47

You may feel in yourself how conducive this is to your highest happiness. For that you should be exalted to the fruition of worlds, and in the midst of innumerable most glorious creatures, be vile and ingrateful, injurious and dishonourable, hateful and evil, is the greatest misery and dissatisfaction imaginable. But to be the joy and delight of innumerable thousands, to be admired as the similitude of God, to be amiable and honourable, to be an illustrious and beautiful creature, to be a blessing, O the good we perceive in this! O the suavity! O the contentation! O the infinite and unspeakable pleasure! Then indeed we reign and triumph when we are delighted in. Then are we blessed when we are a blessing. When all the world is at peace with us and takes pleasure in us, when our actions are delightful, and our persons lovely, when our spirits amiable, and our affections inestimable, then are we exalted to the Throne of Glory. For things when they are useful are most glorious, and it is impossible for you or me to be useful but as we are delightful to God and His attendants. And that the Head of the World, or the End for which all worlds were made should be useless, as it is improportioned to the glory of the means, and methods of His exaltation, so is it the reproach of His nature and the utter undoing of all His glory. It is improportionable to the beauty of His ways, Who made the world, and to the expectation of His creatures.

48

By this you may see, that the works or actions flowing from your own liberty are of greater concernment to you than all that could possibly happen besides. And that it is more to your happiness what you are, than what you enjoy. Should God give Himself and all worlds to you, and you refuse them, it would be to no purpose. Should He love you and magnify you, should He give His Son to die for you, and command all Angels and Men to love you, should He exalt you in His Throne, and give you dominion over all His works, and you neglect them it would be to no purpose. Should He make you in His Image, and employ all His wisdom and power to fill Eternity with treasures, and you despise them, it would be in vain. In all these things you have to do; and therefore your actions are great and magnificent, being of infinite importance in all eyes; while all creatures stand in expectation what will be the result of your liberty. Your exterior works, are little in comparison of these. And God infinitely desires you should demean yourself wisely in these affairs, that is, rightly. Esteeming and receiving what He gives, with veneration and joy and infinite thanksgiving. Many other works there are, but this is the great work of all works to be performed. Consider whether more depends upon God’s love to you, or your love to Him. From His love all the things in Heaven and Earth flow unto you; but if you love neither Him nor them, you bereave yourself of all, and make them infinitely evil and hurtful, and yourself abominable, to you. So that upon your love naturally depends your own excellency and the enjoyment of His. It is by your love that you enjoy all His delights, and are delightful to Him.

49

It is very observable by what small principles infusing them in the beginning God attaineth infinite ends. By infusing the principle of self-love He hath made a creature capable of enjoying all worlds: to whom, did he not love himself, nothing could be given. By infusing grateful principles, and inclinations to thanksgiving He hath made the creature capable of more than all worlds, yea, of more than enjoying the Deity in a simple way: though we should suppose it to be infinite. For to enjoy God as the fountain of infinite treasures, and as the giver of all, is infinite pleasure: but He by His wisdom infusing grateful principles, hath made us upon the very account of self-love to love Him more than ourselves. And us, who without self-love could not be pleased at all, even as we love ourselves He hath so infinitely pleased, that we are able to rejoice in Him, and to love Him more than ourselves. And by loving Him more than ourselves, in very gratitude and honour, to take more pleasure in His felicity, than in our own, by which way we best enjoy Him. To see His wisdom, goodness, and power employed in creating all worlds for our enjoyment, and infinitely magnified in beautifying them for us, and governing them for us satisfies our self-love; but with all it so obligeth us that in love to Him, which it createth in us, it maketh us more to delight in those attributes as they are His, than as they are our own. And the truth is, without this we could not fully delight in them, for the most excellent and glorious effect of all had been unachieved. But now there is an infinite union between Him and us, He being infinitely delightful to us, and we to Him. For He infinitely delighteth to see creatures act upon such illustrious and eternal principles, in a manner so divine, heroic, and most truly blessed; and we delight in seeing Him giving us the power.

