The Works of Jeremy Taylor Author:Jeremy Taylor Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SERMON X. OF CHRISTIAN PRUDENCE. MATTHEW, CHAP. X.—VERSE 16. Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves. PART I. When our blessed Saviour... more » entailed a law and a condition of sufferings, and promised a state of persecution to his servants; and withal had charmed them with the bands and unactive chains of so many passive graces, that they should not be able to stir against the violence of tyrants, or abate the edge of axes by any instrument but their own blood ; being ' sent forth as sheep among wolves,' innocent and silent, harmless and defenceless, certainly exposed to sorrow, and uncertainly guarded in their persons ; their condition seemed nothing else but a designation to slaughter: and when they were drawn into the folds of the church, they were betrayed into the hands of evil men, infinitely and unavoidably: and when an Apostle invited a proselyte to come to Christ, it was in effect a snare laid for his life; and he could neither conceal his religion, nor hide his person, nor avoid a captious question, nor deny his accusation, nor elude the bloody arts of orators and informers, nor break prisons, nor any thing but die. If the case stood just thus, it was well eternity stood at the outer days of our life, ready to receive such harmless people: but surely there could be no art in the design, no pitying of human weaknesses, no complying with the condition of man, no allowances made for customsand prejudices of the world, no inviting men by the things of men, no turning nature into religion ; but it was all the way a direct violence, and an open prostitution of our lives, and a throwing away our fortune into a sea of rashness and credulity. But, therefore, God ordered the affairs and necessities of religion in other ways, and to other purposes. Although God ...« less