, dispositions, and education, cannot make your stock good,
and your fruit good! "Israel is an empty vine,"--this is our name. Nay, but
many think they bring forth fruit. Have not heathens spread forth their
branches, and brought forth many pleasant fruits of temporal patience,
sobriety, magnanimity, prudence, and such like? Do not some civil men many
acts of civility profitable to men? Doth not many a man pray and read the
scriptures from his youth up? Yes, indeed, these are fruits, but for all
that, he is an empty vine, for he brings forth fruit to himself; and so,
as in the original, he is a vine emptying the fruit which it gives, Hos.
x. 1. All these fruits are but to himself, and from himself; he knows not
to direct these to God's glory, but to his own praise or advantage, to
make them his ornament; and he knows not his own emptiness, to seek all
his furniture and sap from another. What were all these fair blossoms and
fruits of heathens? Indeed they were more and better than any now upon the
multitude of professed Christians: and yet these were but _splendida
peccata_, shining sins. What is all your praying and fasting, but to
yourselves, as the Lord charges the people, Zech. vii. "Did ye at all fast
unto me?" No, ye do it to yourselves. Here is the wildness and
degenerateness of your natures. Either you bring forth very bitter fruits,
such as intemperance, avarice, contention, swearing, &c., or else fruits
that have nothing but a fair skin, like apples of Sodom that are beautiful
on the tree, but being handled, turn to ashes; so there is nothing of them
from God, or to God. I think every man almost entertains this secret
persuasion in his breast,--that his nature may be weak, yet it is not
wicked; it may be helped with education, and care, and diligence, and
dressed till it please God, and profit others. Who is persuaded in heart
that he is an enemy to God, and cannot be subject to God's law? Who
believes that his "heart is desperately wicked?" Oh! it is indeed
"deceitful above all things," and in this most deceitful, that it
persuades you ye have a good heart to God. Will not profane men, whose
hands are defiled, maintain the uprightness of their hearts? _Nemo
nascitur bonus sed fit_. I beseech you once, consider that ye are born out
of Christ Jesus. Ye conceive that ye are born and educated Christians; ye
have that name indeed from infancy, and are baptized. But I ask about the
thing; baptism of water doth not imp