January 21

Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days.—James 5:1-3.

THERE is no one thing will more disquiet the mind than to be defeated. Those things wherein men fear miscarriage, or expect disappointment, they prepare such a disposition of mind as may be fit to bear it. But when a man is surprised with evil, the novelty increaseth the vexation. And therefore the Scripture useth to express the greatness of a judgment, by the unexpectedness of it: "When thou didst terrible things, which we looked not for."—The unexpectance doth add unto the terror.

"A breach in an instant, a momentary, a sudden destruction, a swift damnation, a flying roll, a winged woman;"—such are the expressions of a severe judgment. And therefore it was a wise observation which Tacitus made of a great Roman, he was "ambiguarum rerum sciens, eoque intrepidus;" he foresaw, and by consequence was not so much troubled with evil events, as those whom they did surprise. Now men are apt to promise themselves much contentment in the fruition of earthly things, like the fool in the parable; and to be herein disappointed is the ground of much vexation. When a man travels in a deep way, and sees before him a large smooth plain, he presumes that will recompense the toil he was formerly put to: but when he comes to it, and finds it as rotten, as full of sloughs, and bogs, and quagmires, as his former way, his trouble is the more multiplied, because his hopes are deceived. The devil and the world beget in men's minds large hopes, and make profuse promises to those that will worship them; and a man, at a distance, sees abundance of pleasure and happiness in riches, honors, high places, eminent employments, and the like: but when he hath his heart's desire, and peradventure hath outclimbed the very modesty of his former wishes, hath ventured to break through many a hedge, to make gaps through God's law and his own conscience, that he might, by shorter passages, hasten to the idol he so much worshipped; he finds at last, that there was more trouble in the fruition, than expectation at the distance; that all this is but like the Egyptian temples, where, through a stately frontispiece and magnificent structure, a man came, with much preparations of reverence and worship, but to the image of an ugly ape, the ridiculous idol of that people. A man comes to the world as to a lottery, with a head full of hopes and projects to get a prize; and returns with a heart full of blanks, utterly deluded in his expectation. The world useth a man as ivy doth an oak; the closer it gets to the heart, the more it clings and twists about the affections, though it seem to promise and flatter much, yet it doth indeed eat out his real substance, and choke him in the embraces.