A reading from A Comfortable Walk with God by Robert Bolton, originally published in 1626, on repressing raging passions and anger. Be very watchful over your most predominant and troublesome passion, whether it be fear, sorrow, love, anger, and so on. All of them are unruly and raging enough, but yet commonly one overrules all the rest, and is the king in the unregenerate man, but too often offers to rise in rebellion even against the most sanctified man. whatsoever it be. In your private morning sacrifice, be sure to lay on a load of deepest groans and strongest cries for mortifying grace against it, and comfortable conquest over it. Let that period and passage of your prayers be enforced and enlarged with an extraordinary pang of fervency, and filledly sealed, as it were, with the most serific c'est la. Cut off all occasions whatsoever it cost you, which may in any way stir, awaken, and kindle it. Withdraw the fuel that ministers to that passionate flame, though it should be as painful to you as the plucking out of your right eye. or the cutting off of your right hand. Assuredly the pleasures of inward quiet and sweet spiritual calmness of your so understanding soul will infinitely recompense any pains and oppositions and resistances in that nature. Consider seriously beforehand what a deal of disturbance and unsettledness, of visible exorbitancy and breaking of it out, will breed and bring upon your inward man. It will be like a dead fly in a box of precious ointment. Disgrace all your graces and fully folly darken the glory of your profession. It will be like fire in the thatch, for the whole cast into combustion as it were. The whole frame of your spiritual building and turn the heavenly peace of your appeased conscience into a bitter tempest. Tell me whether after a lawless transgression of those bounds of moderation to which your Christian resolution has confined it, and that it has prevailed against you with any notorious success, I say whether at night you find not your spirit quite down and much deadened to the exercise of prayer. or any other evening duty, and if upon your waking in the night there should be any terrible wind, dreadful thunder, or any a frightening accident, whether your heart would not smite you upon that occasion with much more fear and apprehensions of horror, I will suppose your reigning or rather rebelling passion, for I speak to the Christian, to be color and anger, and then first listen to the counsel which the very moral sages minister against this spiritual malady, and to the rules and remedies which the light of reason lead us to. Cut off, they say, the causes, and the effect will vanish. Quench the firebrands which enrage this fury, and you shall be at quiet, dear such as these one. weakness of spirit, unmanliness of mind. Hence it is that old men, infants, and sick folk are commonly more choleric than others. Impotency and excess of passion ever argue the disgrace and inferiority of the understanding part, the noblest power of the soul. And therefore, if we would be armed against the sallies and assaults of this domineering, raging distemper, we must suffer the highest and heavenliest part of our soul to know and exercise its place and strength. We must not make our understandings underlings, but give reason his right and reigning power. Number two, self-love. A foolish doting upon and adorning ourselves which springs from the cursed root of self-ignorance, and puts quite out that light of nature's law in our conscience. Do as you would be done by. If before you loosed the reins to that short frenzy, you would suppose and set yourself in the place of the party with whom you were angry, and then say and do no more than if your own person were the patient. It would be a notable means to curb your color and keep the credit of dispassionateness in moderation and make you patiently suffer that which perhaps you have often confidently offered to others. Number three, an over-tenderness and delicate niceness in bearing wrongs, an impetuous impatiency for being abused, Whereas insensibility and contempt would better become a great spirit, an infeminate facility to be moved and touched with every trifle, a spot or wrinkle upon their garments, a dish misplaced upon their table, some error in their dressing, a bird, a dog, a glass, and so on. Or some lesser toy will turn some kind of people quite out of tune and put them out of their humor into a storm of passion. great minds and victorious over this furious arch-rebel are not moved but with great matters. It is a special point of manly wisdom to pass by many petty provocations to wrath without notice or acknowledgment, without wound or passion, and to digest many times the brawlings and indiscretions of hasty men with the same patience that surgeons do the injuries and blows of madmen when they let them blood. Credulity, lightness, and believing whatsoever comes first to the ear, that is a highway to hold anger still in combustion. For the tongues of slanderers, tail-bearers, whisperers, pick-thanks will prove as so many bellows blown by the devil himself. to keep this fire in height and fullness of flame. 