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Pro_15:13 A merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance: but by sorrow of the heart the spirit is broken.
Ver. 13. A merry heart makes a cheerful countenance.] It sits smiling in the face, and looks merrily out of the windows of the eyes. This is not till faith have healed the conscience, and till grace have hushed the affections, and composed all within. Saint Stephen looked like an angel when he stood before the council; {Act_6:15} and the apostles went away rejoicing. {Act_5:41} There are that rejoice in the face only, and not in the heart; {2Co_5:12} this is but the hypocrisy of mirth, and we may be sure that many a man’s heart bleeds within him when his face counterfeits a smile. It is for an Abraham only to laugh for joy of the promise, and for a David "to rejoice at the word as one that findeth great spoil," {Psa_119:162} wherein the pleasure is usually as much as the profit. Christ’s chariot, wherein he carries his people up and down in the world, and brings them at length to himself, is "paved with love"; {Son_3:9-10} he brings them also into his wine cellar, {Son_2:4} where he cheers up their hearts, and clears up their countenances; and this is praemium ante praemium, Heaven aforehand. These are some few clusters of the grapes of the celestial Canaan.
But by the sorrow of the heart the spirit is broken.] As the looks are marred, so the spirits are dulled and disabled, as a limb out of joint can do nothing without deformity or pain. Dejection takes off the wheels of the soul, hinders comfortable intercourse with God, and that spiritual composedness, that habitual cheerfulness, that sabbath of spirit that every man should strive to enjoy. Afflictions, saith one, are the wind of the soul, passions the storm. The soul is well carried, when neither so becalmed that it moves not when it should, nor yet tossed with tempests of wrath, grief, fear, care, &c., to move disorderly. Of these we must be careful to crush the very first insurrections; storms rise out of little gusts, but the top of those mountains above the middle region are so quiet that ashes, lightest things, are not moved out of place.