"Honor Him that hath advanced you..."

Thomas Manton (1620–1677) was a great Puritan pastor and author. He enterd first pastoral settlement outside London in Stoke Newington around 1642. Here he received as his patron Col. Alexander Popham, a member of Parliament, to whom he dedicated his lectures on JAMES when they were published. As this dedication is read, notice how young Pastor Manton (just age 22) takes advantage of the occasion to exhort his respected and powerful new patron:

SIR - Dedications, though often abused to a vain flattery, are of ancient use, and may be of great profit. Good sir, make it your work to honor Him that hath advanced you. Those differences of high and low, rich and poor, are only calculated for the present world, and cannot outlive time. In the grave, at the day of judgment, and in heaven, there are no such distinctions. The grave taketh away all civil differences; skulls wear no wreaths and marks of honor:  Job 3:19, ‘The small and the great are there, and the servant is free from his master.' So at the day of judgment:  ‘I saw the dead, both great and small, stand before the Lord,' Rev. 20:12. None can be exempted from trial at Christ's bar. When civil differences vanish, moral take place. The distinction then is good & bad, not great & small. Oh, sir, then you will see that there is no birth like that to be born again of the Spirit, no tenure like an interest in the covenant, no estate like the inheritance of the saints in light, no magistracy like that whereby we sit at Christ's right hand, judging angels and men, 1Cor. 6:2-3. How will the faces of great men gather blackness, that now flourish in the pomp and splendor of an outward estate, but then shall become the scorn of God, and saints, and angels! … Sir, you will bear with my plainness and freedom with you; other addresses would neither be comely in me, nor pleasing to you. Our work is not to flatter greatness, but, in the scripture sense (not in the humor of the age), to level mountains, Luke 3:5. 

In his dedicatory epistle for his sermons on JUDE, to Mrs. Letitia Popham, Manton raises a similar concern over the dangers facing those in high position.

MADAM, It is a lovely conjunction when goodness & greatness meet together. Persons of estate and respect in the world have more temptations and hindrances than others, but greater obligations to own God. The great landlord of the world expecteth a rent from every country cottage, but a large revenue from great houses. Now usually it falleth out so that they that hold the greatest farms pay the least rent. Never is the Lord more neglected and dishonored than in great men's houses, in the very face of all his bounty. If religion chance to get in there, it is soon worn out again. Though vices live long in a family, and run in a blood from father to son. yet it is a rare case to see strictness of religion carried on for 3 or 4 descents.

Obviously Manton, himself a 3rd generation believer, and a minister, was humbled by God's grace and goodness to him and his family.