great repositories of grace, and instrumental to all designs of

virtue.

3. For the understanding is not to consider the matter of any meditation in itself, or as it determines in natural excellencies or unworthiness respectively, or with a purpose to furnish itself with notion and riches of knowledge; for that is like the winter sun: it shines, but warms not; but in such order as themselves are put in the designations of theology, in the order of Divine laws, in their spiritual capacity, and as they have influence upon holiness: for the understanding here is something else besides the intellectual power of the soul, it is the spirit; that is, it is celestial in its application, as it is spiritual in its nature; and we may understand it well by considering the beatifical portions of soul and body in their future glories. For therefore, even our bodies in the resurrection shall be spiritual, because the operation of them shall be in order to spiritual glories, and their natural actions (such as are seeing and speaking) shall have a spiritual object and supernatural end; and here, as we partake of such excellencies and co-operate to such purposes, men are more or less spiritual. And so is the understanding taken from its first. and lowest ends of resting in notion and ineffective contemplation, and is made spirit; that is, wholly ruled and guided by God's Spirit to supernatural ends and spiritual employments; so that it understands and considers the motions of the "heavens, to declare the glory of God," the prodigies and alterations in the firmament, to demonstrate his handy work; it considers the excellent order of creatures, that we may not disturb the order of creation, or dissolve the golden chain of subordination. Aristotle and Porphyry, and the other Greek philosophers, studied the heavens, to search out their natural causes and production of bodies; the wiser Chaldees and Assyrians studied the same things, that they might learn their influences upon us, and make predictions of contingencies; the more moral Egyptian described his theorems in hieroglyphics and fantastic representments, to teach principles of policy, economy, and other prudences of morality and secular negotiation: but the same philosophy, when it is made Christian, considers as they did, but to greater purposes, even that from the book of the creatures we may

glorify the Creator, and hence derive arguments of worship and religion: this is Christian philosophy.

4. I instance only in considerations natural to spiritual purposes; but the same is the manner in all meditation, whether the matter of it be nature or revelation. For if we think of hell, and consider the infinity of its duration, and that its flames last as long as God lasts, and thence conjecture, upon the rules of proportion, why a finite creature may have an infinite, unnatural duration; or think by what ways a material fire can torment an immaterial substance; or why the devils, who are intelligent and wise creatures, should be so foolish as to hate God, from whom they know every rivulet of amability derives; this is to study, not to meditate : for meditation considers any thing, that may best make us to avoid the place, and to quit a vicious habit, or master and rectify an untoward inclination, or purchase a virtue, or exercise one so that meditation is an act of the understanding put to the right use.

5. For the holy Jesus, coming to redeem us from the bottomless pit, did it, by lifting us up out of the puddles of impurity and the unwholesome waters of vanity; "he redeemed us from our vain conversation;" and our understandings had so many vanities, that they were made instruments of great impiety. The unlearned and ruder nations had fewer virtues; but they had also fewer vices than the wise empires, that ruled the world with violence and wit together. The softer Asians had lust and intemperance in a full chalice; but their understandings were ruder than the finer Latins; for these men's understandings distilled wickedness as through a limbeck, and the Romans drank spirits and the sublimed quintessences of villany; whereas the other made themselves drunk with the lees and cheaper instances of sin: so that the understanding is not an idle and useless faculty; but naturally drives to practice, and brings guests into the inward cabinet of the will, and there they are entertained and feasted. And those understandings, which did not serve the baser end of vices, yet were unprofitable for the most part, and furnished their inward rooms with glasses and beads, and trifles fit for

* Τοὺς Περσῶν βασιλεῖς ὑπὸ τρυφῆς προκηρύττειν τοῖς ἐφευρίσκωσί τινα καινὴν ἡδονὴν ágyugiou mañbos. - Athen. lib. iv.

an American mart. From all these impurities and vanities, Jesus hath redeemed all his disciples, and not only thrown out of his temples all the impure rites of Flora and Cybele, but also the trifling and unprofitable ceremonies of the more sober deities; not only vices, but useless and unprofitable speculations; and hath consecrated our head into a temple, our understanding to spirit, our reason to religion, our study to meditation: and this is the first part of the sanctification of our spirit.