5 Curiosity An itching humor and needless inquisitiveness to know everything that is done or said. If a man will need to be so meddling, he shall find manner enough to feel his goal. Some men, out of this humor, are eager to know what is said against them in such and such company. Listen to hear what their servants talk concerning them, and if a letter fall into their hands in which they think themselves to be mentioned, they will not hesitate against the laws of society to break it open. Busy bodies in this kind never lack wrath and woe. Antagonist, as it is said of him, was wise to abandon this vanity, for when he heard two of his subjects speaking ill of him in the night near his tent, he desired them to go further off lest the king should hear them. 6. Covetousness, the cutthroat of grace, and canker of the soul, like an eating insatiable wolf, will either still feed upon gain, or else gnaw upon the heart with fretting. And therefore the very loss of a penny, sometimes the omission of a good bargain, the miscarriage of some domestic trifle, the death of a beast, and so on, will presently put a covetous man into anger, for his eyes are so earthly that they look upon the secondary, not upon the supreme cause. 7. A dread of being contemned by others on word, deed, or countenance. Many are so weak this way that if they spy but any secret smiling, two whispering together in the company, or any talking, especially with their eyes now and then cast towards them, They presently think that themselves certainly are the aim and object of their scornful observation, and so grow sour out of tune and unfit for company all the while after. Such as these are extremely troubled and displeased if they have not the chief place and apprehend at meetings, respect and salutation from those they salute, exact observance and obeisance from their inferiors, if they are not put first in manners of compliment and services of humanity, and so on. A riddance and restraint of these and the like maladies of the mind will be a notable means to prevent and hinder the assaults and surprisal of this furious and foul fiend. But if at any time you feel this viper to receive heat in your bosom, and that occasions of anger are offered, then contain your body in quiet and tongue in silence. The stirring and agitation of your body by stamping or flinging about in flames of blood and humors, and the talking of your tongue keeps both the passionate heat in your own heart, and many times sets on fire those you are angry with. The bark of one dog sets all the curds in a town a-brawling. Your breaking forth into raging terms may raise the spirit of raving in others, and therefore silence is a singular cooler to this angry temper. If the swelling and boisterous waves rebound from the soft and even sands, there is no great ado. But if they encounter a rock, they return with great turbulence and turn into foam. Silence, or a soft answer, stops the overflowing of the gull on both sides. But if fury be set upon by rage, they grow both almost stark mad for the time. Give reason, leave to interpose and resolve. It was good counsel, which was given to Augustus, that when the objects and occasions of color were in his eye, he should not be moved before he had pronounced over the letters of the alphabet. It is as absurd for a passion to usurp and domineer over judgment, as for an intemperate skull to jostle a reverend judge out of his place, and there to take on, in her talkative, obscureless manner. If you give the swing and reins to it at first rising, it will presently quite vanish reason and judgment, and be like a man that puts the master out of the house and sets it on fire, and burns himself alive within it. Or like a ship that is neither stern nor pilot, nor sails nor oars, exposed to the mercy, or the waves, winds, and tempest, in the midst of a furious sea. Divert to some other business, company, place, pleasant employment, thoughts of content, and so on. These are notable coolers and very convenient to slack this passionate fire when it first begins to burn in your bosom. Habituate your heart and keep it exercised and seasoned with considerations first. Consider not only the effects of melancholy, a passion which naturally breeds bodily dissempers by stirring anger, heating the blood and the vital spirits. but also consider the brutish deformities and ugly distortions with which this rage disfigures those who are transported with it, as the fierceness of the eye, inflammation of the face, furiousness of the looks, extraordinary panting of the heart, beating of the pulse, swelling of the veins, stammering of the tongue, gnashing of the teeth, a very harsh and hateful expression of the voice, and many other extremely impotent and unmanly behaviors. Hence it was that angry men were anciently counseled in the heat of their fit to look at themselves in a mirror. Demonstrous representations of that deformed fury were suited to frighten them out of their angry humor. of the sweet loveliness and amiable acceptation of a mild and passionate spirit, number two. It is as sinew as it were, and cement of all delightful society and flower of humanity, the very sweetness