true religion, and given up themselves to lust and sensuality, and, perhaps, as enemies, to God and good men, destroy, what their parents labored to build up, these parents wonder at God's judgments, and with broken hearts lament their infelicity, when it were better to lament their own misdoing, and it had been best of all to have lamented it.

Thus families, churches, and kingdoms, run on to blindness, ungodliness, and confusion: self-undoing, and serving the malice of Satan for fleshly lust, is the too common employment of mankind : all is wise, and good, and sweet, which is prescribed us by God, in true nature, or supernatural revelation: but folly, sin, and misery, mistaking themselves to be wit, and honesty, and prosperity, and raging against that which nominally they pretend to and profess, are the ordinary case and course of the most of men and when we would plead them out of their deceit and misery, it is well if we are not tempted to imitate them, or be not partly infected with their disease, or at least reproached and oppressed as their enemies such a Bedlam is most of the world become, where madness goeth for the only wisdom, and he is the bravest man that can sin and be damned with reputation and renown, and successfully drive or draw the greatest number with him unto hell; to which the world hath no small likeness, forsaking God, and being very much forsaken by him.

This is the world which standeth in competition for my love, with the spiritual, blessed world: much of God's mercies and comforts I have here had but their sweetness was their taste of divine love, and their tendency to heavenly perfection. What was the end and use of all the good that ever I saw, or that ever God did for my soul or body, but to teach me to love him, and long for more? How many weaning experiences; how many thousand bitter or contemning thoughts have I had of all the glory and pleasures of this world. How many thousand love tokens from God have called me to believe and taste his goodness. Wherever I go, and which way soever I look, I see vanity and vexation written upon all things in this world, so far as they stand in competition with God, and would be the end and portion of a fleshly mind: and I see holiness to the Lord written upon every thing in this world, so far as it declareth God

and leadeth me to him, as my ultimate end. God hath not for nothing engaged me in war against this world, and commanded me to take and use it as mine enemy: the emptiness, dangerousness, and bitterness of the world, and the all-sufficiency, trustiness, and goodness of God, have been the sum of all the experiences of my life? And shall a worldly, backward heart overcome the teaching of nature, Scripture, the Spirit of grace, and all experience? Far be it from me!

Come down, Lord, into this heart,

But, O my God! love is thy great and special gift: all good is from thee but love is the godlike nature, life, and image it is given us from the love of the Father, the grace of the Son, and the quickening, illuminating, and sanctifying operation of the Holy Spirit: what can the earth return unto the sun, but its own reflected beams,—if those? As, how far soever man is a medium in generation, nature, and that appetite which is the moving pondus in the child, is thy work; so whatever is man's part in the mediate work of believing and repenting, (which yet is not done without thy Spirit and grace,) certainly it is the blessed Regenerator, which must make us new creatures, by giving us thy divine nature, holy love, which is the holy appetite and pondus of the soul. for it cannot come up to thee. Can the plants for life, or the eye for light, go up unto the sun? Dwell in me by the Spirit of love, and I shall dwell by love in thee. Reason is weak, and thoughts are various, and man will be a slippery, uncertain wight, if love be not his fixing principle, and do not incline his soul to thee: surely through thy grace I easily feel that I love thy word, I love thy image, I love thy work, and, oh, how heartily do I love to love thee, and long to know and love thee more! And if all things be of thee, and through thee, and to thee, surely this love to the beams of thy glory here on earth is eminently so! It is thee, Lord, that it meaneth: to thee it looketh it is thee it serveth: for thee it mourns, and seeks, and groans in thee it trusts: and the hope, and peace, and comfort which support me, are in thee. When I was a returning prodigal in rags, thou sawest me afar off, and didst meet me with thy embracing, feasting love and shall I doubt whether he that hath better clothed me, and dwelt within me, will entertain me with a feast of greater love in the heavenly mansions, the world of love?

The suitableness of things below to my fleshly nature, hath detained my affections too much on earth: and shall not the suitableness of things above to my spiritual nature much more draw up my love to heaven? There is the God whom I have sought and served: he is also here; but veiled, and but little known: but there he shineth to heavenly spirits in heavenly glory. There is the Savior in whom I have believed he hath also dwelt in flesh on earth; but clothed in such meanness, and humbled to such a life and death, as was to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the Gentiles matter of reproach: but he shineth and reigneth now in glory, above the malice and contempt of sinners. And I shall there live because he liveth; and in his light I shall have light. He loved me here with a redeeming, regenerating, and preserving love: but there he will love me with a perfecting, glorifying, joyful love. I had here some rays of heavenly light but interpositions caused eclipses and nights, yea, some long and winter nights: but there I shall dwell in the city of the sun, the city of God, the heavenly Jerusalem, where there is no night, eclipse, or darkness: there are the heavenly hosts, whose holy love, and joyful praises, I would fain be a partaker of! I have here had some of their loving assistance, but to me unseen, being above our fleshly way of converse; but there I shall be with them, of the like nature, in the same orb, and of the same triumphant church and choir! There are perfected souls gathered home to Christ: not, as here, striving, like Esau and Jacob in the womb; nor yet as John when he leaped in the womb, because of his mother's joy; nor as wrangling children, that are hardly kept in the same house in peace: not like the servants of Abraham and Lot, like Paul and Barnabas, like Epiphanius and Chrysostom, like Luther and Carolostadius, like Ridley and Hooper, or the many striving parties now among us; nor like the disciples striving who should be the greatest: not like Noah's family in a wicked world, or Lot in a wicked city, or Abraham in an idolatrous land: nor like Elijah left alone; nor like those that wandered in sheep-skins and goat-skins, destitute, afflicted, and tormented, hid in dens and caves of the earth: not like Job on the dunghill; nor like Lazarus at the rich man's door: not like the African bishops, whose tongues were cut out; nor like the preachers silenced