6. And this was the cause, holy Scripture commands the duty of meditation in proportion still to the excellencies of piety and a holy life, to which it is highly and aptly instrumental. "Blessed is the man, that meditates in the law of the Lord, day and night." And the reason of the proposition, and the use of the duty, is expressed to this purpose: "Thy words have I hid in my heart, that I should not sin against thee." The placing and fixing those Divine considerations in our understandings, and hiding them there, are designs of high Christian prudence, that they, with advantage, may come forth in the expresses of a holy life. For what in the world is more apt and natural to produce humility, than to meditate upon the low stoopings and descents of the holy Jesus, to the nature of a man, to the weaknesses of a child, to the poverties of a stable, to the ignobleness of a servant, to the shame of the cross, to the pains of cruelty, to the dust of death, to the title of a sinner, and to the wrath of God? By this instance, poverty is made honourable, and humility is sanctified and made noble, and the contradictions of nature are amiable, and fitted for a wise election. Thus hatred of sin, shame of ourselves, confusion at the sense of human misery, the love of God, confidence in his promises, desires of heaven, holy resolutions, resignation of our own appetites, conformity to Divine will, oblations of ourselves, repentance and mortification, are the proper emanations from meditation of the sordidness of sin, our proneness to it, our daily miseries as issues of Divine vengeance, the glories of God, his infinite unalterable veracity, the satisfactions in the vision of God, the rewards of piety, the rectitude of the laws of God, and perfection of his sanctions, God's supreme and

paternal dominion, and his certain malediction of sinners: and when any one of these considerations is taken to pieces, and so placed in the rooms of application, that a piece of duty is conjoined to a piece of the mystery, and the whole office to the purchase of a grace, or the extermination of a vice, it is like opening our windows to let in the sun and the wind; and holiness is as proportioned an effect to this practice, as glory is to a persevering holiness, by way of reward and moral causality.

7. For all the affections, that are in man, are either natural, or by chance, or by the incitation of reason and discourse. Our natural affections are not worthy the entertainments of a Christian; they must be supernatural and divine, that put us into the hopes of perfection and felicities: and these other, that are good, unless they come by meditation, they are but accidental, and set with the evening sun. But if they be produced upon the strengths of pious meditation, they are as perpetual as they are reasonable, and excellent in proportion to the piety of the principle. A garden, that is watered with short and sudden showers, is more uncertain in its fruits and beauties, than if a rivulet waters it with a perpetual distilling and constant humectation and just such are the short emissions and unpremeditated resolutions of piety, begotten by a dash of holy rain from heaven, whereby God sometimes uses to call the careless but to taste what excellencies of piety they neglect; but if they be not produced by the reason of religion, and the philosophy of meditation, they have but the life of a fly or a tall gourd; they come into the world, only to say they had a being; you could scarce know their length, but by measuring the ground they cover in their fall.

8. For since we are more moved by material and sensible objects than by things merely speculative and intellectual, and generals, even in spiritual things, are less perceived and less motive than particulars; meditation frames the understanding part of religion to the proportions of our nature and our weakness, by making some things more circumstantiate and material, and the more spiritual to be particular, and therefore the more applicable: and the mystery is made like the Gospel to the apostles: "Our eyes do see, and our ears do hear, and our hands do handle, thus much of the word of life," as is prepared for us in the meditation.

9. First And, therefore, every wise person, that intends to furnish himself with affections of religion, or detestation against a vice, or glorifications of a mystery, still will proportion the mystery, and fit it with such circumstances of fancy and application, as, by observation of himself, he knows aptest to make impression. It was a wise design of Mark Antony, when he would stir up the people to revenge the death of Cæsar; he brought his body to the pleading-place, he shewed his wounds, held up the rent mantle, and shewed them the garment, that he put on that night, in which he beat the Nervii; that is, in which he won a victory, for which his memory was dear to them; he shewed them that wound, which pierced his heart, in which they were placed by so dear a love, that he made them his heirs, and left to their public use places of delight and pleasure: and then it was natural, when he had made those things present to them, which had once moved their love and his honour, that grief at the loss of so honourable and so loved a person should succeed; and then they were lords of all; their sorrow and revenge seldom slept in two beds. And thus holy meditation produces the passions and desires it intends; it makes the object present and almost sensible; it renews the first passions by a fiction of imagination; it passes from the paschal parlour to Cedron, it tells the drops of sweat, and measures them, and finds them as big as drops of blood, and then conjectures at the greatness of our sins; it fears in the midst of Christ's agonies, it hears his groans, it spies Judas's lantern afar off, it follows Jesus to Gabbatha, and wonders at his innocence and their malice, and feels the strokes of the whip, and shrinks the head, when the crown of thorns is thrust hard upon his holy brows; and, at last, goes step by step with Jesus, and carries part of the cross, and is nailed fast with sorrow and compassion, and dies with love. For if the soul be the principle of its own actions, it can produce the same effects by reflex acts of the understanding, when it is assisted by the imaginative part, as when it sees the thing acted only let the meditation be as minute, particular, and circumstantiate, as it may; for a widow, by representing the caresses of her dead husband's love, produces sorrow, and the new affections of a sad endearment. It is too sure, that the recalling the circumstances of a past impurity does re-enkindle the flame, and entertain the