50

That I am to receive all the things in Heaven and Earth is a principle not to be slighted. That in receiving I am to behave myself in a Divine and illustrious manner, is equally glorious. That God and all Eternity are mine is surely considerable: that I am His, is more. How ought I to adorn myself, who am made for his enjoyment? If man’s heart be a rock of stone, these things ought to be engraven in it with a pen of a diamond, and every letter to be filled up with gold that it might eternally shine in Him and before Him! Wherever we are living, whatever we are doing, these things ought always to be felt within him. Above all trades, above all occupations this is most sublime. This is the greatest of all affairs. Whatever else we do, it is only in order to this end that we may live conveniently to enjoy the world, and God within it; which is the sovereign employment including and crowning all: the celestial life of a glorious creature, without which all other estates are servile and impertinent.

51

Man being to live in the Image of God, and thus of necessity to become productive of glorious actions, was made good, that he might rejoice in the fruits, which himself did yield. That goodness which by error and corruption becomes a snare, being in the clear and pure estate of innocency, the fountain and the channel of all his joys.

52

Thus you see how God has perfectly pleased me: it ought also to be my care perfectly to please Him. He has given me freedom, and adventured the power of sinning into my hands: it ought to be a principle engraven in me, to use it nobly, to be illustrious and faithful, to please Him in the use of it, to consult His honour, and having all the creatures in all worlds by His gift ministering unto me, to behave myself as a faithful friend to so great a Majesty, so bountiful a Lord, so Divine a Benefactor. Nothing is so easy as to yield one’s assent to glorious principles, nothing so clear in upright nature, nothing so obscure to find in perverted, nothing so difficult to practise at all. In the rubbish of depraved Nature they are lost, though when they are found by any one, and shewn, like jewels they shine by their native splendour.

53

If you now ask, what is become of us since the fall? because all these things lately named seem to pertain to the estate of innocency; truly now we have super-added treasures, Jesus Christ, and are restored to the exercise of the same principles, upon higher obligations: I will not say with more advantage, though perhaps obligations themselves are to us advantage. For what enabled Adam to love God? Was it not that God loved him? What constrained him to be averse from God? Was it not that God was averse from him? When he was fallen he thought God would hate him, and be his enemy eternally. And this was the miserable bondage that enslaved him. But when he was restored, O the infinite and eternal change! His very love to himself made him to prize His eternal Love: I mean his Redeemer’s. Do we not all love ourselves? Self-love maketh us to love those that love us, and to hate all those that hate us. So that obligations themselves are to us advantage. How we come to lose those advantages I will not stand here to relate. In a clear light it is certain no man can perish. For God is more delightful than He was in Eden. Then He was as delightful as was possible, but he had not that occasion, as by Sin was afforded, to superadd many more delights than before. Being more delightful and more amiable, He is more desirable, and may now be more easily, yea strongly beloved: for the amiableness of the object enables us to love it.

54

It was your friend’s delight to meditate the principles of upright nature, and to see how things stood in Paradise before they were muddied, and blended, and confounded. For now they are lost and buried in ruins, nothing appearing but fragments, that are worthless shreds and parcels of them. To see the entire piece ravisheth the Angels. It was his desire to recover them and to exhibit them again to the eyes of men. Above all things he desired to see those principles which a stranger in this world would covet to behold upon his first appearance. And that is, what principles those were by which the inhabitants of this world are to live blessedly and to enjoy the same. He found them very easy, and infinitely noble: very noble, and productive of unspeakable good, were they well pursued. We have named them, and they are such as these: A man should know the blessings he enjoyeth: A man should prize the blessings which he knoweth: A man should be thankful for the benefits which he prizeth: A man should rejoice in that for which he is thankful. These are easy things, and so are those also which are drowned in a deluge of errors and customs; That blessings the more they are, are the sweeter; the longer they continue the more to be esteemed; the more they serve, if lovers and friends, the more delightful, yet those are the hard lessons, in a perverse and retrograde world, to be practised: and almost the only lessons necessary to its enjoyment.