dication have all its innate virtues and properties within it, and are by so much the more universal in their issues and actings upon other things: and such an inward, living principle of virtue and activity, further heightened, and united, and informed with light and truth, we may call liberty. Of this truly noble and divine liberty, religion is the mother and nurse, leading the soul to God, and so impregnating that inward, vital principle of activity and vigour that is embosomed in it, that it is able, without any inward disturbance and resistance from any controlling lusts, to exercise itself, and act with the greatest complacency, in the most full and ample manner, upon that first, universal, and unbounded essence which is God Himself. The most generous freedom can never be taken in its full and just dimensions and proportion, but then, when all the powers of the soul exercise and spend themselves, in the most large and ample manner, upon the infinite and essential goodness, as upon their own most proper object. If we should ask a good man, when he finds himself best at ease, when he finds himself most free; his answer would be, when he is under the most powerful constraints of Divine love. There is a sort of mechanical Christians in the world, who, not finding religion acting like a living form within them, satisfy themselves only to make an art of it, and rather inform and actuate it, than to be informed by it; and setting it such bounds and limits as may not exceed the short and scant measures of their own homeborn principles, then they endeavour to fit the notions of their own minds as so many examples to it: and, it being a circle of their own making, they can either ampliate or contract it, accordingly as they can force their own minds and dispositions to agree and suit with it. But true religion, indeed, is no art, but an inward nature that contains all the laws and measures of its motion within itself. A good man finds

not his religion without him, but as a living principle within him; and all his faculties are still endeavouring to unite themselves more and more in the nearest intimacy with it, as with their proper perfection. There is that amiableness in religion, that strong sympathy between the soul and it, that it needs carry no testimonials or commendations along with it. If it could be supposed that God should plant a religion in the soul, that had no affinity or alliance with it, it would grow there but as a strange slip. But God, when He gives His laws to men, does not, by virtue of His absolute dominion, dictate anything at random, and in such an arbitrary way, as some imagine; but He measures all by His own eternal goodness. Had God Himself been anything else than the first and greatest good of man, then to have loved Him with the full strength of all our faculties should not have been 'the first and greatest commandment',' as our Saviour tells us it is. Some are apt to look upon God as some peevish and self-willed being, because themselves are such: and, seeing that their own absolute and naked wills are for the most part the rules of all their actions, and the impositions which they lay upon others, they think that heaven's monarchy is such an arbitrary thing too, as being governed by nothing else but by an Almighty absolute will. But the soul that is most intimately acquainted with the Divine will, would more certainly resolve us, that God's unchangeable goodness (which makes the divinity to be a uniform thing, and to settle together upon its own centre, as I may speak with reverence) is also the unchangeable rule of His will; neither can He any more swerve from it, than He can swerve from Himself. Nor does He charge any duty upon man, without consulting first of all with His goodness: which being the original and adequate object of a good man's will and affections, it must needs

1 Matt. xxii. 38.

be, that all the issues and effluxes of it be entertained with an answerable complacency and cheerfulness. This is the hinge upon which all true religion turns, the proper centre about which it moves; which, taking a fast and sure hold of an innate and correspondent principle in the soul of man, raiseth it up above the confines of mortality, and, in the day of its mighty power, makes it become a free-will offering unto God.

CHAPTER IV.

The second property discovering the nobleness of religion, viz. That it restores man to a just power and dominion over himself, and enables him to overcome his self-will and passions. Of self-will, and the many evils that flow from it. That religion does nowhere discover its power and prowess so much, as in subduing this dangerous and potent enemy. The highest and noblest victories are those over our self-will and passions. Of self-denial, and the having power over our wills; the happiness and the privileges of such a state. How that magnanimity and puissance, which religion begets in holy souls, differ from and excel that gallantry and puissance, which the great Nimrods of this world boast of.

2.

THE second property or effect of religion, whereby it discovers its own nobleness, (and it is somewhat akin to the former particular, and will help further to illustrate and enforce it,) is this, That it restores a good man to a just power and dominion over himself, and his own will, and enables him to overcome himself, his own self-will and passions, and to command himself and all his powers for God. It is only religion that restores that avтečovσiov to which the Stoical philosophy so impotently pretended: it is this only that enthrones man's deposed reason, and establishes within him a just empire over all those blind powers and passions, which so impetuously rend a man from the possession and enjoyment of himself. Those turbulent and unruly, uncertain and unconstant

motions of passion and self-will, that dwell in degenerate minds, divide them perpetually from themselves, and are always moulding several factions and tumultuous combinations within them against the dominion of reason. And the only way to unite man firmly to himself is by uniting him to God, and establishing in him a firm amity and agreement with the first and primitive Being.

There is nothing in the world so boisterous as a man's own self-will, which is never guided by any fixed or steady rules, but is perpetually hurried to and fro by a blind impetus of pride and passions issuing from within itself. This is the true source and spring of all that envy, malice, bitterness of spirit, malecontentedness and impatience, of all those black and dark passions, those inordinate desires and lusts, that reign in the hearts and lives of wicked men. A man's own self-will throws him out of all true enjoyment of his own being: therefore, it was our Saviour's counsel to His disciples, 'In patience possess ye your souls'.' We may say of that self-will which is lodged in the heart of a wicked man, as the Jews speak of the y-figmentum malum-so often mentioned in their writings, that it is the prince of death and darkness, which is at continual enmity with heaven; and the filthiness and poison of the serpent. This is the seed of the evil spirit, which is perpetually at enmity with the seed of God and the heaven-born nature: its design and scope is, with a giant-like pride, to climb up into the throne of the Almighty, and to establish an unbounded tyranny in contradiction to the will of God, which is nothing else but the issue and efflux of His eternal and unbounded goodness. This is the very heart of the old Adam that is within men. This is the hellish spirit of self-will: it would solely prescribe laws to all things; it would fain be the source and fountain of all affairs and events; it would judge all things at its own

1 Luke xxi. 19.

tribunal. They, in whose spirits this principle rules, would have their own fancies and opinions, their perverse and boisterous wills to be the just square and measure of all good and evil; these are the plumb-lines they apply to all things, to find out their rectitude or obliquity. He that will not submit himself to, nor comply with, the eternal and uncreated will, but, instead of it, endeavours to set up his own will, makes himself the most real idol in the world, and exalts himself against all that is called God, and ought to be worshipped. To worship a graven image, or to make cakes and burn incense to the queen of heaven, is not a worse idolatry than it is for a man to set up self-will, to devote himself to the serving of it, and to give up himself to a compliance with his own will, as contrary to the divine and eternal will. When God made the world, He did not make it merely for the exercise of His Almighty power, and then throw it out of His hands, and leave it alone, to subsist by itself, as a thing that had no further relation to Him: but He derived Himself through the whole creation, so gathering and knitting up all the several pieces of it again; that, as the first production and continued subsistence of all things are from Himself, so the ultimate resolution and tendency of all things might be to Him. Now that which first endeavoured after a divorce between God and His creation, and to make a conquest of it, was that diabolical arrogancy and self-will, that crept up and wound itself, serpent-like, into apostate minds and spirits. This is the true strain of that hellish nature, to live independently of God, and to derive the principles from another beginning, and carry on the line of all motions and operations to another end, than God Himself, by whom, and to whom, and for whom, all things subsist.

From what hath been said concerning this powerful and dangerous enemy, that wars against our souls, and