comfort of human life. Man was intended to be a sociable creature,
conscience, that in simplicity and godly sincerity, not with fleshly wisdom, but by the grace of God, particularly the grace of meekness, we have had our conversation in the world, and so have pleased God and done our duty. He did not speak the sense, no, not of the sober heathen, that said, "Revenge is sweeter than life;" for it often proves more bitter than death.
2. He enjoys his friends; and that is a thing in which lies much of the comfort of human life. Man was intended to be a sociable creature, and a Christian much more so. But the angry man is unfit to be so, that takes fire at every provocation; fitter to be abandoned to the lions' dens and mountains of the leopards, than to go forth by the footsteps of the flock. He that has his hand against every man, cannot but have, with Ishmael's character, Ishmael's fate, "every man's hand against him," and so he lives in a state of war; but meekness is the cement of society, the bond of Christian communion: it planes and polishes the materials of that beautiful fabric, and makes them lie close and tight, and the living stones which are built up a spiritual house, to be like the stones of the temple that Herod built, all as one stone, whereas, "Hard upon hard," as the Spaniard's proverb is, "will never make a wall." Meekness preserves among brethren that unity which is like the ointment upon the holy head, and the dew upon the holy hill. Psa. 133:1, 2. In our present state of imperfection, there can be no friendship, correspondence, or conversation maintained without mutual allowances; we do not yet dwell with angels or spirits of just men made perfect, but with men subject to like passions. Now meekness teaches us to consider this, and to allow accordingly; and so distance and strangeness, feuds and quarrels are happily prevented, and the beginnings of them crushed by a timely care. How necessary to true friendship it is to surrender our passions, and to subject them all to the laws of it, was perhaps intimated by