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Ecc_7:8 Better [is] the end of a thing than the beginning thereof: [and] the patient in spirit [is] better than the proud in spirit.
Ver. 8. Better is the end of a thing than the beginning.] No right judgment can be made of anything unless we can see the end of it. God seems oft to go a contrary way to work, but by that time both ends be brought together, all is as it should be, and it appears that he doth all things in number, weight, and measure. We may learn (saith Mr Hooper, {a} martyr, in a certain letter exhorting to patience) by things that nourish and maintain us, both meat and drink, what loathsome and abhorring they come unto, before they work their perfection in us: from life they are brought to the fire, and clean altered from what they were when they were alive; from the fire to the trencher and knife, and all to be hacked; from the trencher to the mouth, and as small ground as the teeth can grind them; from the mouth into the stomach, and there so boiled and digested before they nourish, that whosoever saw the same would loathe and abhor his own nourishment, till it come to perfection. But as a man looketh for the nourishment of his meat when it is full digested, and not before, so must he look for deliverance when he hath suffered much trouble, and for salvation when he hath passed through the strait gate, &c. Let the wise man look to the end, and to the right which in the end God will do him, in the destruction of his oppressors; and this will patient his heart and heal his distemper. We "have heard of the patience of Job, and what end the Lord made with him. Be ye also patient," you shall shortly have help if ye hold out waiting. "Mark the upright man, and behold the just, for" - whatsoever his beginning or his middle be - "the end of that man is peace." {Psa_37:37} Only he must hold out faith and patience, and not fall off from good beginnings; for as the evening crowneth the day, and as the grace of an interlude is in the last scene, so it is constancy that crowneth all graces, and he only that "continueth to the end that shall he saved." Laban was very kind at first, but he showed himself at parting. Saul’s three first years were good. Judas carried himself fair, usque ad loculorum officium, saith Tertullian, till the bag was committed to him. Many set out for heaven with as much seeming resolution as Lot’s wife did out of Sodom, as Orphah did out of Moab, as the young man in the Gospel came to Christ; but after a while they fall away, they stumble at the cross, and fall backwards. Now to such it may well be said, The end is better than the beginning. Better it had been for such never to have known the way of God, &c. Christ loves no lookers back. See how he thunders against them. {Heb_10:26-27; Heb_10:38-39} So doth St Paul against the Galatians, because they "did run well," but, lying down in that heat, they caught a surfeit, and fell into a consumption.
And the patient in spirit is better than the proud, &c.] Pride is the mother of impatience, as infidelity is of pride. "The just shall live by faith" {Hab_2:4} - live upon promises, reversions, hopes - wait deliverance or want it, if God will have it so. "But his soul, which," for want of faith to ballast it, "is lifted up," and so presumes to set God a time wherein to come or never come, {2Ki_6:33} "is not upright in him." Some things he doth, as it were a madman, not knowing or greatly caring what he doth, saith Gregory. {b} He frets at God and rails at men - lays about him on all hands, and never ceaseth, till in that distemperature he depart the world, which so oftentimes himself had distempered, as the chronicler {c} concludes the life of our Henry II.
{a} Acts and Mon., fol. 1377.
{b} Greg. Pastor.
{c} Daniel.