This sermon was preached by John Donne, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, on Whit Sunday, 1623
1
In the great ant hill of the whole world, I am an ant. I have my part in the creation. I am a creature. But there are ignoble creatures. God comes nearer. In the great field of clay, of red earth, that man was made of and mankind, I am a clod. I am a man. I have my part in the humanity. But man was worse than annihilated again. When Satan in that serpent was come, as Hercules with his club into a potter’s shop and had broken all the vessels, destroyed all mankind. And the gracious promise of a Messiah to redeem all mankind was shed and spread upon all. I had my drop of that dew of heaven, my spark of that fire of heaven, in the universal promise in which I was involved. But this promise was appropriated after, in a particular covenant, to one people, the Jews, to the seed of Abraham. But for all that I have my portion there, for all that profess Christ Jesus are by a spiritual engrafting, and transmigration, I and of that stock and that seed of Abraham – and I am one of those. But then, of those who do profess Christ Jesus, some grovel still in the superstitions they were fallen into and some are raised by God’s good grace out of them – and I am one of them. God hath afforded my station in that Church, which is departed from Babylon.
Now, all this while, my soul is in a cheerful progress, when I consider what God did for Goshen in Egypt, for a little park in the midst of a forest; what he did for Jewry, in the midst of enemies, as a shire that should stand out against a kingdom round about it. How many Sancerras he hath delivered from famine. How many Genevas from plots and machinations against her. All this while my soul is in progress. But I am at home while I consider bulls of excommunication, and solicitations of rebellions, and pistols and poisons, and the discoveries of these. There is our nos, we – testimonies that we are in the favour and care of God: we, our nation; we, our Church. There I am at home; but I am in my cabinet at home when I consider what God hath done for me and my soul. There is the ego, the particular, the individual, I.
2
The Holy Spirit could not express more danger to a man than when he calls him Filium soeculi, the child of this world. Nor a worse dispossession than when he calls him Filium diaboli (as St. Peter calls Elymas), the child of the devil. Nor worse possessing of the devil than when he calls him Filium gehennae, the child of hell. The child of this world, the child of desperation, the child of the devil, the child of perdition, the child of hell is a high expressing, a deep aggravating of his damnation. That his damnation is not only his purchase, as he hath acquired id, but it is his inheritance: he is the child of the devil. So it is also a high exaltation when the Holy Spirit draws out our pedigree from any good thing, and calls us the children of that. As when he calls us Filios lucis, the children of light, that we have seen the day-star arise. When he calls us Filios sponsi, the children of the bedchamber, begot in lawful marriage upon the true Church. These are fair approaches to the highest title of all, to be Filii Dei, the children of God. And not children of God, Per filiationem vestigii (so every creature is a child of God) by having an image and impression of God in the very being thereof, but children so as that we are heirs and heiresses so that we are co-heirs with Christ, as it implies in the next verse and is implied this this name: children of God.
Heirs of heaven, which is not a gavel-kind, every son, every man alike; but it is a universal primogeniture: every man full, so full that every man hath all in such measure as that there is nothing in heaven which any man wants. Heirs of the joys of heaven – joy in a continual dilatation of thy heart, to receive augmentation of essential and accidental joy. Joy in a continual melting of indissoluble bowls, in joyful and yet compassionate beholding thy Saviour. Rejoicing at thy being there and almost lamenting (in a kind of affection which we can call no name) that thou couldst not come thither; but by those wounds, which are still wounds, though wounds glorified. Heirs of the joy and heirs of the glory of heaven, where if thou look down and see kings fighting for crowns, thou canst look off as easily as from boys at stool-ball for points here; and from kings triumphing after victories, as easily as a philosopher from a pageant of children here. Where thou shalt no be subject to any other title of dominion in others, but Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews; nor ambitious of any other title in thyself but that which thou possessed, to be the child of God. Heirs of joy, heirs of glory and heirs of the eternity of heaven: where in the possession of this joy and this glory. The angels which were there almost 6,000 years before thee and so prescribe, and those souls which shall come at Christ’s last coming and enter but then shall not survive thee; but they, and thou, and all shall live as long as he that give you all that life, as God himself.
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