labour, and fruitless toil, (you find this already by experience,
you who apprehend the weight of your sins, and the greatness of divine
wrath,) that there is an intolerable pressure upon your souls already, and
that this is nothing diminished, but rather augmented, by your vain
labours and inquiries after some ease and peace,--your endeavours to
satisfy your own consciences, and pacify God's wrath some other way,
having filled you with more restless anxiety, and seeing there is a
certain assurance of true rest and tranquillity here, upon the easiest
terms imaginable, that is, "come to Jesus Christ, all ye who are
disquieted and restless, and he will give you rest,"--O should not this be
an invincible and irresistible attractive to your hearts, to draw them to
our Redeemer over all impediments? The rest is perfect happiness; and yet
the terms are easy. Only come and embrace it, and seek it nowhere else.
There is a kind of quietness and tranquillity in the seeking and attaining
this rest. All other rests are come to by much labour and business. Here
Christ would have you,--who have laboured in vain for rest, and lost your
toil and your pains,--to come at it, by ceasing from labour, as it were,
that which you could not attain by labour, to come by it, _cunctando_ (by
keeping quiet), which you could not gain _pugnando_ (by fighting). There
is a quiet and silent way of believing promises, and rolling yourselves
upon Christ offered in them, which is the nearest and most compendious way
to this blessed rest and quietness, which, if you think to attain by much
clamour and contention of debate or dispute, or by the painful labour and
vexation of your spirits, which you call exercise of mind,--you take the
way about, and put yourselves further off from it. Faith has a kind of
present vacancy and quietness in it, in the very acting of it. It is not a
tumultuous thing, but composes the soul to quietness and silence, to a
cessation from all other things but the looking upon Christ holden out in
the gospel, and this in due time will give greater rest and tranquillity.
Consider what the Lord speaks to the people that would take a journey upon
them to Egypt, (Isa. xxx. 15). "In returning and rest shall ye be saved,
in quietness and confidence shall be your strength." Their peace was near
hand, but they would travel abroad to seek it, and they find trouble.
Their strength was to sit still and be quiet, and trust in the Lord. Nay,
but they