Again, what divine pleasure is it to hear a God beginning the work of his providence, and speaking those wondrous words of power to every plant and animal, "be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth," and lo, in a long succession of near six thousand years the earth has been covered all over with herbs and plants, with shrubs and tall trees in all their beauty and dimensions. The air hath been filled with birds and insects, the seas and rivers with fish, and the dry land with beasts and men even to this present day. When all this philosophy is changed into devotion, it must also be transformed into divine and unutterable joy.

Nor are these things too low and mean for the contemplation of heavenly beings: For God is seen in all of them: There is not a spire of grass but the but the power and wisdom of a God are visible therein. And it is certain the heavenly beings must be sometimes employed in the contemplation of many of these lower wonders. The plants and beasts in desolate regions where no man inhabits, and in distant and foreign oceans and rivers, where the fishy shoals in all their variety and numbers, in all their successions and generations for near six thousand years were never seen nor known by any of the sons of men; these seem to have been created in vain, if no heavenly beings are acquainted with them, nor raise a revenue of glory to him that made them.

This Almighty power therefore which made this huge universe, which sustains the frame of it every moment, and secures it from dissolving; this power

which brings forth the stars in their order, and worms and creeping things in their innumerable millions, and governs all the motions of them to the purposes › of divine glory, must needs affect a contemplative soul with raptures of pleasing meditation; and in these sublime meditations, by the aids of the divine Spirit, a soul on earth may get near to heaven. And with what religious and unknown pleasure at such a season doth it shrink its own being as it were into an atom, and lie in the dust and adore!

4. The all-sufficiency of the great God to form and to supply every creature with all that it can want or desire,' is another perfection of the divine nature, which is better known in heaven than it ever was here on earth, and affords another scene of astonishment and sacred delight: And there may be some advances towards this pleasure found among saints below, some first fruits of this heavenly felicity and joy in the all-sufficiency of God.

My whole self, body and mind, is from God and from him alone. All my limbs and powers of flesh. and spirit were derived from him, and borrowed their first existence from their original pattern in his fruitful mind. All that I have of life or comfort, of breath or being, with all my blessings round about me, is owing to his boundless and eternal fulness; and all my long reaching hopes and endless expectations that stretch far into futurity, and an eternal world, are growing out of this same all-sufficient fulness.

But what do I think or speak of so little a trifle as I am? Stretch thy thoughts, O my soul, through the

lengths, and breadths, and depths of his creation, O what an unconceivable fulness of being, glory, and excellency is found in God the universal parent and spring of all! What an inexhaustible ocean of being and life, of perfection and blessedness must our God be, who supplies all the infinite armies of his creatures in all his known and unknown dominions with life and motion, with breath and activity, with food and support, with satisfaction and delight! Who maintains the vital powers and faculties of all the spirits which he hath made in all the visible and invisible worlds, in all his territories of light, and peace, and joy, and in all the regions of darkness, punishment and misery! In him all things "live and move, and have their beings," Acts xvii. 28. Acts xvii. 28. Psal. civ. 29. "He withdraws his breath and they die." He hath writ down all their names in his own mind, he gives them all their natures, and without him there is nothing, there can be nothing; all nature without him would have been a perpetual blank, an universal emptiness, an everlasting void, and with one turn of his will he could sink and dissolve all nature into its original nothing.

Confess, O my soul, thy own nothingness in his presence, and with astonishing pleasure and worship' adore his fulness: He is thy everlasting all. Be thy dependence ever fixed upon him; thou canst not, thou shalt not live a moment without him, without this habitual dependence, and a frequent delight. ful acknowledgment of it. Such a devout frame as this, is heaven, and such scenes now and then pass

ing through the soul, are glimpses of the heavenly blessedness.

SECTION III.

Though the eternity and immensity of God might perhaps, in their own nature, and in the reason of things, be first mentioned, yet his majesty, his power, and his wisdom in their sovereign excellency strike the souls of creatures more immediately, therefore I have put these first. However, let us now consider the eternity of the great God and his omnipresence, and think how the spirits in heaven are affected therewith, and what kindred meditations may be derived from these perfections by the saints here on earth. I proceed therefore,

5. To the eternity of God: Which though the most exalted spirit in heaven cannot comprehend, yet it is probable they have some nearer and clearer discovery of it than we can have here in this mortal state, while we dwell in flesh and blood. We have nothing in this visible world that gives us so much as an example or similitude of it. The great God "who is, who was," and "who is to come" through all ages, he is, and was, and for ever will be the same. Let us go back as many thousand ages as we can in our thoughts, and still an eternal God was before them; a Being that had no beginning of his existence, nor will have any end of his life or duration. And as he says to Moses, my name is I am that I am, so as there is nothing which had any hand in his be

ing, but all the reasons of it are derived from his own self-fulness, therefore we may say of him that he is because he is, and because he will be: He had no spring of his first beginning, nor any cause of his continued existence, but what is within himself. We can never set ourselves in too mean a light when an eternal God is near us; and every thing besides God can be but little in our eyes.

And, O my thinking powers, are ye not sweetly lost in this holy rapture, and overpowered with divine pleasure, O my soul in such meditation as this? Art thou not delightfully surprised with the thoughts of such self-sufficience and such an unconceivable perfection? Thy being considered as here in this life, is not so much in the sight of God as an atom in comparison of the whole earth; and even the supposed future ages of thy existence in the eternal state are unconceivably short, when compared with the glory of that Being that never began his life or his duration.

Many things here on earth concur towards my satisfaction and peace, but if I have God my friend, I have all in him that I can possibly want or desire. Let me then live no longer upon creatures when God is all.

Let sun, moon and stars vanish, and all this visible creation disappear and be for ever annihilated if God please, he himself is still my eternal hope and neverfailing spring of all my blessedness: My expectations are continually safe in his hands, and shall