grees of our desert and improvement. The sense of which will not only compose our minds into a perfect satisfaction, but also continually excite us to those beatifical acts of love and praise, thanksgiving and adoration. Thus humility, you see, tunes and composes us for heaven, and only casts us down, like balls, that we may rebound the higher in glory and happiness.

Thus you see how all those virtues, which appertain to a man considered as a reasonable animal, conduce to the great Christian end, viz. the happiness of heaven. It is true, indeed, the immediate product of this sort of virtue is only, at least chiefly, privative happiness, or the happiness of rest and indolence, which consists in not being miserable, or, in a perfect cessation from all such acts and motions as are hurtful and injurious to a rational spirit. For, as I have shewed you in the beginning of this section, the proper office of human virtue consists in so regulating all our powers of action, as that we do nothing that is hurtful or injurious to our rational nature; and thus you plainly see these five aforenamed virtues do most effectually perform. But besides this privative, there is, as I shewed you, a positive part of happiness, which consists not in rest, but in motion; in the vigorous exercise of our rational faculties upon such objects as are most suitable to them and to the obtaining of this part of our happiness, there are other kinds of virtues necessary to be practised by us, of which I shall discourse in the two following sections. But though the immediate effect of these human virtues we have been discoursing of be only the happiness of rest, yet do they tend a great deal farther even to the happiness

of motion and exercise. For it is impossible so to suppress that active principle within us, as to make it totally surcease from motion; and therefore, as every intermission of its sober and regular actings does but make way for wild and extravagant ones; so every abatement of its hurtful and injurious motions makes way for beatifical ones; and so the human virtues, by giving us rest from those motions that are afflictive to our natures, incline and dispose us to such motions and exercise as are most pleasant and grateful to it.

SECT. II.

Concerning those divine virtues which belong to a man considered as a reasonable creature related to God; shewing that these also are comprehended in the heavenly part of the Christian life, and that the practice of them effectually conduces to our future happiness.

I PROCEED now to the second kind of virtues, viz. divine; to which, I told you, we are obliged in the capacity of reasonable creatures related to God, who being not only endowed with all possible perfections, with infinite truth and justice, wisdom and power, with all that can render any being most highly reverenced, admired, loved, and adored; who being not only the Author of our being and wellbeing, as he is Creator and Preserver of all things, but also our sovereign Lord and King, as he is God Almighty, the supreme and overruling power of heaven and earth, hath upon all these accounts a just and unalienable claim to sundry duties and homages from his creatures: all which I shall reduce to these six particulars :

1. That we should frequently think of and contemplate the beauty and perfection of his nature.

2. That upon the account of these perfections we should humbly worship and adore him.

3. That we should ardently love and take complacency in him.

4. That we should attentively and unweariedly imitate him in all his imitable perfections and actions.

5. That we should entirely resign up ourselves to his conduct and disposal.

6. That we should cheerfully rely and depend upon him. All which, as I shall shew, are included in the heavenly part of the Christian life, and do most effectually contribute to our future happiness.

I. As we are rational creatures related to God, we are obliged to be often contemplating and thinking upon him. For the natural use of our understanding is to contemplate truth; and therefore the more of truth and reality there is in any knowable object, and the farther it is removed from falsehood and nonentity, the more the understanding is concerned to contemplate and think upon it. God therefore being the most true and real object, as he stands removed by the necessity of his existence from all possibility of not being, must needs be the most perfect theme of our understanding, the best and greatest subject on which it can employ its meditations. And besides that, he is the most true and real of all beings: he is also the source and spring of › all truth and reality; his power, conducted by his wisdom and goodness, being the cause not only of all that is, but of all that either shall be or can be. And is it fit that our understanding, which was made

to contemplate, should wholly overlook the fountain of it? But besides this too, that he is the greatest truth himself, and the cause of every thing else that is true and real, he is the sovereign of beings, and the most amiable and perfect, as he includes in his infinite essence all possible perfections, both in kind and degree. And what a monstrous irreverence is it, for minds that were framed to the contemplation of truth, to pass by such a great and glorious one without any regard or observance, as if he stood for a cipher in the world, and were not worthy to be thought upon! Nay, and besides all this, (which one would think were enough to oblige our understandings to the strictest attendance to him,) he is a truth, in which, above all others, we are most nearly concerned; as he is not only the father and prop of our beings, and the consolation of our lives, but the sole arbiter of our fate too, upon whom our everlasting well or ill being depends: and what can we be more concerned to think and meditate upon than this great Being, from whom we sprang, in whom we live and breathe, and of whom we are to expect all that evil or good that we can fear or hope for? All which considered, there is no doubt to be made, but that our understanding was chiefly made for God, to look up to him, and contemplate his being and perfections. And though in this imperfect state it is too often averted from him, by this vast variety of sensual things that surround it, and intercept his prospect; yet, as our soul recovers out of this sensual condition into a life of reason, we find by experience that its understanding presently looks upwards, by a natural instinct, and directs itself to God, as to its proper pole and centre. And as it grows more and

more indifferent to the objects of sense, so it becomes more and more vigorous in its tendency towards God and divine things: and it is no wonder it doth so, since it is God only, who is an infinite truth, that is able to satisfy its infinite thirst after truth. And hence it is, that till we have throughly fixed our minds and wills upon God, we do naturally affect such an infinity of objects, that our desires are always reaching at new pleasures, and carried forth after new possessions; that our fancy is always entertaining our mind with new ideas, and our understanding continually calling for new scenes of contemplation; by which, as one hath well observed, the soul declares that it is not to be perfectly pleased with finite truth or good; which possibly may be the reason of that delight we take in fables, and pictures of anticks and monsters, because they exceed the limits of truth, and so do enlarge, as it were, the prospect of the soul, which, by its unconfined motions, shews that it is of a divine extract, and that it can never be perfectly satisfied but in union with God, who is an infinite ocean of truth and goodness. For as for all other beings, they are so very shallow, that we quickly see (or at least shall do, when we see after the manner of spirits) to the very bottom of their truth and reality; and when we have done that, they have no more in them to feed and entertain our understandings. So that when we have exhausted the truth of infinite beings, we must either cease to understand any more, which would be to deprive our noblest faculty of any farther pleasure, or we must at last fix our mind upon God, in whom it will find such infinite truth, as will be sufficient to exercise it throughout all its infinite dura