Existence and Attributes of God

As if there were not any such Being as God in the world; or as if we wished there were none at all; so feeble and spiritless are our thoughts of the Being of a God.

(1.) No desire for the remembrance of him. How delightful are other things in our minds? How burdensome the Memorials of God, from whom we have our Being? With what pleasure do we contemplate the Nature of Creatures; even of Flies and Toads; while our minds tire in the search of him, who hath bestowed upon us our knowing and meditating Faculties? Though God shows himself to us in every Creature; in the meanest Weed, as well as the highest Heavens; and is more apparent in them to our reasons than themselves can be to our sense; yet though we see them, we will not behold God in them: We will view them to please our sense, to improve our reason in their natural perfections; but pass by the consideration of God's perfections so visibly beaming from them. Thus we play the Beasts and Atheists in the very exercise of reason, and neglect our Creator to gratify our sense; as though the pleasure of that were more desirable than the knowledge of God: The desire of our Souls is not towards his Name and the Remembrance of him, when we set not ourselves in a posture to feast our Souls with deep and serious meditations of him; have a thought of him, only by the by and away, as if we were afraid of too intimate acquaintance with him.

Are not the thoughts of God rather our Invaders, than our Guests; seldom invited to reside and take up their home in our hearts? Have we not when they have broke in upon us, bid them depart from us, and warned them to come no more upon our ground; sent them packing as soon as we could, and were glad when they were gone? And when they have departed, have we not often been afraid they should return again upon us; and therefore looked about for other inmates, things not good; or if good, infinitely below God, to possess the room of our hearts before any thoughts of him should appear again? Have we not often been glad of excuses to shake off present thoughts of him; and when we have wanted real ones, found out pretences to keep God and our hearts at a distance? Is not this a part of Atheism to be so unwilling to employ our faculties about the giver of them, to refuse to exercise them in a way of a grateful remembrance of him; as though they were none of his gift, but our own acquisition; as though the God that truly gave them, had no right to them; and he that thinks on us every day in a way of Providence, were not worthy to be thought on by us in a way of special Remembrance?

Do not the best, that love the remembrance of him, and abhor this natural averseness, find, that when they would think of God, many things tempt them and turn them to think elsewhere? Do they not find their apprehensions too feeble, their motions too dull, and the impressions too slight? This natural Atheism is spread over human nature.

(2.) No desire of converse with him. The word remember in the command for keeping holy the Sabbath-Day, including all the duties of the Day, and the choicest of our lives; implies our natural unwillingness to them, and forgetfulness of them: God's pressing this Command with more reasons than the rest, manifests that man hath no heart for Spiritual Duties. No spiritual duty, which sets us immediately Face to Face with God; but in the attempts of it, we find naturally a resistance, from some powerful Principle; so that everyone may subscribe to the speech of the Apostle, that when we would do good, evil is present with them. No reason of this can be rendered, but the natural temper of our Souls, and an affecting a distance from God under any consideration: For though our guilt first made the breach, yet this aversion to a converse with him steps up without any actual reflections upon our guilt, which may render God terrible to us as an offended Judge: Are we not often also in our attendance upon him, more pleased with the modes of Worship which gratify our fancy, than to have our Souls inwardly delighted with the Object of Worship, himself?

This is a part of our natural Atheism. To cast such duties off by total neglect, or in part, by affecting a coldness in them; is to cast off the Fear of the Lord. Not to call upon God, and not to know him, are one and the same thing. Jer. 10.25. Either we think there is no such Being in the world, or that he is so slight a one, that he deserves not the respect he calls for; or so impotent and poor, that he cannot supply what our necessities require.

