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was written to direct me to; which ministers | ing hopes, and yet be unwilling to pass unto the preached to me; which my books were written possession of them.

for; which I prayed for; and for which I served God? Or was it not for his grace on earth, and glory in heaven? Is it not better for me to have the end of all these means, than lose them all, and lose my hopes? Why have I used them, if I would not attain their end?

That is my best state which all the course of God's fatherly providence tends to. All his sweeter mercies, and all his sharper corrections, are to make me partaker of his holiness, and to lead me to glory in the way that my Saviour and all his saints have gone before me all things work together for the best to me, by preparing me for that which is best indeed. Both calms and storms are to bring me to this harbour: if I take them but for themselves, and this present life, I mistake them, and understand them not, but unthankfully vilify them, and lose their end, life, and sweetness. Every word and work of God; every day's mercies, changes, and usages, look at heaven, and intend eternity; God leads me no other way. If I follow him not, I forsake my hope in forsaking him: if I follow him, shall I be unwilling to be at home, and come to the end of all this way?

Surely that is best for me, which God hath required me principally to value, love, and seek, and that as the business of all my life, referring all things else thereto; that this is my duty, I am fully certain, as is proved elsewhere. Is my business in the world only for the things of this world? How vain a creature then were man; and how little were the difference between waking and sleeping, life and death. No wonder if he that believes that there is no life but this to seek or hope for, lives in uncomfortable despair, and only seeks to palliate his misery with the brutish pleasures of a wicked life, and if he stick at no villany which his fleshly lusts incline him to especially tyrants and multitudes who have none but God to fear. It is my certain duty to seek heaven with all the fervour of my soul, and diligence of my life, and is it not best to find it? That must needs be best for me which all other things must be forsaken for. It is folly to forsake the better for the worse; but scripture, reason, and conscience, tell me, that all this world, when it stands in competition, or opposition, should be forsaken for heaven; yea, for the least hopes of it. A possible everlasting glory should be preferred before a certainly perishing vanity. I am sure this life will shortly be nothing to me; and therefore it is next to nothing now. Must I forsake all for my everlast

That is like to be our best which is our maturest state. Nature carries all things towards their perfection: our apples, pears, grapes, and every fruit, is best when it is ripe, though they then hasten to corruption, that is, through the incapacity of the corporeal materials any longer to retain the vegetative spirit, which is not annihilated at its separation; and being not made for its own felicity, but for man's, its ripeness is the state in which man uses it, before it doth corrupt of itself, that its corruption may be for his nutriment; and the spirits and best matter of his said food doth become his very substance. Doth God cause saints to grow up unto ripeness, only to perish and drop down into useless rottenness? It is not credible. Though our bodies fall into corruption, our souls return to God that gave them; though he need them not, he uses them in their separated state; and that to such heavenly uses as the heavenly maturity and mellowness hath disposed them to. Seeing then love hath ripened me for itself, shall I not willingly drop into its hand.

That is like to be the best which the wisest and holiest in all ages of the world have preferred before all, and have most desired; which also almost all mankind do acknowledge to be best at last. It is not likely that all the best men in the world should be most deceived, and be put upon fruitless labours and sufferings by this deceit, and be undone by their duty; and that God should by such deceits rule all, or almost all mankind: also that the common notices of human nature, and conscience's last and deepest impressions, should be all in vain. But it is past all doubt, that no men usually are worse than those that have no belief or hopes of any life but this; that none are so holy, just, and sober, so charitable to others, and so useful to mankind, as those that most firmly believe and hope for the state of immortality. Shall I fear that state which all that were wise and holy, in all ages, have preferred and desired?

It is not unlikely that my best state is that which my greatest enemies are most against. How much Satan doth to keep me and other men from heaven, and how much worldly honour, pleasure, and wealth he could afford us to accomplish it, I need not here again be copious in reciting, having said so much of it elsewhere. Shall I be towards myself, so much of Satan's mind: he would not have me come to heaven: and shall I also be unwilling? All these things tell me, that it is best to be with Christ.

