went through fire and through water;" 1 Pet. i. 6,
7, "Ye are in heaviness through manifold temptations; that the trial of
your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though
it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise," &c. Affliction is also
the fuller's soap to purify and make white: Dan. xi. 35; xii. 10, "Many
shall be purified, and made white, and tried;" where the same word is used
from which I said before the fuller's soap hath its name.

The doctrine shall be this: "Tribulation doth either accompany or follow
after the work of reformation or purging of the house of God." So it was
when Christ himself came into his temple: Luke xii. 49, 51, "I am come to
send fire on the earth. Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth?
I tell you, Nay; but rather division;"--so it was when the Apostles were
sent forth into the world: Peter applieth to that time the words of Joel,
"And I will show wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath;
blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke: the sun shall be turned into
darkness, and the moon into blood," Acts ii. 19, 20. The meaning is, such
tribulation shall follow the gospel, which shall be like the darkening of
the great lights of the world, and, as it were, a putting of heaven and
earth out of their course, so great a change and calamity shall come. The
experience both of the ancient and now reformed churches doth also
abundantly confirm this doctrine. Neither must we think that all the
calamities of the church are now overpast. Who can be assured that that
hour of greatest darkness, the killing of the witnesses, is past, and all
that sad prophecy, Rev. xi., fulfilled? And if some be not much
mistaken,(1414) it is told, Dan. xii. 1, that there shall be greater
tribulation about the time of the Jews' conversion than any we have yet
seen: "At that time," saith the angel to Daniel, "there shall be a time of
trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same
time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall
be found written in the book."

I make haste to the uses; and, first, let me give unto God the glory of
his truth. If we have been deceived, surely he hath not deceived us; for
he hath given us plain warning in his word, and hath not kept up from us
the worst things which ever have or ever shall come upon his church. And
now when the sword of the Lord hath gotten a charge against these three
covenant