of civil conversation, as it is a singular preservative to keep a man's own heart in much calmness and quiet. So it is also an attractive lodestone to draw to him the hearts and love of others. of the aim and aspirations of moral wisdom which labors to draw a man's heart to that unshaken, constant and comfortable temper, that beautiful and noble disposition which resembles the highest region of the air, where there is no overshadowing cloud nor tempestuous thunder, but perpetual fairness, serenity and peace. I have no longer insisted upon these moral instructions purposely to make Christians ashamed, who, besides the honest arguments of pure reason, have also the rules of religion and heavenly remedies, and yet are too often overtaken with this mental drunkenness, as some call it. For you must know that all this while I mean hasty, unjust, and exorbitant anger, which misses in measure, object, end, seasonableness, or other circumstances. For there is a sinless and a holy anger, therefore Paul says, Be you angry and sin not. Ephesians 4 verse 26. Upon the describing and limiting of which, it is not seasonable for me at this time to insist Now then, secondly, for religious directions, and more immediately drawn from sacred learning, consider one, that all your wrongs and unworthy usages, your injuries and indignities, crosses and uncomfortable accidents, that shall ever anyway befall you, are for appointed order and disposed by God's wise and merciful providence. and that for your spiritual and everlasting good, this very one thought that God has evered the principal agent, kept fresh and on foot in your mind, will be a sovereign power to cool and beat back any intemperate heat which might either rise in your heart or rage in your tongue against His instruments, and cause you many times when you are chafing, ripe and ready to rave, To lay your hand upon your mouth, and sweetly say to God with David, I was dumb, I opened not my mouth, because you did it. Psalm 39 verse 9. And not like a child to beat the place that hurt him, but rather to walk more heedfully. Not like a foolish cur to snarl and snatch at the stone, never looking after the thrower or a madman. To bite the sword that sticks in his flesh, but rather to pull it out softly and hasten to the surgeon. There was matter and malice enough in the mouth of Shimei to have made David's royal heart naturally to rise with implacable indignation against that dead dog. unkindness and cruelty enough in the hearts of Joseph's brethren to have made him forever irreconcilable, wrong and villainy enough in the courage of the Chaldeans to have set Job on fire with rage and revenge against them. But these holy men, by practice of the present point, and from the strength of this consideration which I now commend for the restraint of anger, procured a great deal of sweet peace and patience to their own hearts, pleasedness and acceptation with God. admiration and example to posterity, where they glanced by the means of the men and fastened their eyes upon their maker and the first mover. Joseph looked beyond his brethren's barbarous dealing with him and said, The Lord sent me before you, Genesis 45, 7. Job, beyond the Chaldeans' lawless outrages, said, The Lord is taken away. David, beyond Shimei's dogged rancor, and said, The Lord has bidden him. 2 Samuel 16.11 Jesus Christ himself, blessed forever, looked beyond the Pharisees, priests, Jews, Judas, and the soldiers to his father's cup. The cup which my father has given me, shall I not drink it? John 18 verse 11 When he commanded Peter to sheathe his sword, this Christian counsel passes that which was given to Augustus, when the objects and occasions of anger are in your eye or ear. When you are in any ways wrong, belied, railed upon, spurned at, or trampled upon by the feet of honored insolence or dunghill malice, before you inwardly fret or break out into any impatient behavior, say first, seriously and fillingly, in your own heart, This is from God, for my good. Or with old Eli, it is the Lord, let him do what seems him good. 1 Samuel 3 verse 18. And let it forever bridle, nay, sweetly compose your hastiness and sourness of your corrupt nature in a case of anger. Number two, let the wonderful patience of that mighty Lord of heaven and earth who is able with one word to cast all the creatures in the world into hell, even with the breath of his mouth to turn hell and heaven and earth and all things into nothing. I say let us patience against the infinite, intolerable, and endless provocations of his own most obliged creatures. Who, like so many desperate traitors, live and lie continually in open rebellion against so great a majesty, be a pattern and precedent to you, a silly worm, dust and ashes, earth, or anything that is not of proportionable forbearance, if there could be any proportion between infinite and finite, towards your fellow creatures. How many black and blasphemous mouths are incessantly open against his blessed majesty? With what dreadful oaths do they tear and recrucify the precious body of his glorious son who sits at his own right hand? With what lies and slanders do they revile his ambassadors