will make it their bait to draw away our hearts from God, and to steal that love, desire, and care, which is due him, and begin to tell us of rest, or satisfaction, or felicity here, it is time to cry out, Crucify it, crucify it. When it would insinuate itself into our bosom, and get next our hearts, and have our most delightful and frequent thoughts, and become so dear to us, that we cannot be without it; when it is the very thing that our minds are bent upon, and that lifts us up when we have it, and casts us down when we want it: and thus disposeth of our affections and endeavours, it is time to lay such an idol in the dust, and to cast out such a traitor with the greatest detestation. As we ourselves shall be exalted if we humble ourselves, and brought low if we exalt ourselves: so must we cast down the world, when it would exalt itself in our esteem; and the right exaltation of it is by the lowest subjecting of it unto God. For whoever hath to deal with Infinite power, must think of no other way of exaltation.

3. The world must be abhorred, and crucified by us, as it standeth at enmity to God and his holy ways. It is become, through man's corruption, the great seducer, and an impediment to our entertainment of heavenly doctrine, and a means of keeping the soul from God. Yea, it is become the interest of the flesh, and is set in fullest opposition to our spiritual interest. In what degree soever the world would turn your hearts from God, or stop your ears against his word, or take you off from the duty which he prescribeth you, in that measure you must seek to crucify it to yourselves. If father or mother would draw us away from Christ, though as parents they must be honoured still, yet as enemies to Christ they must be contemned. When your honours would hinder you from honouring God, and your credit doth contend against your conscience, and your worldly business contradicteth your heavenly business, and your gain is pleaded against your obedience; it is time then to use the world as an enemy, and to vilify those honours and businesses, and commodities. A tender conscience that is acquainted with a course of universal obedience, will take notice when these worldly interpositions and avocations would interrupt his course: and a soul acquainted with a holy dependance upon God and communion with him, can

feel when these enticing and deluding things would interrupt his communion, and turn his eye from the face of God: and therefore he can feel by the advantage of his holy experience, when the world becomes his enemy, and calleth him to the conflict.

4. The world is to be crucified, as it is the matter of our flesh-pleasing; or the food of our carnal affections, and the fuel of our concupiscence. The grand idol that is exalted against the Lord, is carnal-self. This is the God of all the unregenerate. This hath their hearts, their care, their labours. The pleasings of this flesh is the end of the unsanctified, and therefore the summary capital sin, which virtually containeth all the rest. Even as the pleasing of God is the end of every saint, and therefore the summary capital duty, which virtually containeth all other duties. The world is an idol subservient to the flesh, as being the matter of its delight, and the means by which its end is attained; as in the contrary state, the Mediator is subservient to the Father, as being the matter of his delight in whom he is well-pleased, and the means by whom he obtaineth his ends, in making his people also wellpleasing in his eyes. The devil also is an idol of the ungodly; but that is in a subserviency to the world and to the flesh, as by the bait of worldly things he pleaseth the flesh; as in the contrary state the Holy Ghost is in office subordinate to the Son and to the Father, in that he bringeth us to Christ, by whom we must have access to the Father. In the carnal trinity then you may see, that as the flesh is the principal and ultimate end, and hath the first place, so the world is the nearest means to that end, and hath the second place: and as there is no coming to the Father or pleasing him but by the Son, so there is no way of pleasing the flesh but by the world. So that by this you may perceive in what relation we stand to the sensual, seducing world, and on what grounds, and how far it is necessary that we crucify it. The fixed determination of our sovereign is, that if" we live after the flesh we shall die, but if by the Spirit we mortify the deeds of the body, we shall live;" Rom. viii. 13. To live after the flesh, is by loving the world, and enjoying it as our felicity; and to mortify the deeds of it by the Spirit, is by withdrawing this fuel and food that doth maintain them, and by crucifying and killing the world as to such ends. Our work is to

"put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof;" Rom. xiii. 14. It is the world that is this provision for the fulfilling of our fleshly lusts. So far therefore as the flesh must be mortified, the world also must be mortified.

