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eternal glory. In my last moments, when all the springs of natural life shall cease in me, fill me with hopes full of immortality. I ask it for the honour of Christ, the conqueror of death; who by his resurrection and ascension hath opened the way into the holiest of all. To whom with thee, Holy Father, and thee, blefsed Spirit, be equal and unceasing praise. Amen.

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CHAP. XII.

On the State and Blessedness to which the Believer is advanced when admitted to Eternal Glory.

TH

HE EVERBLESSED GOD, whose infinite blessedness flows from his efsential nature and perfections, hath loved his elect with an everlasting love. He hath manifested it by setting them apart in his own eternal decree and election-purposes to a supercreation union and communion with himself. It hath pleased him to open his vast designs respecting them; and he executes his antient, internal, and eternal purposes towards them within and upon them in a vast variety of ways and means, and by various and succefsive degrees. As the GOD OF ALL GRACE, he brings them out of their natural and sinful state, calls them unto, and invests them with a right and title to, and works in them in regeneration a meetnefs for his eternal glory by Christ Jesus. As they are prepared for it by regeneration; so he gives them many sweet foretastes of it in their communion with him by faith in his beloved Son through the grace and influence of the Holy Spirit. As

they know him to be their portion and shield; so he hath given them his promise, that he will be in all his persons, perfections, and blefseduefs their exceeding great reward. He is their guide through life, their hope and consolation in death, and will continue to be to them in Heaven their everlasting light and their everlasting glory. God is styled The God of Glory. What God is efsentially, that he is as personally considered. The Father is called The Father of Glory. Christ The Lord of Glory. The Spirit The Spirit of Glory. And the state of blefsednefs, into which believers immediately enter on the disunion of their souls and bodies by death, is a state of glory. The apostle speaks of it, as an exceeding eternal weight of glory.

As the title The God of all Grace is most justly due to our Covenant-God, and taken by him to express what he is to us, and what an all-sufficiency of Grace he hath displayed towards us in Christ Jesus, and treasured up in his fullness for us, every way suitable for whatsoever can possibly befal us all through life, or in the article of death; so the title The God of Glory exprefses what he hath prepared for us, what he will bestow upon us, and what he will be to us, in the house eternal in the Hea

vens. It is an important truth and an immutable reality, whether it be perceived by us or not, that the Lord is in a most particular manner very present with his people in their dying moments. They are then most truly blessed, because they die in the Lord,-in union and communion with him. They are blefsed, as in general they die in the free and full exercise of their faith, and hope, and love on him. They are blessed, as the moment they cease to breathe the whole body of sin with all its lusts inherent in it everlastingly expires, and. they are eternally delivered from it. They are blessed, as they have a prospect of the glory which they are entering upon. They are blefsed, as the Spirit of Glory rests on them, and an abundant entrance is ministered to them into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. He admits them into it, and presents them faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, saying, Come ye blessed of my Father, enter into the joy of your Lord.-This is a great and most peculiar solemnity. Every individual believer at his entrance into heaven doth and will share in it. Like as when the soul in regeneration was made by the Holy Ghost the subject of his graces and gifts, and was then intro

duced into the state of Grace, and spiritual joys suited hereunto were impart. ed; so it is now clothed with immortality, and admitted into the state of eternal glory, and joys equal to it are imparted. The complacency which the Eternal Three will exprefs on the arrival of the elect in Heaven far exceeds all expres sion; yea, infinitely transcends all con ception. On the soul's first conversion and open espousals to Christ all the persons in the Godhead made an open ma nifestative discovery of their respective loves; so upon its arrival at the city of habitation there will be fresh, most free, and most glorious exprefsions of it. God the Father, as The Father of Spirits, receives the soul into the open embraces of his everlasting love; and gives new and unspeakable views, proofs, and en joyments of it.

He fills the soul with so much of it in communion with himself, as exceeds all that was ever known of it on earth. Our divine Jesus, the Head of his Church, and its most preeious and adorable Mediator, presents the soul to its divine Father faultless; and receives it with unutterable joy to the continued and perpetual enjoyment of all the love wherewith he hath loved it, and to an uninterrupted communion with himself in all the fruits and blessings of his eternal redemption and glory. God

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