REMNANTS OF TIME,

EMPLOYED IN

PROSE AND VERSE:

OR,

SHORT ESSAYS AND COMPOSURES,

ON

VARIOUS SUBJECTS.

T

ADVERTISEMENT.

Dr. Watts's Opinion about publishing these Papers, appears in the following Advertisement, prefixed to them by himself.

THESE papers were written at several seasons and intervals of leisure, and on various occasions, arising through the greatest part of my life. Many of them were designed to be published among the Reliquiæ Juveniles; but, for some reason or other, not worth present notice, were laid by at that time. Whether I shall ever publish them I know not, though far the greatest part of them have long stood corrected among my manuscripts; nor do I suppose many of them inferior to those Essays and Remarks of this kind, which have before appeared in the world with some acceptance. If they are not published in my life-time, my worthy friends, who have the care of my papers, may leave out what they please.

July 3, 1740.

I. W.

1

REMNANTS OF TIME,

EMPLOYED IN

PROSE AND VERSE, &c.

I.

Justice and Grace.

NEVER was there any hour since the creation of

all things, nor ever will be till the last conflagration, wherein the holy God so remarkably displayed his justice and his grace, as that hour that saw our Lord Jesus Christ hanging upon the cross, forsaken of his Father and expiring. What a dreadful glory was given to vindictive justice, when the great and terrible God made the soul of his own Son a painful sacrifice for sin! What an amazing instance of grace, that he should redeem such worthless sinners as we are from the vengeance by exposing his beloved Son to it! When I view the severity or the compassion of that hour, my thoughts are lost in astonishment: it is not for me, it is not for Paul or Apollos, it is not for the tongue of men or angels, to say which was greatest, the compassion or the severity. Humble adoration becomes us best, and a thankful acceptance of the pardon that was purchased at so dear a rate.

Next to this, I know not a more eminent display of terror and mercy, than the dying hour of a pious but desponding christian, under the tumultuous and disquieting temptations of the devil.

See within those curtains a person of faith and serious piety, but of a melancholy constitution, and expecting death. While his flesh is tortured with sharp agonies, and terribly convulsed, a ghastly horror sits on his countenance, and he groans under extreme anguish. Behold the man a favourite of heaven, a child of light, assaulted with the darts of hell, and his soul surrounded with thick darkness: all his sins stand in dreadful array before him, and threaten him with the execution of all the curses in the Bible. Though he loves God with all his heart, he is in the dark, he knows it not, nor can he believe that God has any love for him; and though he cannot utterly let go his hold of his Saviour and the gospel, yet in his own apprehension he is abandoned both of the Father and the Son. In every new pang that he feels, his own fears persuade him that the gates of hell are now opening upon him: he hangs hovering over the burning pit, and at the last gasp of life, when he seems to be sinking into eternal death, he quits the body with all its sad circumstances, and feels himself safe in the arms of his Saviour, and the presence of his God.

What amazing transport! What agreeable surprise! not to be uttered by the words of our scanty mortal language, nor conceived but by the person who feels it: the body indeed, which was the habitation of so pious a spirit, is demolished at once: behold the lifeless carcase; it makes haste to putrefaction. The released soul, in ecstasy, feels and surveys its own happiness, appears before the throne, is acknowledged there as one of the sons of God, and invested with the glories of the upper world. Sorrows and sins, guilt, fetters, and darkness, vanish for ever: it exults in liberty and light, and dwells for ever under the smiles of God.

What was it could provoke the wise and gracious God to permit the wicked spirit to vex one of his own children at this rate, and to deal so severely with the man whom he loves? To expose that soul

to exquisite anguish in the flesh, which he designed the same day to make a partner with blessed spirits? To express in one hour so much terror and so much mercy?

St. Paul will give a short and plain answer to this inquiry, Rom. viii. 10: The body is dead because of sin, but the spirit is life because of righteousness.' Hence that anguish, those agonies and convulsions in the sinful flesh that must die; and these will be felt, in some measure, by the partner-spirit; though that spirit, being vested with divine righteousness, or justified in the sight of God, shall survive these agonies in a peaceful immortality. Though the sufferings of the Son of God have redeemed it from an everlasting hell, yet it becomes the offended Majesty of heaven sometimes to give sensible instances, what misery the pardoned sinner has deserved; and the moment that he receives him into full blessedness, may, on some accounts, be the fittest to make a display of all his terror, that the soul may have the full taste of felicity, and pay the higher honours to recovering grace. The demolition of the earthly tabernacle, with all the pangs the groans that attend it, are a shadow of that vengeance which was due even to the best of saints: it is fit we should see the picture of vindictive justice, before we are taken into the arms of eternal mercy.

and

Besides, there may be another reason that renders the dying hour of this man more dreadful too: perhaps he had walked unwatchfully before God, and had given too much indulgence to some congenial iniquity, some vice that easily beset him: now it becomes the great God to write his own hatred of sin in deep and piercing characters, sometimes on his own children, that he may let the world know that he is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity any where without resentment. The man had built. much hay and stubble upon the divine foundation of Christ Jesus, and it was proper that he should 'be saved so as by fire. 1 Cor. iii. 15.