peace may not be disturbed by any outward provocation. No doubt a
provocation? Will not my cooler thoughts correct these hasty resentments, and therefore were it not better to check them now? Such are the reasonings of the meekness of wisdom.
2. The work of meekness is to calm the spirit, so as that the inward peace may not be disturbed by any outward provocation. No doubt a man may express his displeasure against the miscarriages of another, as much as at any time there is occasion for, without suffering his resentments to recoil upon himself, and throw his own soul into a fury. What need is there for a man to tear himself—his soul, as it is in the Hebrew—in his anger? Job 18:4. Cannot we charge home upon our enemy camp without the willful disordering of our own troops? Surely we may, if meekness has the command; for that is a grace which keeps a man master of himself while he contends to be master of another, and fortifies the heart against the assaults of provocation that do us no great harm while they do not rob us of our peace, nor disturb the rest of our souls. As patience in case of sorrow, so meekness in case of anger keeps possession of the soul, as the expression is in Luke 21:19, that we be not dispossessed of that freehold. The drift of Christ's farewell sermon to his disciples we have in the first words of it, "Let not your hearts be troubled." John 14:1. It is the duty and interest of all good people, whatever happens, to keep trouble from their hearts, and to have them even and sedate, though the eye, as Job expresses it, should "continue" unavoidably "in the provocation" of this world. "The wicked"—the turbulent and unquiet, as the world primarily signifies—"are like the troubled sea when it cannot rest;" but that peace of God which passes all understanding, keeps the hearts and minds of all the meek of the earth. Meekness preserves the mind from being ruffled and discomposed, and the spirit from being unhinged by the vanities and vexations of this lower world. It stills the noise of the sea, the noise of her waves, and the tumult of the soul; it permits not the passions to