SECTION II.-ULTERIOR REASONS.

Is it not far better to dwell with God in glory, than with sinful men, in such a world as this? Though he be every where, his glory, which we must behold to our felicity, and the perfecting operations and communications of his love, are in the glorious world, and not on earth. As the eye is made to see the light, and then to see other things by the light, so is man's mind made to see God, and to love him; and other things, as in, by, and for him. He that is our beginning is our end and our end is the first motive of all moral action, and for it, it is that all means are used. The end attained is the rest of souls. How often hath my soul groaned under the sense of distance, darkness, and estrangement from God? How often hath it looked up, and aspired after him, and said, O when shall I be nearer and better acquainted with my God? As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God: my soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God?' Would I not have my prayers heard, and my desires granted? What else is the sum of lawful prayers, but God himself? If I desire any thing more than God, what sinfulness is in those desires, and how sad is their signification? How often have I said, Whom have I in heaven but thee, and there is none on earth that I desire besides thee? It is good for me to draw near to God.' Woe to me, if I did dissemble; if not, why should my soul draw back is it because that death stands in the way? Do not my fellow-creatures die for my daily food? And is not my passage secured by the love of my Father, and the resurrection and intercession of my Lord? Can I see the light of heavenly glory in this darksome shell and womb of flesh?

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All creatures are more or less excellent and glorious, as God is more or less operative and refulgent in them, and by that operation communicates most of himself unto them: though he be immense and indivisible, his operations and communications are not equal; and that is said to be nearest to him, which hath most of those operations on it, and that without the intervening causality of any second created cause; and so all those are in their order near unto him, as they have noblest natures, and fewest intervening causes. Far am I from presuming to think that I am, or shall be, the best and noblest of God's creatures, and so that I shall be so near him, as to be under the influx of no second or

created causes; of which more in the sequel. But to be as near as my nature was ordained to approach, is but to attain the end and perfection of my nature.

As I must not look to be the nearest to him, as he is the first efficient, no more must I as he is the governing cause: as now I am under the government of his officers on earth, I look for ever to be under sub-governors in heaven: my glorified Saviour must be my Lord and Ruler; and who else under him I know not. If angels are not equal in perfection, nor, as is commonly supposed, equal in power, nor without some regimental order among themselves, I must not conclude that no created angel or spirit shall have any government over me: but it will be so pure and divine, as that the blessed effects of God's own government will be sweetly powerful therein. If the law was given by angels, and the angel of God was in the burning bush, and the angel conducted the people through the wilderness, and yet all these things are ascribed to God, much more near and glorious will the divine rule there be, whoever are the administra

tors.

As I must expect to be under some created efficient causes there, so must I expect to have some subordinate ends: else there would not be a proportion and harmony in causalities; whatever nobler creatures are above me, and have their causalities upon me, I must look to be finally for those nobler creatures. When I look up and think what a world of glorious beings are now over me, I dare not presume to think that I shall finally, any more than receptively, be the nearest unto God, and that I am made for none but him. I find here that I am made, ruled, and sanctified, for the public or common good of many as above my own, of which I am past doubt. I am sure that I must be finally for my glorified Redeemer; and for what other spiritual beings or intelligences that are above me, little do I know: and God hath so ordered all his creatures, as that they are mutually ends and means for and to one another, though not in an equality nor in the same respects. But whatever nearer ends there will be, I am sure that he who is the first efficient, will be the ultimate final cause. I shall be, in this respect, as near him as is due to the rank and order of my nature. I shall be useful to the ends which are answerable to my perfection.

If it be the honour of a servant to have an honourable master, and to be appointed to the most honourable work: if it be some honour to a horse above a swine, or a worm, or fly, that

he serves more nearly for the use of man, yea, for a prince, will it not be also my advancement to be ultimately for God, and subordinately for the highest created natures; and this in such services as are suitable to my spiritual and heavenly state?

