those tender pledges of God's love to you, the offspring of your own body, whom you were a monster of cruelty to neglect; yet here you may be suddenly, be wholly disappointed. Your darling child, the living image of yourself, how unable are you to preserve its invaluable life from perils, and from fierce disease! When parted from you on a visit or some business, you may, like Sisera's fond mother, be chiding its delay, and, with all the impatience of love, asking, Wherefore is my son or daughter, so long in coming?' whilst some appointment of God has taken away the desire of your eyes with a stroke.

Thus, if you take a full survey of every thing which the children of men seek with greatest anxiety to enjoy; compared with a supreme concern for the salvation of the soul, and steady regard to its interests, how vain is it? Nay, whatever it be, except the soul, about which you are careful, it has this most degrading circumstance attending it, it has the condition only of an annuity for life: Each successive year makes a considerable decrease in its value, and at death the whole is at an end for ever.

· But if your principal care and solicitude is for the salvation of your soul, all the unexpected disasters, disappointments and losses, which harass the sinful children of men, will become affecting proofs of the supreme wisdom of your choice, and the unrivalled excellency of your pursuit. Even the tears that stream down the cheeks of the miserable, and the complaints of those who are disappointed in worldly schemes, will pronounce you blessed, who are athirst for your immortal soul's salvation. Are you conscious of its worth? Are you striving in daily intercourse with God, its Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, to secure its eternal welfare? Then you may set all the evils that terrify the human race at defiance. Your inferior dying part they may wound, but they cannot strike deep enough, or reach high enough, to hurt your soul. In the midst of what, otherwise, would prove ruin insupportable, your wise choice will cover you like armour, and render you invulnerable.

Are you poor, and treated with scorn by the sons of pride? you will have examples and prospects more than sufficient to support you. You will see your own case in

the instructive history of the saints of God, who were destitute and afflicted; and in that wonderful contrast of meanness and grandeur, extreme poverty and immense wealth, the dying Lazarus. With patience, with gladness of heart you will see, that the deepest distress, and the surest title to glory, may be for a small moment united. In every case where proper care for the soul hath vailed, you will see that poverty, however extreme, sufferings, however long and grievous, add both to the weight and brightness of future glory.

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In sickness also, the supreme wisdom of having been careful above all things for your soul, will display itself with peculiar lustre. For though health is absolutely essential to a sensitive happiness; though the least ache, or bodily disorder, deprives the proud and worldly minded of their enjoyments, yet the soul, if with due care it has been exercised in the ways appointed by God, finds sources from whence to derive consolation under the most violent pressures; consolation sufficient to banish both outward impatience and inward dejection from their accustomed throne, the chamber of sickness and pain. With a lovely and edifying meekness, you will regard such discipline, though trying to sense, and oppressive to the flesh, as prepared by the all-wise and merciful Refiner, to purge away every base mixture that still cleaves to and defiles your soul. The welfare of your soul, dearer to you than all external comforts, will induce you to welcome the visitations, which are of such sovereign use to promote its health. In short, in sickness the whole man is a miserable sufferer, where the soul has been forgotten: where earnestly cared for, and instructed in divine truth, the inferior part alone feels the pressure.

To advance still further: death, the detector of all cheats- -death, the touchstone of all true worth, and therefore the king of terrors to those whose care every thing has shared but their souls, even death itself will confirm the supreme wisdom of your conduct. The deathbed, on which the gay, the prosperous, and the noble, lay down their heads appalled and confounded, is the theatre for displaying the fortitude of those who have sought, as the one thing needful, the salvation of their

souls. The former are confounded, because unprepared. The loss of all they valued is coming upon them: their approaching change can promise them nothing; it is much if it forbode not dreadful consequences. But to the latter, every thing wears another aspect. Must the world be left by them? it has been already renounced and vanquished. Must all temporal good be forsaken for ever? how placid, how calm the surrender, when the riches of eternity are theirs: no striving, no querulous repining against the irresistible summons to depart, when that very departure has been habitually expected, as a translation of the soul to its proper everlasting happiness.

In fact, dying Christians, that is, all that have duly sought in a right method, the salvation of their souls, have given proofs of the supreme wisdom of their conduct in the hour of nature's sorrow and distress: so that those fine lines of Dr. Young, are most justly descriptive of the happy few, whose souls have been more precious to them than every temporal concern or comfort.

