lamitous circumstances, or exposed to such imminent peril; but thy God, whom thou servest, is able to deliver thee from the one, and to support thee under the other.-To support! to deliver! Let me not dishonour the unlimited greatness of his power. He is able to exalt thee, from the deepest distress, to the most triumphant joy, and to make even a complication of evils work together for thy everlasting good. He is able, not only to accomplish what I have been speaking, but to do exceeding abundantly above all that we can ask or think.

O! the wretched condition of the wicked, who have this Lord of all power for their enemy! O! the desperate madness of the ungodly, who provoke the Almighty to jealousy!-Besotted creatures! are you able to contend with your Maker, and enter the lists against incensed Omnipotence? Can you bear the fierceness of his wrath, or sustain the vengeance of his lifted arm? At his presence, though awfully serene, the hills melt like wax, and the "mountains skip like frighted "lambs." At the least intimation of his displeasure, the foundations of nature rock, and the

member this declaration, ye that fight the good fight of faith.-The united force of all your enemies, be it ever so formidable to the eye of flesh, is, before your Almighty Guardian, nihil nihilissimum, not only nothing, but less than nothing, and vanity. Job xxii. 20.

I should, in this place, avoid swelling the notes any farther, was it not to take notice of the inimitable passage quoted above, and to be found Eph. iii. 20.-Which, if I do not greatly mistake, is the most complete representation of divine power, that it is possible for words to frame. To do all that our tongue can ask, is a miracle of might: but we often think more than we can express, and are actuated with "groanings unutterable." Yet, to answer these vast desires, is not beyond the accomplishment of our heavenly Father.-Nay, to make his gifts and his blessings commensurate to the largest stretch of human expectations, is a small thing with the God of Glory. He is able to do above all, that the most enlarged apprehension can imagine; yea, to do abundantly more, exceeding abundantly more, than the mind itself, in the utmost exertion of all its faculties, is capable of wishing, or knows how to conceive.

I pillars of Heaven tremble." How then withered leaf endure, when" his lips are full of "indignation, and his tongue as a devouring "fire?"-Or can any thing screen a guilty worm, when the great and terrible God shall whet his glittering sword, and his hand take hold on inexorable judgment? When that hand which shoots the planets, masses of excessive balk, with such surprising rapidity through the sky: that hand which darts the comets to such unmeasurable distances, beyond the orbit of our remotest planet, beyond the pursuit of the strongest eye: when that hand is stretched out to punish, can the munition of rocks, the intervention of seas, or even interposing worlds, divert the blow?-Consider this, ambition, and bow thy haughty crest. Consider this, disobedience, and bend thy iron sinew. O consider this, all ye that forget, or affront, the tremendous Jehovah. He can, by a single act of his will, lay the universe in utter ruin: and can he want power to bring you, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, to the dust of death, or to the flames of hell? He has-I say not, ten thousand lightnings to scorch you to ashes, ten thousand thunders to crush you into atoms; but, what is unspeakably more dreadful-he has an army of terrors, even in the look of his angry countenance: his very frown is worse than destruction.

I cannot dismiss this subject without admiring the patience of the blessed God: who, though so strong and powerful, yet " is provoked every day." -Surely, as is his majesty, so is his mercy; his

One of the planets (Saturn) is supposed to be more than 90 times as big as the globe on which we live. According to the same calculation, the largest of the planets (Jupiter) is above 200 times vaster than this vast collection of spacious forests, towering mountains, extensive continents, and boundless oceans. Such enormous magnitude! winged with such prodigious speed-It raises astonishment beyond expression.-With God is terrible majesty! Job xxxvii. 22.-Who shall not fear Thee, O Lord, and gle rify thy name? Rev. xv. 4.

pity altogether commensurate to his power. If I vilify but the name of an earthly monarch, I lose my liberty, and am confined to the dungeon. If I appear in arms, and draw the sword against my national sovereign, my life is forfeited, and my very blood will scarce atone for the crime. But thee I have dishonoured, O! thou King immortal and invisible! Against thee my breast has fomented secret disaffection; my behaviour has risen up in open rebellion; and yet I am spared, yet I am preserved. Instead of being banished from thy presence; I sit at thy table, and am fed from thy hand: instead of pursuing me with thunderbolts of vengeance, thy favours surround me on every side. That arm, that injured arm which might justly fall with irretrievable ruin on a traitor's head, is most graciously stretched out to caress him with the tenderest endearments, to cherish him with every instance of parental kindness.-O! thou mightiest, thou best of Beings, how am I pained at my very soul for such shameful and odious disingenuity! Let me always abominate myself, as the basest of creatures; but adore that unwearied long-suffering of thine, which refuses to be irritated; love that unremitted goodness, which no acts of ingratitude could stop, or so much as check in its gracious current. O! let this stubborn heart, which duty could not bind, which threatenings could not awe, be the captive, the willing captive, of such triumphant beneficence!