For I am far from thinking that I shall be above service, and have none to do, for activity will be my perfection and my rest; all such activity must be regular in harmony and order of causes, and for its proper use. What though I know not now fully what service it is that I must do? I know it will be good, and suitable to the blessed state which I shall be in it is enough that God and my Redeemer know it, and that I shall know it in due time, when I come to practice it; of which more afterward.

The inordinate love of this body and present composition, seduces souls to think that all their use and work is for its maintenance and prosperity, and when the soul hath done that, and is separated from flesh, it hath nothing to do, but must lie idle, or be as nothing, or have no considerable work or pleasure: as if there were nothing in the whole world, but this little fluid mass of matter for a soul to work upon, or as if itself, and all the creatures, and God, were nothing, or no fit objects for a soul: why not hereafter as well as now? Or, as if that which in our compounded state, operates on and by its organs, had no other way of operation without them. As if the musician lost all his power, or were dead, when his instrument is out of tune, or broken, and could do nothing else but play on that as if the fiery part of the candle were annihilated or transmutated, as some philosophers imagine, when the candle goes out, and were not fire, and in action still or as if that sunbeam which I shut out, or which passes from our horizon, were annihilated, or did nothing, when it shines not with us? Had it no other individual to illuminate, or to terminate its beams or action, were it nothing to illuminate the common air? Though I shall not always have a body to operate in and upon, I shall always have God, a Saviour, and a world of fellow-creatures; and when I shine not in this lantern, and see not by these spectacles, nor imaginarily in a glass, I shall yet see things suitable intuitively, and as face to face. That which is essentially life, as a living principle, will live: that which is essentially an active, intellectual principle, force, and virtue, will still be such while it is itself, and is not annihilated, or changed into another thing; which is not to be feared: that

which is such can never want an object till all things be annihilated.

Reason assures me, that were my will now what it should be, and fully obsequious herein to my understanding, to fulfil God's will would be the fulfilling my own will, for my will should perfectly comply with his, and to please him perfectly would be my perfect pleasure. It is the unreasonable adhesion to this body, and sinful selfishness, which makes any one think otherwise now. I am sure that my soul shall live, for it is life itself, and I am sure that I shall live to God, and that I shall fulfil and please his blessed will; and this is as incomparably better than my felicity. Yet so far as I am pleased in so doing, it will be my felicity.

I begin now to think, that the strange love which the soul hath to this body, so far as it is not inordinate, is put into us of God, partly to signify to us the great love which Christ hath to his mystical body, and to every member of it, even the least. He will gather all his elect out of the world, and none that come to him shall be shut out, and none that are given him shall be lost. As his flesh is to them meat indeed, and his blood is to them drink indeed, and he nourishes them for life eternal ;—his spirit in them, turning the sacrament, the word, and Christ himself, as believed in, into spirit and life to us, as the soul and our natural spirits turn our food into flesh, blood, and spirits, which, in a dead body, or any lifeless repository, it would never be ;-so as we delights in the ease and prosperity of our body, and each member, and have pleasure in the pleasant food that nourishes it, and other pleasant objects which accommodate it; Christ also delights in the welfare of his church, and of all the faithful, and is pleased when they are fed with good and pleasant food, and when hereby they prosper: Christ loves the church, not only as a man must love his wife, but as we love our bodies: no man ever hated his own flesh. Herein I must allow my Saviour the pre-eminence, to out-go me in powerful, faithful love: he will save me better from pain and death, than I can save my body; and will more inseparably hold me to himself. If it please my soul to dwell in such a house of clay, and to operate on so mean a thing as flesh, how greatly will it please my glorified Lord to dwell with his glorified body, the triumphant church, and to cherish and bless each member of it? It would be a kind of death to Christ to be separated from his body, and to have it die. Whether Augustine and the rest of the fathers were in the right or not, who thought, that as our bodies do not only shed

