scudderpage149

cause of your affliction; consider with yourself, what harm impatience will do you, compared with the good that will follow a patient enduring of it. For, besides that it deprives you of your right understanding, and makes you to forget yourself, as I have said, even to forget your duty both to God and man; it is the readiest means to double and lengthen the affliction, not to abate it, and take it off. That parent who intended to give a child but light correction, if he be impatient and rebellious under it, is hereby more incensed, and does punish him more severely. But if, in any affliction, you do patiently submit yourself under God's mighty hand, 1 Peter v. 6, besides the ease and quiet it gives to the soul, and experience and hope which it produces in you, it is the readiest means of seasonable deliverance out of it; for then God will exalt you in due time. God is wise, and too strong to be overcome by any means, but by fervent prayer and humble submission to his will, Hosea xii. 4.

Fifthly, If yet your mind be disquieted within you at any crosses; that you may quiet your soul, you must not, as most do, only consider the weight and number of your crosses, together with their several aggravations; but withal seriously think upon the manifold mercies and favours of God, both in the evils you have escaped, and in the benefits which you have received, and do now enjoy, and which, through Christ, you have cause to hope to receive hereafter. But amongst all his mercies, forget not this one, which you have already, God has given Christ unto you, whereby he himself is yours, as your all-sufficient portion. Now, if you have Christ, you have with him, all things also which are worth the having, Rom. viii. 32.

When you have thus weighed impartially blessings and mercies against crosses, you will tell me, that for one cross, you have a hundred blessings, yea, a blessing in your crosses, Psa. cxix. 71, and you will say, that this one mercy of being in Christ, alone weighs up all crosses, and makes them as light as nothing; giving you so much matter of joy and thankfulness,