and vilify his chosen? How many graceless wretches do willfully and obstinately profane His Sabbath, pollute His sacraments, and turn their backs upon His Word? How many do daily turn themselves into beasts by their own swineish drunkenness, to the great reproach of mankind in dishonor of their reasonable nature? How many enclosing nimrods and cruel landlords grind the faces of the poor, nay pluck off their skins, tear their flesh, break their bones and chop them in pieces as for the pot? and eat the flesh of God's people. Micah 3, verses 2 and 3. In a word, how many incarnate devils march up and down the earth with hearts and hands as full as hell, with all manner of mischief, lewdness, and rebellion! So many, and with such extreme and sufferable audaciousness and impudence! That is, to learn a divine speech, if but any tender-hearted man should sit but one hour in the throne of God Almighty, if it be fit so to suppose, and look down upon the earth as God does continually and see what abominations are done in that hour, he would undoubtedly in the next set all the world on fire and not allow his wrath to be pacified or the fire to be quenched. And yet for all this, our gracious God, in the meantime, though he be armed with his own irresistible omnipotence and a thousand chariots of the whirlwinds, though he have ever in readiness all the angels in heaven, all the devils in hell, all the creatures in the world, nay, the very hands and consciences of profane wretches, and all that provoke the eyes of His glory with their pollutions to be the instruments and executioners of His just wrath upon their sin. Yet I say our gracious God opposes His infinite patience against all these restless, outrageous provocations. He sweetly and fairly distempers and moderates in the meantime his most just and causeful indignation, to see if the bountifulness of his forbearance and long-suffering will lead them to repentance. Be thou then forever ashamed to be angry for every trifle, to break patience upon every trivial provocation. to turn lying in your own house, and which is common in carnal worldlings, to rage with extreme folly and baseness against a wife, children, servants, cattle. or anything that comes in your way. For every cross-accident, worldly loss, domestic miscarriage, nay, many times to torture your own heart and trouble others in this kind, upon mere mistakings, groundless surmises and misconstructions. But rather take this gracious lesson from the Lord Jesus' own mouth. Learneth me. For I am meek and lowly in heart. Matthew 11 verse 29 And an example of patience from his first martyr, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. Acts 7 verse 60 Number three, let the sweet experience of God's patient and merciful dealing with you soften your heart with a compassionate sense of other men's weaknesses and a melting forwardness to forgive. If he out of the riches of his mercy has remitted to you 10,000 talents, what a base wretchedness were it to fly in the face of your fellow servant and to take him by the throat for 100 pence. If He entreated you, with all love and with all long-suffering, to come into His stretched-out arms of mercy, when you lay wallowing abominably in the gore blood of your many scarlet and crimson sins, fraught on the devil's side to the loss of the very life-blood of your soul, and every time you came to the Lord's Supper shed the precious blood of His blessed Son, what a shame is it to you to fall a-raging and swell with anger for the mere oversight many times unwilling miscarriage and unpurposed error of those perhaps who otherwise treat you with obsequiousness and love. If a man will not be moved with more fair and ingenuous motives to master and mortify this bedlam rage, I speak in this passage to him that hates to be reformed. Let him be amazed at a man for shame, since the Holy Ghost has charged every man not to meddle or make any league of friendship with him while he nourishes and gives a reins to the bosom rebel. Make no friendship with an angry man, and with a furious man you shall not go. What a monster is a man of anger! This Solomon should set such a brand upon him, in which everyone is warned to beware of him and fly from him as from a nettling, dangerous, unsociable creature. a word or two of another passion before I pass out of the point, and that is carnal fear, which I had not touched at this time, had it been only a rack in which the hearts of covetous, ambitious, and carnal men are woefully rent and torn and tortured all their life long, and not also a cruel engrosser of too much gold and time even from God's children, not without impressions of much fruitless sadness and unnecessary discontent. The vanity and tyranny of this passion is especially seen and exercised in putting all real stings into imaginary evils and drawing true and bitter sorrows from supposed sufferings, in quick apprehension and anticipation of sorrows to come so that a man by too much forethoughtfulness and painful apprehension suffers them many times before they cease upon him, or the first, who doesn't feel the fantasticalness opinion to forge and fasten upon him many dreadful