any other reason, but that they are delivered up by God to be informed and acted by the Devil; who, having once obtained the possession of them, continually plies them with temptation, and never ceases urging and pressing them forward from one degree of wickedness to another, till at length he hath seared and hardened them into final and incurable impenitence. this in particular was the case of Judas, who having long persisted in his thievery and sacrilege, notwithstanding all those warnings and admonitions our Saviour had given him to the contrary, was at length abandoned to that Devil to whose temptations he had been so obsequious; upon which it is said, that the Devil entered into him, Luke xxii. 3. and the Devil being in possession of him, immediately provokes and irritates him to the foulest and most horrible villainy that ever any mortal creature was guilty of; for so, John xiii. 2. we are told, that the Devil put it into the heart of Judas to betray Christ. But as yet, it seems, he was not totally abandoned to the Devil, who had only permission to make that black and dire proposal to him; after which our Saviour attempts, by the most pathetic persuasions, to prevent his compliance, Mark xiv. 21. notwithstanding which, the wretch being still enticed by his own covetousness to listen to that horrid suggestion, our Saviour having marked him out for a traitor, by giving him the sop, it is said again, that Satan entered into him; and upon this second entrance our Saviour gives him up for desperate; for, That thou doest, saith he, do quickly, John xiii. 27. As much as if he had said, Now I find the Devil has the full posses-.

sion of thee, and that henceforth there remains no more hope of reclaiming thee: go therefore and despatch thy wicked purpose as soon as thou pleasest. So that now, it seems, he was entirely delivered up to the Devil; who thereupon immediately hurries him to the execution of his black design.

IV. And lastly, Another instance of the ministry of evil spirits to Christ, is their executing his vengeance on incorrigible sinners in the other world. For since, as I have shewn before, our Saviour makes use of the power and malice of these evil spirits to correct and chasten men in this life, why may we not thence conclude, that he makes use of the same to plague and punish them in the life to come; especially considering that they bear the same malice to us in the other life that they did in this; for they tempt us to sin here for no other end but that they may make us miserable there; and therefore to be sure that same malice of theirs which excites them now to contribute all they can to our sin, will equally provoke them then to contribute all they can to our misery, and render them altogether as active in tormenting us in hell as they were in tempting us upon earth; and then, considering that spirits can act upon spirits, as well as bodies upon bodies, and that the more powerful any spirit is, the more vigorously it can act upon other spirits, we may be sure that those evil spirits, being angels by nature, are incomparably more powerful than the souls of men, and therefore can act upon them with unspeakably more force and vigour than one soul can on another: for the weaker any spirit is, the more passive it must necessarily be to those spirits that are stronger and more powerful; and therefore, by how much weaker wicked souls are