popish operators in all their religious performances. But may not God answer these men, about their so much valued services, as he did the Jews about their sacrifices? I need none of your prayers, none of your humiliations; my glory is above them, and entire without them. But if the service of any of my creatures might be of advantage to me, is not the whole host of heaven mine? Have I not thousands and ten thousands of angels, ready at a word to fulfil my will, to execute my commands, and to speak my praises?

Surely if these men dwelt much upon the contemplation of God's glorious nature, they could never esteem themselves for paying God those services, of which he stands in no need, and by which the substantial greatness of his honour is not at all increased. For most true it is, that there is no accession to the divine perfections, by the very best and utmost that the holiest person in the world can do. And if there was no other rational end and use of our obedience than this, God would never exact it. For the ends why he exacts and requires it of us are, that it may be both a testification of our homage to him, and an instrument of good to ourselves. That is all, for there is no end of profit or advantage on our Creator's part served by it, who is neither a greater God or a mightier Lord, because we serve him, or pray unto him. Since, if we did not, he could equally make good his honour upon us, and fetch his pennyworths out of us by damning us for our disobedience.

Let a man think much of this, and make God the measure of his perfections and his services; and he cannot but see cause to bring down his spirit, and

to make it poor, and humble, and base, in all his reflections upon himself: it will shew him how mean and useless a thing he is, as to the compassing of the great ends and designs of Heaven; how easily Providence can be without him, without any straitening of itself; and how far he is from being necessary to the setting forth of the glory of his Maker. We know how high Job bore himself, in the apprehension of his own integrity, which he thought gave him the vantage-ground so far, as to be able to expostulate and to reason it out with the Almighty; nor could all the discourses of his friends reduce him to a right understanding of himself, so as to bring him upon his knees in a submissive acknowledgment of the righteous proceedings of his great Judge. Nothing could control either the risings of his spirit, or the insolence of his speech, till God himself undertook, and encountered him out of the cloud, displaying his greatness, his power, his wisdom, and his other surpassing perfections, laying all these before his astonished eyes, as we have them fully described in those four excellent chapters, the 38th, 39th, 40th, and 41st of Job: and then the man's stubborn heart began to bend, and to come down from its heights; then he presently knows himself, and his distance from God; his deplorable weakness and his vileness, and so breaks forth in those expressions, Job xlii. 5, 6, Behold, says he, I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee. What follows? Wherefore, says he, I abhor myself. It was the clear sight of the glory and greatness of the divine nature that humbled him to this self-abhorrence, and altered the tune of his former self-justification. Now

let every confident, self-valuing person, compare himself with those descriptions of God in the forementioned chapters; and if he has but his understanding and his judging faculties about him, I doubt not but they will have the same effect and impression upon him, that they had upon Job, and make him descend some steps lower, till they have brought him to the level of the poor in spirit. Let this therefore be one way for the obtaining of this evangelical virtue, for a man to think much of the transcendent greatness and majesty of God, and his own unspeakable distance from him.

2. The second course that he is to take for the same purpose, is for him to be much in comparing himself with the exceeding exactness, perfection, and spirituality of the divine law. Self-esteem, which is the thing properly and directly opposite to this poorness of spirit here spoke of by our Saviour, is the effect of men's rating themselves by false measures; and, as I shew, that men's not measuring themselves by the infinite perfection of God's nature brought them to overvalue their persons, so now their not measuring themselves by the sublimity and exactness of God's law will bring them to the same false valuation of their actions and services. The law of the Lord is perfect, says the Psalmist, Psalm xix. 7. But certain it is, that no mortal man is so; and yet it is as certain, that thousands think that they are, and accordingly entertain thoughts of pride, naturally consequent upon thoughts of perfection.

But now what is the cause of this error, and where and how do men gather up these unreason

or nonattendance to the law, which requires a perfect original uprightness and rectitude in the whole man, and throughout all his natural faculties; it requires also a constant holiness and purity in his very thoughts and first inclinations; it requires an universal, uninterrupted practice of the same in all his actions, and through the tenor of his whole life: and this it does with that unrelenting strictness and rigour, as not to allow of the least deviation or turning from the rule; but inexorably curses every the least and most minute transgression of it in thought, word, or deed. This is the economy and constitution of the law: but who is sufficient for these things? What man can answer all these demands, or live up to these heights? What merit-monger among all the sons of supererogation will promise and engage, upon the utmost peril of his soul, that from the first to the last minute of his breathing in the world he will never do or desire, or so much as think any thing amiss? But if this be an undertaking too vast for weak flesh and blood, that will have its failings, and lives merely upon the stock of grace and pardon; then let every man let fall his crest, forget his pride, and learn to be poor in spirit, till he is richer in good works.

Let him come off from those false weights and wrong measures, that pervert him in his judgment about all his actions. Some have contrived the body of practical divinity into easy and flesh-pleasing propositions; such as make salvation attainable by something less than a good life. Now, so long as men trust to and steer by such directions, they may quickly and easily grow into a very good opinion of their own piety and perfection, when to be

pious, and to be perfect, is only to live up to an imperfect and a faulty rule: but it is a ready and easy way of proficiency, for a man to learn as much as he is taught, when he is taught but very little.

Others again there are, who measure the piety of their own lives by the scandalous and enormous impiety of other men's; and will therefore conclude themselves holy, because they neither revel it with the drunkard or the epicure, swear with the profane, or grind the face of the poor with the tyrant or extortioner: all which are heights and great improvements of villainy, and such as have many degrees under them, many impieties of a lesser guilt and malignity, yet enough, unrepented of, to damn and destroy the person in whom they are found. No wonder therefore if men take up a fair opinion of themselves and their own righteousness upon these grounds; and if they count themselves very good indeed, so long as the being good is only not to be as bad as the worst.

But now what course is to be taken to dispossess men of this false and flattering opinion? Why, surely, that course prescribed by the prophet, Isaiah viii. 20, to the law and to the testimony. The doctrines of men may deceive us, and examples may blind us; but there is no trick, or fallacy, or imperfection in the law, which issues from the fountain of infinite truth and goodness, and so is reached forth to the world as that absolute, indefective copy of divine holiness, that all mankind is to write after. This is a glass in which the fairest soul may see its spots and deformities; a glass that will not, that cannot flatter: and therefore he that shall view himself in it frequently and attentively, shall see enough