All these are the beginning of sorrows.
Ver. 8. All these are the beginning, &c.] q.d. There yet remain far worse matters than war, -famine, pestilence, earthquakes. Adhuc restant gravissimi partus cruciatus. And yet war is as a fire that feeds upon the people, Isaiah 9:19,20. Famine is far worse than that, Lamentations 4:9. Pestilence is God's evil angel,Psalms 78:49,50. Earthquakes are wondrous terrible, and destructive to whole cities, as to Antioch of old, and to Pleurs in Italy of late, where fifteen hundred men perished together. A conflux of all these abides the condemners of Christ's gospel. The holy martyrs, as Saunders, Bradford, Philpot, &c.; the confessors also that fled for religion in Queen Mary's days acknowledged (as Ursinus relates) that that great inundation of misery came justly upon them, for their unprofitableness under the means of grace which they had enjoyed in King Edward's days. "When I first came to be pastor at Clavenne," saith Zanchy, "there happened a grievous pestilence, that in seven months' time consumed 1200 persons." Their former pastor, Mainardus, that man of God, had often foretold such a calamity for their popery and profaneness: but he could never be believed, till the plague had proven him a true prophet; and then they remembered his words, and wished they had been warned by him. When the Protestants of France began to grow wanton of their peace and prosperity, to jangle among themselves about discipline, and to affect a vain frothy way of preaching, then came the cruel massacre upon them. (Melch. Adam. in Vita Bulling.)