I have often been struck with wonder at that Almighty skill, which weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance; which proportioned the waters in the hollow of its hand, and adjusted the dust of the earth by a measure.

*Isai. xl. 12. The dust of the earth, in this sublime scripture, signifies the dry land, or solid part of our globe: which is placed in contradistinction to the whole collection of fluid matter, mentioned in the preceding clause.-Per

But how much more marvellous is that magnificent œconomy, which poised the stars with inexpressible nicety, and meted out the Heavens with a span! Where all is prodigiously vast, immensely various, and yet more than mathematically exact. Surely, the wisdom of God manifests itself in the skies, and shines in those lucid orbs: shines on the contemplative mind, with a lustre incomparably brighter than that which their united splendors transmit to the eye.

Behold yonder countless multitude of globes; consider their amazing magnitude; regard them as the sovereigns of so many systems, each accompanied with his planetary equipage. Upon this supposition, what a multiplicity of mighty spheres must be perpetually running their rounds in the upper regions! Yet none mistake their way, or wander from the goal; though they pass through trackless and unbounded fields. None fly off from their orbits into extravagant excursions; none press in upon their centre with too near an approach. None interfere with each other in their perennial passage, or intercept the kindly communications of another's influence. But all their

haps, this remarkable expression may be intended to intimate, not only the extreme niceness, which stated the dimensions of the world in general, or in the gross; but also that particular exactness, with which the very smallest materials, that constitute its frame (not excepting each individual atom), were calculated and disposed-q. d. Tis a small thing to say, no such enormous redundancies, as unnecessary ridges of mountains, were suffered to subsist: there was not so much as the least grain of sand superfluous, or a single particle of dust deficient-As the grand aim of the description is, to celebrate the consummate wisdom, exemplified in the creation; and to display that perfect proportion, with which every part tallies, coincides, and harmonizes, with the whole; I have taken leave to alter the word of our English translation com prehend, and introduce in its stead a term, equally faithful to the Hebrew, and more significative of the prophet's precise idea,

The interception of light, by means of an eclipse, happens very rarely; and then is of so short a continuance, as not to be at all inconvenient: nay, it is attended with

rotations proceed in eternal harmony; keeping such time, and observing such laws as are most exquisitely adapted to the perfection of the whole.

While I contemplate this "excellent wisdom, "which made the Heavens," and attunes all their motions; how am I abashed at that mixture of arrogance and folly, which has, at any time, inclined me to murmur at thy dispensations, O Lord! What is this, but a sort of implicit treason against thy Supremacy, and a tacit denial of thy infinite understanding?-Hast thou so regularly placed such a wonderful diversity of systems through the spaces of the universe?-Didst thou, without any probationary essays, without any improving retouches, speak them into the most consummate perfection?-Dost thou continually superintend all their circumstances with a sagacity that never mistakes the minutest tittle of propriety? And shall I be so unaccountably stupid as to question the justness of thy discernment in "choosing my inheritance, and fixing the bounds "of my habitation?"-Not a single erratum, in modelling the structure, determining the distance, and conducting the career of unnumbered worlds! And shall my peevish humour presume to censure thy interposition with regard to the affairs of one inconsiderable creature, whose stature, in such a comparative view, is less than a span, and his present duration little more than a moment?

such circumstances, as render it rather useful, than prejudicial.

The sun in particular (and let this serve as a specimen of that most curious exactness with which the other celestial bodies are constituted, and all their circumstances regulated), the sun is formed of such a determinate magnitude, and placed at such a convenient distance-" as "not to annoy, but only refresh us, and nourish the ground "with its kindly warmth. If it was larger, it would set "the earth on fire; if smaller, it would leave it frozen; "if it was nearer us, we should be scorched to death; if "farther from us, we should not be able to live for want "of heat." Stackhouse's History of the Bible.