The chamber where the good man meets his fate
Is privileg'd, beyond the common walk

Of virtuous life, quite in the verge of heav'n:
Heaven waits on the last moment; owns her friends
On this side death, and points them out to men,
A lecture silent, but of sov'reign pow'r.*

All these advantages, arising from supreme carefulness for the salvation of the soul, are still more worthy of regard, because not at all uncertain. You may be braving the thickest dangers of the field of war, to get the name of valour, and the place of command; yet fall an early victim in the bloody battle, or after it your services may be neglected. You may burn with inextinguishable ardour, to stand high in the rank of scholars, and ruin your health by intense study, yet die mortified at the littleness of your reputation. Your labour to succeed in business may be incessant, yet, through a thousand circumstances which you have no power to prevent, you may repeatedly suffer disappointment, and poverty still remain your portion. The favour of patrons, friends, relations, may be assiduously courted, and appear promising to your earnest * Night Thoughts, book ii.

wishes; and yet others may supplant you, and, receiving the benefits you were grasping in idea, make the very name of patron, friend, relation, odious to you. The world is every day exhibiting instances of bitter disappointment, in each of the cases above described.

But if with all the strength of desire you have sought for the salvation of your soul, through Jesus Christ, you have nothing to do with the changes ever incident to the things of time and sense. You have to do with the blessed God, in whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. You may be therefore rich, or you may be poor; raised, or depressed; beloved or slighted, by those on whom you are dependent; you may enjoy health, or be oppressed with mortal disease, whilst in each state were you to ask yourself, what course could I have best taken for my present peace and felicity? Reason, conscience, scripture will all reply, the very course you have taken, that of caring, in the first place, for the salvation of your soul.

To say no more; the quick succession of years, which exceedingly impoverish, as they pass by, every man whose soul is not his chief care, will, on the contrary, be accumulating for you the true riches. Like a prudent factor, who, instead of lavishing his gain in present luxury, yearly remits it home, that he may return to enjoy life in his native country after all his toils with ease and honour; so will you be growing rich towards God; sure to return, by death, to that happy country, where, amidst congratulating saints and angels, you shall enter upon the possession of an inheritance prepared for your soul, incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you.*

CHAPTER III.

THE SCRIPTURE CHARACTER OF GOD.

THE first duty of a Christian is to conceive of God only according to the revelation which he has given of himself: *For the prayer adapted to this chapter, see prayer the first.

To meditate on this revelation with humility, diligence, and prayer, not daring to indulge fallacious reasonings, lest he should form an imaginary god, and then worship the creature of his own brain.

Nor will such an absolute submission of the understanding to revelation, in this matter, be thought in the least grievous or dishonourable, when it is considered, that of ourselves, and in our present state of darkness and corruption, we are utterly unable to form any just conceptions of the divine nature and perfections. When once we forsake the guidance of scripture, we are left to uncertain conjecture; we put ourselves in the condition of the unenlightened heathens; and their errors, on this most important subject, as universal as they were lamentable, are a sufficient evidence of the short-sightedness and vanity of unassisted reason, and of the ignorance of man in the things of God.

I shall therefore present you with a transcript of what the sacred oracles have delivered to us, on this important point of belief. In absolute submission to them, I shall endeavour to delineate the character of the blessed God, as drawn by himself, and explain his nature and will, his acts and providences, his decrees and purposes, as exhibited in the Bible. Thus, knowing the God with whom we have to do, may we be faithful to the light he hath given us, and regulate our conduct towards him, by the infallible standard of his own plain and positive declarations. And may he himself render them effectual to enlighten the understanding; so that every reader, in the devout fervour of his soul, may cry out before him, "Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are thy ways, thou king of saints: who shall not fear thee, O Lord, and glorify thy name?"

In the first place, the scripture represents God, as possessed of the incommunicable perfection of eternal existence. All other beings once were not: there was a period when the most excellent of them first began to exist; and the same power which gave them life, could again reduce them to their original nothing.

On the contrary, God has ever existed; the same in essence, felicity, and perfection: from all eternity he has