(3.) No desire of a thorough return to him. The first man fled from him after his defection, though he had no refuge to fly to, but the grace of his Creator. Cain went from his presence, would be a Fugitive from God, rather than a Suppliant to him; when by Faith in, and application of the promised Redeemer, he might have escaped the wrath to come for his Brothers blood, and mitigated the sorrows he was justly sentenced to bear in the World. Nothing will separate prodigal Man from commoning with Swine, and make him return to his Father, but an empty Trough: Have we but husks to feed on, we shall never think of a Fathers presence. It were well if our sores and indigence would drive us to him; but when our strength is devoured, we will not return to the Lord our God, nor seek him for all this. Not his drawn Sword as a God of Judgment, nor his mighty Power as a Lord, nor his open Arms as the Lord their God, could move them to turn their eyes and their hearts towards him. The more he invites us to partake of his grace, the further we run from him to provoke his wrath: The louder God called them by his Prophets, the closer they stuck to their Baal. We turn our backs when he stretches out his hand, stop our ears when he lifts up his voice: We fly from him when he courts us, and shelter ourselves in any bush from his merciful hand, that would lay hold upon us; nor will we set our faces towards him, till our way be hedged up with thorns, and not a gap left to creep out any by-way. Whosoever is brought to a return, puts the Holy-Ghost to the pain of striving; he is not easily brought to a spiritual subjection to God, nor persuaded to a Surrender at a Summons, but sweetly over power'd by storm, and victoriously drawn into the Arms of God: God stands ready, but the heart stands off; Grace is full of entreaties, and the Soul full of excuses: Divine love offers, and Carnal self-love rejects: Nothing so pleases us, as when we are furthest from him; as if anything were more amiable, anything more desirable than himself.

(4.) No desire of any close imitation of him. When our Savior was to come as a Refiners fire to purify the Sons of Levi, the cry is, who shall abide the day of his coming? Mal. 3.2, 3. Since we are alienated from the Life of God, we desire no more naturally to live the Life of God, than a Toad or any other Animal desires to live the Life of a Man: No heart that knows God, but hath a holy ambition to imitate him. No Soul that refuseth him for a Copy, but is ignorant of his Excellency: Of this temper is all Mankind naturally. Man in Corruption is as loath to be like God in Holiness; as Adam after his Creation was desirous to be like God in Knowledge; his Posterity are like their Father, who soon turned his back upon his original Copy.

What can be worse than this? Can the denial of his Being be a greater injury than this contempt of him; as if he had not goodness to deserve our remembrance, nor amiableness fit for our converse; as if he were not a Lord fit for our subjection, nor had a Holiness that deserved our imitation?

For the use of this. It serves,

1. For Information.

1. It gives us occasion to admire the wonderful Patience and Mercy of God. How many Millions of practical Atheists breath every day in his Air, and live upon his Bounty, who deserve to be Inhabitants in Hell, rather than Possessors of the Earth? An infinite Holiness is offended, an infinite Justice is provoked; yet an infinite Patience forbears the Punishment, and an infinite Goodness relieves our wants: The more we had merited his Justice and forfeited his Favor, the more is his affection inhanc'd, which makes his hand so liberal to us.

At the first invasion of his rights, he mitigates the terror of the threatening which was set to defend his Law, with the grace of a Promise to relieve and recover his rebellious Creature: Who would have looked for anything but tearing Thunders, sweeping Judgments, to rase up the foundations of the apostate world? But oh, how great are his Bowels to his aspiring Competitors? Have we not experimented his Contrivances for our good, though we have refused him for our happiness? Has he not opened his Arms, when we spurned with our Feet; held out his alluring mercy, when we have brandisht against him a rebellious sword? Has he not entreated us while we have invaded him, as if he were unwilling to lose us, who are ambitious to destroy ourselves? Has he yet denied us the care of his Providence, while we have denied him the rights of his Honor, and would appropriate them to ourselves? Has the Sun forborne shining upon us, though we have shot our Arrows against him? Have not our Beings been supported by his Goodness, while we have endeavored to climb up to his Throne; and his mercies continued to charm us, while we have used them as weapons to injure him? Our own necessities might excite us to own him as our happiness, but he adds his invitations to the voice of our wants. Has he not promised a Kingdom to those that would strip him of his Crown, and proclaimed Pardon upon Repentance to those that would take away his Glory? And hath so twisted together his own end which is his Honor, and man's true end, which is his Salvation, that a man cannot truly mind himself and his own Salvation, but he must mind God's glory; and cannot be intent upon God's honor, but by the same act he promotes himself and his own happiness; So loath is God to give any just occasion of dissatisfaction to his Creature, as well as dishonor himself. All those wonders of his mercy are inhanc'd by the heinousness of our Atheism; a multitude of gracious thoughts from him above the multitude of contempts from us. What Rebells in actual Arms against their Prince aiming at his Life, ever found that favor from him, to have all their necessaries richly afforded them, without which they would starve, and without which they would be unable to manage their attempts, as we have received from God? Had not God had riches of goodness, forbearance and long suffering, and infinite riches too; the despite the world hath done him in refusing him as their Rule, Happiness, and End would have emptied him long ago.