5. Moreover the world must be crucified to us, as far as it is presented to us as an independent, or separated good, without its due relations unto God. It is God only who is the absolute, necessary, independent Being; and all creatures are but secondary, contingent, dependent beings, (whether univocally or equivocally, or analogically so called, with God, let the schools debate). To look on the creature as a separated or simple being or good, is to look upon it as God. And here came in the first idolatry of the world. When Adam had all his felicity in God, and,had the creature only as a stream and means, and when all his affections should have been centred in God, and he should not have viewed one line in the volume of nature, without the joint observance of the centre where it was terminated; contrarily he withdraws his eye from God, and fixeth it on the creature, as a separated good; and desiring to know good in this separated sense, he made it an evil to him, and knew it to his sorrow. And so forsaking the true and All-sufficient Good, he turned to a good which indeed, as conceived of by him, was no good, and knew it by a knowledge, which as to the truth of it, was not knowing, but erring. And in this course which our first progenitors have led us into, the carnal world proceedeth to this day. The creature is near them, but God is far off. A little they know of the creature, but they are utter strangers to God. And therefore think on the creature as independent, separated good. And you must carefully note, that the dependence of the creature on God, is not to be fully manifest by the dependence of any creature upon another. The line is locally distant from the centre; and the streams are locally distant from the spring, though they are contiguous, and have the dependency of an effect. But God is not local, and so not locally distant from us. The nearest similitude is that of the body's dependence on the soul (which yet doth fall exceeding short). In God both we and every creature do live, and move, and have our being. As no man of reason will talk to a corpse, nor dwell and converse with any man mere

ly as corporeal, without respect to the soul that doth animate him, nor will he fall in love with a corpse; so no man that is spiritually wise (so far as he is so) will once look upon any creature, much less converse with it, or fall in love with it, barely as a creature, conceiving it as a thing that is separated from God, or not positively conceiving of God as animating it, and as being its Alpha and Omega, its Begining and End, its principal efficient, and ultimate, final cause, at least. For this were to imagine the carcase of a creature, and to conceive of it as such a thing as is not in being. For out of the God of nature the creature is nothing, nor can do any thing; for there is no such thing; even as out of Christ the Lord of spiritual life and grace, the new creature is nothing, and we can do nothing: for there is no such new creature.

You have here the very difference between a carnal and a spiritual life. The carnal man doth see only the carcase of the, world, and is blind to God, and seeth not him, when he seeth that which is animated by him. But the spiritual man seeth God in and by the creature, and the creature is nothing to him but in God. As an illiterate man doth look upon a book, and seeth only the letters, and taketh pleasure in their shape and order, and falls a playing with it as children do; but he seeth not, nor understands the sense; and therefore if it contained the most noble mysteries of the greatest promises, even such as his life did depend upon, he loveth it not in any such respect; nor doth he for that delight in it but let a learned man have the perusing of the same book, and though he may commend the clearness of the character, yet it is the sense that he principally observeth and the sense that he loveth, and the sense that he delighteth in; and therefore as the sense is incomparably more excellent than the character simply considered, so it is a higher and more excellent kind of knowledge and delight which he hath in the book, than that which the illiterate hath. And indeed it is an imaginary annihilation of the book, and of every character of it, formally considered, to conceive of it as separated from the sense; for the very essence of it, is to be a sign of that sense; and therefore as the illiterate cannot see the sense of words and letters, the wood for trees, so the literate can see no such thing as words without sense, nor would regard the materials but for this signifying use.

I have expressed the similitude in more words than I use in such cases, because it much illustrateth our present matter. It was never the mind of God to make the great body of this world to stand as a separated thing, or to be an idol. He made all this for himself. The whole creation is one entire volume, and the sense of every line is God. His name is legible on every creature, and he that seeth not God in all understandeth not the sense of the creation. As it is eternal life to know God, so this God is the life of the creature which we know, and the knowing of him in it is the life of all our knowledge. The illiterate world doth gaze upon the creatures, and fall in love with the outside and materials, and play with it, but understandeth not a creature. By separating it in their apprehensions from God, the sense, they do annihilate the world to themselves, as to its principal use and signification.

There are two texts of Scripture, among many others, of which I have often thought, as notable descriptions of a carnal man's life; the one as to the privative part, and the other as to the positive. One is Ephes. ii. 12. which calleth them " Atheists, or without God in the world." They see and know somewhat of the world, but God they neither see nor know. They converse with the world, but not with God. All their affections are let out upon the world, but God hath none of them. All their business is about the world; but they live as if they had nothing to do with God. As a scholar, if his master should stand in a corner of the school to watch what he will do, will behave himself while he seeth him not, as if he were not there; he will play with his fellows and talk to them, as if there were no master in the school: so do the ungodly live in the world, as if there were no God in the world; they think, and speak, and deal with the world, as if there were nothing but the world for them to converse with. As for God, they know him not, but carry themselves as if they had nothing to do with him; and ask in their hearts, as Pharaoh once did, "Who is the Lord that I should serve him?" And perhaps this made David say, "the fool hath said in his heart there is no God;" Psal. xiv. 1. Though he speak it not positively, yet there is a privative atheism, which is interpretatively to say, There is no God. For he seeth him not, nor taketh any great notice of him; but liveth as without him in the world. Not