objects, which of themselves have no vigor to vex, because no real being in existence, yet truly torture and afflict by the strength of imagination alone. Thus one eats his own heart with grief for loss of those riches and that superfluous wealth, which he had ever still possessed he would never have used. Another lies under the continual slavery of restless fear, lest fire or robbery, some alteration in the state or desolation of war, should disperse his hoard or hazard his temporal happiness. One is haunted with much thoughtfulness and carking care. What will become of his children after his death? What men will say of him when he is gone? How will it fare with his wife after his departure? For naturally our minds are so vain that besides the abundance and burden of present cares, they will transport our desires and affections beyond ourselves and being. Another fredently fears that he shall be undone in a deep year, and tires himself with variety of plots for comings in for many years to come, when he may die in the meantime. Some take up too much precious time from present and more profitable meditations, by troubling their hearts, lest at the time's turn they should not be able to endure the fiery trial, whereas afterwards, perhaps, they end their life in the peaceful noontide of the glorious gospel. Others, upon the thought or talk of death, are ready to entertain fearful apprehensions lest they should disgrace their Christian life. with an uncomfortable end, and by some extraordinary temptation, raving, furious courage lay open to the world's interpretation, sinister censures, and misconstruction of their former courses, whereas it may be they conclude their days calmly in a good memory to the last gasp, without any storm or cloud of feared horror and discomfort, except former distrustful fears justly bring upon them that which they feared. For since every one whose life has been consecrated to God's glory, with truth of heart, does certainly pass through these dreadful pangs and last pain into pleasures endless and unspeakable, he ought also to submit, with patience and quiet to glorify Him, and to be serviceable to His secret ends with what kind of death He please, whether it be one glorious and untempted, 2. Discomfortable by reason of bodily distemper. 3. Mingled with temptations and triumph. 4. Ordinary and without any great show or remarkable speeches after extraordinary singularities of a holy life, which promise an end of special note and observation. But for the second, besides these utterly unnecessary and merely imaginary miseries, many fearful spirits, especially haunted with the humor of melancholy, will not suffer also certain and inevitable evils, which at length must needs befall them to sleep and keep in their stings until the time appointed. but many times awake them by the cry of fear, like so many sleeping lions and cowardly provoke them with timorous expectation to rend their hearts and sting terribly before the time. Thus our vain minds torment us more with the fear of evils. than with the evils which we fear, spur us on with much unmanly folly to meet in the midway, nay to overtake outrun sorrows to come, and make us a thousand times miserable with one individual misery. For example, you have a child, and perhaps but one, which you love most dearly, for that affection which would be severely strong towards ten. or how many soever, is united in it alone, if you enjoy a wife whose death would be to you as a loss of half of your heart, and so proportionably of any worldly comfort. Now certain it is, you must at length part from all these, or what else soever, most dear and desirable things in this life, They must be taken from you, or you from them. In this case, then, if you give way and forth to this faint-hearted tyrant and malicious passion, it will wound your heart many and many a time with a sense of their loss before you lose them. and mean will amid your dearest and most doting apprehensions of their sweetness and worth many bitter thoughts of the day of divorce, and the stings of much worldly grief. For such only, I mean, from a torturing apprehension of painful heartbreak at parting. But the most tormenting wrack of this kind, upon which this tyrannical passion does much terrify and tear the hearts of carnal men, especially, is death. It is called a prince of terror by reason of its own extreme inevitable pangs, and to them also it is a certain passage to torments without end and past imagination. And therefore if their consciences be not desperately seared and sealed up securely with the spirit of slumber against the day of vengeance, They are wont to die almost every day by a slavish fear of death. Hebrews 2 verse 15. O death, saith the wise man, how bitter is the remembrance of you to a man that lives at rest in his possession, to the man that has nothing to vex him and that has prosperity in all things. Oh, how the heart of such a man does shrug together for horror, quake like an aspen leaf, and die all the while when his fear represents to it, in a mirror of his imagination, the grisly forms and ugly face of death. With those other dreadful circumstances does the