their hairs, but by sicknesses and waste lose much of their very flesh, so Christ's militant body doth not only lose hypocrites, but also some who seem to be living, justified members; yet certain it is, that confirmed members, and more certain that glorified members, shall not be lost heaven is not a place for Christ or us to suffer such loss in. Will Christ love me better than I love my body? Will he be more loth to lose me than I am to lose a member, or to die? Will he not take incomparably greater pleasure in animating and actuating me for ever, than my soul doth in animating and actuating this body? O then let me long to be with him! And though I am naturally loth to be absent from the body, let me be by his Spirit more unwilling to be absent from the Lord; and though I would not be unclothed had not sin made it necessary, let me groan to be clothed upon with my heavenly habitation, and to become the delight of my Redeemer, and to be perfectly loved by Love itself. Even this blessed susceptibility of my soul, in terminating the love and delight of my glorified Head, must needs be a felicity to me! The insensible creatures are but beautified by the sun's communication of its light and heat; but sensitives have also the pleasure of it. Shall my soul be senseless? Will it be a clod or stone? Shall that which is now the form of man, be then more lifeless, senseless, or incapable than the form of brutes is now? Doubtless it will be a living, perceiving, sensible recipient of the felicitating love of God and my Redeemer. I shall be loved as a living Spirit, and not as a dead and senseless thing, that doth not comfortably perceive it. If I must rejoice with my fellow servants that rejoice, shall I not be glad to think that my blessed Lord will rejoice in me, and in all his glorified ones? Union will make his pleasure to be much mine: and it will be aptly said by him to the faithful soul, Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.' His own active joy will objectively be ours, as ours will be efficiently his, or from him. Can that be an ill condition to me, in which my Lord will most rejoice? It is best to him, and therefore best to me.

The heavenly society will joyfully welcome a holy soul. If there be now 'joy in heaven among the angels for one sinner that repenteth,' who hath yet so little holiness and so much sin, what joy will there be over a perfected, glorified soul! Surely if our angels there behold our Father's face, they will be glad, in season of our company. The angels that carried Lazarus to Abraham's bosom, no doubt rejoiced in their work and their success. Is the joy of angels and the heavenly

host as nothing to me? Will not love and union make their joy to be my own; if love here must make all my friends and neighbours' comforts to become my own? As their joy, according to their perfection, is greater than any that I am now capable of, so the participation of so great a joy of theirs, will be far better than to have my little separated apartment. Surely that will be my best condition which angels and blessed spirits will be best pleased in, and I shall rejoice most in that which they most rejoice in.

SECTION III.-SPECIAL REASONS ARISING OUT OF THE INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER OF THE MIND.

Though the tempter would persuade men because of the case of infants in the womb, &c. that the understanding will be but an inactive power when separated from these corporeal organs, I have seen before sufficient reasons to repel this temptation. I will suppose that it will not have such a mode of conception as it hath now by these organs: but, 1. The soul will be still essentially a vital, intellectual substance, disposed to act naturally; and that is to those acts which it is formally inclined to, as fire to illuminate and warm. As it cannot die while it is what it is in essence, because it is life itself, that is, the vital substance; so it cannot but be intellectual as to an inclined power, because it is such essentially, though God can change or annihilate any thing if he would. 2. It will be among a world of objects. 3. It will still have its dependence on the first cause, and receive his continual actuating influx. 4. No man cau give the least show of true reason to prove that it shall cease sensation, whether the sensitive faculties be in the same substance which is intellect, which is most probable, or in one as some imagine, though the species and modes of sensation cease which are denominated from the various organs. 5. Yea, no man can prove that the departing soul doth not carry with it its igneous spirits, which in the body it did immediately actuate: if it were ever so certain that those Greek fathers were mistaken, as well as Hippocrates, who took the soul itself to be a sublime intellectual fire.

As to the objection, some hold that the soul pre-existed before it was in the body; others, and most, that it then received its first being. If the first were true, it would be true that the soul had its intellectual activity before, though the soul itself incorporate, remembers it not, be

that said, God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, that is, stands not related to them as his people, as a king to his subjects, is not himself the Lord of the absolute dead but of the living.

