to your troublers, when he cometh with his mighty angels in flaming fire, to take vengeance on rebels, and to be glorified in his saints, and admired in all true believers. And when that solemn judgment shall pass on them that did good, and that did evil, described Matt. xxv., with a "Come, ye blessed, inherit the kingdom," and "Go, ye cursed, into everlasting fire." Doing good and not doing it, much more doing mischief, will be better distinguished than now they are, when they are rendered as the reason of those different dooms.

TRUE CHRISTIANITY;

OR,

CHRIST'S ABSOLUTE DOMINION,

AND

MAN'S NECESSARY SELF-RESIGNATION

AND SUBJECTION.

IN TWO ASSIZE SERMONS,

PREACHED BEFORE THE HONOURABLE JUDGE OF

ASSIZE, AT WORCESTER, AUG. 2, 1654.

"For to this end Christ both died, and rose, and revived, that he might be Lord both of the dead and the living."-ROM. xiv. 9.

TO THE

RIGHT HONOURABLE SERJEANT GLYN,

NOW JUDGE OF ASSIZE IN THIS CIRCUIT.

MY LORD,

COULD my excuse have satisfied you, this sermon had been confined to the auditory it was prepared for. I cannot expect that it should find that candour and favour with every reader, as it did with the hearers. When it must speak to all, the guilty will hear, and then it will gall. Innocency is patient in hearing a reproof, and charitable in the interpretation, but guilt will smart and quarrel, and usually make a fault in him that findeth one in them. Yet I confess this is but a poor justification of his silence that hath a call to speak. Both my calling and this sermon would condemn me, if, on such grounds, I should draw back, but my backwardness was caused by the reason which I then tendered your Lordship as my excuse, viz., because here is nothing but what is common, and that it is in as common and homely a dress. And I hope we need not fear that our labours are dead, unless the press shall give them life. We bring not sermons to church, as we do a corpse for a burial. If there be life in them, and life in the hearers, the connaturality will cause such an amicable closure, that through the reception, retention, and operation of the soul, they will be the immortal seed of a life everlasting. But yet seeing the press hath a louder voice than mine, and the matter in hand is of such exceeding necessity, I shall not refuse, upon such an invitation, to be a remembrancer to the world of a doctrine and duty of such high concernment, though they have heard it ever so oft before. Seeing, therefore, I must present that now to your eyes, which I lately presented to your ears, I shall take the boldness to add one word of application in this epistle, which I thought not seasonable to mention in the first delivery, and that shall be to your Lordship, and all