wellings and outcries of wife children and friends, about his sickbed, parting from all worldly pleasures forever, rotting in the grave, dragging to the tribunal in terror of the last day, and so on. Besides, these imaginary sufferings and untimely sorrows take notice of three other base pestilential effects and mischiefs, which this natural slavish distrustful fearâ€"for that I am only mean in the whole pointâ€"puts upon a man. It may bring upon him the thing which he fears. By fearing to become miserable, he may become what he fears. And so, turn his vain fear into certain miseries, according to that saying of Solomon. To fear of the wicked it shall come upon him. Proverbs 10 verse 24. And that of Isaiah 66 verse 4. I will bring their fears upon them. You have a wife, a child, an outward state, a high place, which you are moderately afraid to lose. Now this very distrustful fear, derogating from the glory of God's merciful providence, which sweetly and widely disposes all things, may justly provoke him to deprive you of them, whereas otherwise you might have enjoyed them still. It robs and bereaves you of the kindly relish and comfortable enjoyment even of good things. A man can take no delight in the fruition of that good which he fears to lose. Life itself is loathsome if a man slavishly feared to die. That good breeds the truest present contentment against the loss in which we are always prepared. And therefore those who live in a continual fear of losing their child, goods, liberty, life, or any other thing that is dear to them, lose a great deal of that honest joy and allowed pleasures that they might have even in these outward things. It ejects and debases this noble nature below the miseries and baseness of beasts in this point, for they are fenced from this folly and vanity by the benefit of their weakness and want of reason. never reafflicting themselves with evil's past or fearing any to come, but through their whole life enjoying entirely and with full security all contentments and pleasures incident to their natures, except only when they are pinched with a sense of present pain. What a shame, then, is it to man? who, being honored with the excellency of an understanding, reasonable and provident spirit, in which he outshines all other creatures like an angel upon earth, should, by the abuse and misemployment of it, make it a means to himself to become more miserable in this respect than a brute. Beast. Now many of sweet are the places and promises in God's book, which may serve as precious antidotes and cordials against this carking venom, which too often haunts with insinuations even the most heavenly mind. but eats continually like a canker into the carnal heart. They are such as these, I will never leave you nor forsake you. Hebrews 13 5 Should you fall into the fiery trial, assuredly your merciful God would either supply you with the supernatural and extraordinary power and patience over that most exquisite pain, or else abate and lessen the rage of the flames for your sake. All things work together. for good to them that love God. Romans 8 verse 28. Sin in its own nature is the deadliest and rankest poison to the soul, and in itself the greatest evil that is or can be. Yet God's infinite power and wisdom which at first drew light out of darkness, as a skillful apothecary deals with poison so orders and tempers it to his people. that approves a medicine, much more doth he turn to their good, crosses, disgraces, losses of earthly things, poverty, lack, life and death, anything, everything. God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted above that you are able, but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that you may be able to bear it. 1st Corinthians 10 verse 13 It is a child of God's peculiar privilege in the case of afflictions and all future troubles to expect support in them, benefit by them, deliverance out of them. He that spared not his own son, how shall he not with him also freely give us all thanks? If Jesus Christ be ours, it is infinitely absurd, slavishly, to fear either hurt by ill or want of good. He is incomparably worth more than ten thousand worlds. If you enjoy them, such a jewel, what accursed vanity is it to torture and tear your heart with fear of any earthly loss? or have ever been prevailed against by any created power, take yet more spiritual armor and heroical resolution against the assaults of this cowardly tyrant, which doth though unworthily afflict the spirits of men, not only with imminent ills, but also with those which are not. and perhaps shall never be, nay sometimes which cannot possibly be, out of those two sweetest Psalms for promises of future protection, Psalm 91 and Psalm 121. But the special preservative which at this time I would commend to you against this distrustful heart's poison may be extracted from Christ's own words in Matthew 6, verse 34. After many strong and precious arguments against thoughtfulness and karking, our Heavenly Teacher concludes, Take therefore no thought for the moral, for the moral shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient to the day is the evil of it. Matthew 6 verse 34