Therefore the immortality of the soul is provable by the light of nature, but the manner of its future operation must be known by faith. Blessed be the Father of spirits, and our Redeemer, who hath sent and set up this excellent light, by which we see further than infidels can do.

But I deny not but even the scripture itself doth tell us but little of the manner of our intellectual constitution, when we are out of the body; and it is not improbable that there is more imperfection in this mode of abstract knowledge. which the soul exercises in the body, than most consider of: that as the eye hath the visual faculty in sleep, and when we wink, and an internal action of the visual spirits, no doubt, and yet sees not any thing without, till the eye-lids are opened, and was not made to see its own sight; so the soul in the body is as a winking eye to all things that are not by the sense and imagination intromitted or brought within its reach: but I am very suspicious that the body is more a lantern to the soul than some will admit; and that this abstract knowledge of things by organical images, names, and notions, is occasioned by the union of the soul with the body as forms, and is that childish knowledge which the apostle saith shall be done away. How much of man's fall might consist in such a knowing of good and evil I cannnot tell, or in the over-valuing such a knowledge. I think that when vain philosophy at Athens had called the thoughts and desires of mankind from great realities to the logical and philological game at words and notions, it was Socrates's wisdom to call them to more

cause it operates but in human form, and its oblivion they take to be part of its penalty: they that think it a ray of the soul or system of the world, must think that then it did intellectually animate this world or a part of the world: to do so again, is the worst they can conjecture of it. As the rays of the sun which heat a burning glass, and by it set a candle on fire, are the same rays still diffused in the air, and illuminating, heating, and moving it, and terminated on some other body, and not annihilated or debilitated when their contracted operation ceases by breaking the glass or putting out the candle: as the spirit of a tree still animates the tree, when it retires from the leaves and lets then fall. But this being an unproved imagination of men's own brains, we have no further use of it than to confute themselves. But if the soul existed not till its incorporation, what wonder if it operate but as a form, when it is united to the body for that use? What wonder if its initial operations, like a spark of fire in tinder, or the first lighting of a candle be weak, and scarcely by us perceptible? What wonder if it operate but to the uses that the creation did appoint it; and first, as vegetative, fabricate its own body, as the maker's instrument, and then feel, and then understand? What wonder if it operate no further than objects are admitted? Therefore what wonder if in apoplexies, &c. such operations are intercepted? But the departing soul is, 1. In its maturity. 2. No more united to this body, and so not confined to sense and imagination in its operations, and the admission of its objects. 3. It is sub ratione meriti, and as a governed subject is ordinate to its reward; which it was not capable of receiving in the womb or in an apoplexy, as we have the reasons before alleged to hold that it shall not be annihilated, nor dissolved, nor lose its essential faculties or substantial studies, and Paul's greater wisdom to powers, nor those essential powers be continued useless by the wise and merciful Creator, though by natural revelation we know not in what manner they shall act; whether on any other body, and by what conjunction, and how far; so by supernatural revelation we are assured, that there is a reward for the righteous, and that holy souls are still members of Christ, and live, because he lives, and that in the day of their departure they shall be with him in para-called seeing: Blessed are the pure in heart, for dise, and being absent from the body, shall be present with the Lord; and that Christ therefore died, rose, and revived, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living, that is, of those that being dead, hence do live with him, and of those that yet live in the body: for he

warn men to take heed of such vain philosophy, and to labour to know God and Jesus Christ, and the things of the Spirit, and not to overvalue this ludicrous, dreaming, worldly wisdom. If I have none of this kind of notional, childish knowledge when I am absent from the body, the glass and spectacles may then be spared, when I come to see with open face, or as face to face. Our future knowledge is usually in scripture

they shall see God.'—'We shall see face to face.' -We shall see him as he is.'-'Father, I will that those which thou hast given me, be with me where I am, that they may behold my glory which thou hast given me,' &c. An intuitive knowledge of all things, as in themselves imme

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