by Popish imposers; (in Germany by the interim, or elsewhere ;) nor like such as Tzegedine, Peucer, and many other worthy men, whose maturest age was spent in prisons: not as we poor bewildred sinners, feeling evil, and fearing more, confounded in folly and mad contention, some hating the only way of peace, and others groping for it in the dark, wandering and lost in the clearest light, where the illuminated can but pity the blind, but cannot make them willing to be delivered. What is heaven to me, but God? God, who is life, and light and love, communicating himself to blessed spirits, perfecting them in the reception, possession, and exercise of life, and light, and love for ever. These are not the accidents, but the essence of that God who is heaven and all to me. Should I fear that death which passeth me to infinite, essential life? Should I fear a darksome passage into a world of perfect light? Should I fear to go to love itself? Think, O my soul, what the sun's quickening light and heat is to this lower, corporeal world? Much more is God, even infinite life, and light and love, to the blessed world above. Doth it not draw out thy desires to think of going into a world of love? When love will be our region, our company, our life; more to us than the air is for our breath, than the light is for our sight, than our food is for our life, than our friends are for our solace; and more to us than we are to ourselves. O excellent grace of faith which doth foresee, and blessed word of faith that doth foreshow, this world of love! Shall I fear to enter where there is no wrath, no fear, no strangeness, nor suspicion, nor selfish separation, but love will make every holy spirit as dear and lovely to me as myself, and me to them as lovely as themselves, and God to us all more amiable than ourselves and all: where love will have no defects or distances, no damps, or discouragements, no discontinuance or mixed disaffection; but as life will be without death, and light without darkness, (a perfect, everlasting day of glory,) so will love be without any hatred, unkindness, or allay. As many coals make one fire, and many candles conjoined make one light, so will many living spirits make one life, and many illuminated, glorious spirits, one light and glory, and many spirits, naturalized into love, will make one perfect love of God, and be loved as one by God for ever: for all the body of Christ is one; even here

it is one in initial union of the Spirit, and relation to one God, and Head, and Life, (1 Cor. xii. throughout; Eph. iv. 1-17,) and shall be presented as beloved and spotless to God, when the great marriage day of the, Lamb shall come. (Eph. v. 24, 25, &c.; Rev. Ixxi. and xxii.)

Hadst thou not given me, O Lord, the life of nature, I should have had no conceptions of a glorious, everlasting life: but if thou give me not the life of grace, I shall have no sufficient delightful inclination and desire after it. Hadst thou not given me sight and reason, the light of nature, I should not have thought how desirable it is to live in the glorious light and vision; but if thou give me not the spiritual illumination of a seeing faith, I shall not yet long for the glorious light, and beatific vision. Hadst thou not given me a will and love, which is part of my very nature itself, I could not have tasted how desirable it is to live in a world of universal, perfect, endless love but unless thou also shed abroad thy love upon my heart, by the Spirit of Jesus, the great medium of love, and turn my very nature or inclination into divine and holy love, I shall not long for the world of love. Appetite followeth nature: oh! give me not only the image and the art of godliness; the approaches towards it, nor only some forced or unconstant acts; but give me the divine nature, which is holy love, and then my soul will hasten towards thee, and cry, How long, O Lord, how long! O come, come quickly, make no delay.' Surely the fear of dying intimateth some contrary love that inclineth the soul another way; and some shameful unbelief, and great unapprehensiveness of the attractive glory of the world of love otherwise no frozen person so longeth for the fire, none in a dungeon so desireth light, as we should long for the heavenly light and love.

God's infinite, essential self-love, in which he is eternally delighted in himself, is the most amiable object, and heaven itself to saints and angels and next to that his love to all his works, to the world, and to the church in heaven, speaketh much more of his loveliness than his love to me. But yet due self-love in me, is his work, and part of his natural image; and when this by sin is grown up to excess, (through the withdrawing of a contracted, narrow soul, from the union and due love to my fellow-creatures, and to God,) I must also,