flections on the good or evil it had done, must raise joy or horror in it; so those good or ill dispositions accompanying the departed souls, they must either rise up to a higher perfec tion, or sink to a more depraved and miserable state.

In this life, variety of affairs and objects do much cool and divert our minds; and are, on the one hand, often great temptations to the good, and give the bad some case in their trouble; but in a state wherein the soul shall be separated from sensible things, and employed in a more quick and sublime way of operation, this must very much exalt the joys and improvements of the good, and as much height en the horror and rage of the wicked.

So that it seemed a vain thing to pretend to believe in a Supreme Being, that is wise and good as well as great, and not think a discrimination will be made between the good and the bad, which it is manifest is not fully done in this life.

As for the government of the world, if we believe the Supreme power made it, there is no reason to think he does not govern it for all that we can fancy against it is the distraction which that infinite variety of second causes, and the care of their concernments, must give to the first, if it inspects them all. But as, among men, those of weaker capacities are wholly taken up with some one thing, whereas those of more enlarged powers can, without distraction

have many things within their care; as the eye can at one view receive a great variety of objects, in that norrow compass, without confusion; so, if we conceive the understanding to be as far above ours, as his power of creating and framing the whole universe is above our limited activity, we will no more think the government of the world a distraction to him. And if we have once overcome this prejudice, we shall be ready to acknowledge a providence directing all affairs; a care well becoming the great Creator,

As for worshipping him, if we can imagine our worship is a thing that adds to his happiness, or gives him such a fond pleasure as weak people have to hear themselves commended; or that our repeated addresses do overcome him, through our mere importunity, we have certainly very unworthy thoughts of him. The true end of worship comes within another consideration, which is this: a man is never entirely reformed, till a new principle governs his thoughts: nothing makes a principle so strong, as deep and frequent meditations of God, whose nature, though it be far above our comprehension, yet whose goodness and wisdom are such pe, fections as fall within our imagination And he that thinks often of God, and considers him as governing the world, and as ever observing all his actions, will feel a very sensible effect of such meditations, as they grow more lively and frequent with him; so the end

of religious worship, either public or private} is to make the apprehensions of God have deeper root and a stronger influence on us. The frequent returns of these are necessary, lest, if we allow of too long intervals between them, these impressions may grow feebler, and other suggestions may come in their room. And the returns of prayer are not to be considered as favours extorted by mere importunity, but as rewards conferred on men so well disposed and prepared for them, according to the promises that God had made for answering our prayers, thereby to engage and nour ish a devout temper in us, which is the chief root of all true holiness and virtue.

It is true, we cannot have suitable notions of the divine essence; for indeed we have no just idea of any essence whatsover. Since we commonly consider all things either by their out. ward figure or effect, and from thence make inferences what their nature must be ; so, tho we cannot frame any perfect image in our minds of the Divinity, yet we may, from the discoveries God has made of himself, form such conceptions of him as may possess our minds with great reverence for him, and beget in us such a love of those perfections as to engage us to imitate them. For when we say we love, the meaning is, we love that being, God, who is holy, just, good, wise, and infinitely perfect. And loving these attributes in that object, will certainly carry us to desire them in ourselves.

For whatever we love in another, we naturally, according to the degree of our love, endeavour to resemble. In sum, the loving and worshipping of God, though they are just and reasonable returns and expressions of the sense we have of his goodness to us, yet they are exacted of us not only as a tribute to God, but as a means to beget in us a conformity to his nature, which is the chief end of pure and undefiled religion.

If some men have at several times found out inventions to corrupt this, and cheat the world, it is nothing but what occurs in every sort of employment to which men betake themselves. Mountebanks corrupt physic; pettifoggers have entangled the matters of property; and all professions have been vitiated by the kna veries of a number of their calling.

With all these discourses he was not equally satisfied. He seemed convinced that the impressions of God being much in men's minds, would be a powerful means to reform the world; and did not seem determined against Providence. But for the next state, he thought it more likely that the soul began anew, and that her sense of what she had done in this body, lying in the figures that are made in the brain, as soon as she dislodged, all these perished, and that the soul went into some other state to begin a new course.

But I said upon this head, that this was at best a conjecture raised in him by his fancy,

for he could give no reason to prove it was true. Nor was all the remembrance our souls had of past things, seated in some material figures lodged in the brain; though it could not be denied but that a great deal of it lay in the brain. That we have had many abstracted notions and ideas of immaterial things which dẹpend not on bodily figures. Some sins, such as falsehood and iil-nature, were seated in the mind, as lusts and appetite were in the body; and as the whole body was the receptacle of the soul, and the eyes and the ears were the orgars of seeing and hearing, so was the brain the seat of memory. Yet the power of faculty of memory as well as of seeing and hearing lay in the mind and so it was no inconceivable thing that either the soul, by its own strength, or by the means of some subtiler organs, which might be fitted for it in another state, should still remember as well as think.

But indeed we know so little of the nature of our souls, that it is a vain thing for us to raise, an hypothesis out of the conjectures we have about it, or to reject one, because of some difficulties that occur to us; since it is as hard to understand how we remember things now, as how we shall do it in another state; only we are sure we do it now, and so we shall be then when we do it.

When I pressed him with the secret joys a good man felt, particularly as he drew near death, and the horrors of ill men, especially at