2. It brings in a Justification of the exercise of his Justice. If it gives us occasion loudly to praise his Patience; it also stops our mouths from accusing any acts of his Vengeance. What can be too sharp a recompense for the despising and disgracing so great a Being? The highest contempt merits the greatest anger; and when we will not own him for our happiness, 'tis equal we should feel the misery of separation from him. If he that is guilty of Treason deserves to lose his Life; what punishment can be thought great enough for him that is so disingenious as to prefer himself before a God so infinitely good, and so foolish as to invade the rights of one infinitely powerful? 'It is no injustice for a Creature, to be forever left to himself, to see what advantage he can make of that self he was so busily employed to set up in the place of his Creator. The Soul of Man deserves an infinite punishment for despising an infinite good: And it is not unequitable, that that self which Man makes his Rule and Happiness above God, should become his Torment and Misery by the Righteousness of that God whom he despised.

3. Hence ariseth a necessity of a new state and frame of Soul, to alter an Atheistical Nature. We forget God: Think of him with reluctancy: Have no respect to God in our course and acts: This cannot be our original state. God being infinitely good, never let man come out of his hands with this actual unwillingness to acknowledge and serve him: He never intended to dethrone himself for the work of his hands, or that the Creature should have any other end than that of his Creator: As the Apostle saith in the Case of the Galatians Error, Gal. 5.8. This persuasion came not of him that called you; so this frame comes not from him that created you: How much therefore do we need a restoring Principle in us? Instead of ordering ourselves according to the Will of God, we are desirous to fulfil the Wills of the Flesh : There is a necessity of some other principle in us to make us fulfil the Will of God, since we were created for God, not for the Flesh.

We can no more be voluntarily serviceable to God, while our serpentine nature, and Devillish habits remain in us; than we can suppose the Devil can be willing to glorify God, while the nature he contracted by his fall abides powerfully in him. Our Nature and Will must be changed, that our actions may regard God as our End, that we may delightfully meditate on him, and draw the motives of our obedience from him. Since this Atheism is seated in Nature, the change must be in our Nature: Since our first aspirings to the rights of God, were the fruits of the Serpents breath which tainted our Nature; there must be a removal of this taint, whereby our Natures may be on the side of God against Satan, as they were before on the side of Satan against God. There must be a supernatural Principle before we can live a supernatural Life, i. e. live to God, since we are naturally alienated from the Life of God: The aversion of our Natures from God, is as strong as our inclination to evil; we are disgusted with one, and pressed with the other; we have no will, no heart, to come to God in any service. This Nature must be broken in pieces and new molded, before we can make God our Rule and our End: While men's deeds are evil, they cannot comply with God ; much less while their natures are evil: Till this be done, all the service a man performs riseth from some evil imagination of the heart, which is evil, only evil, and that continually , from wrong Notions of God, wrong Notions of Duty, or corrupt Motives. All the pretences of Devotion to God, are but the Adoration of some golden Image. Prayers to God for the ends of self, are like those of the Devil to our Savior, when he asked leave to go into the Herd of Swine: The Object was right, Christ; the end was the destruction of the Swine, and the satisfaction of their malice to the Owners: There is a necessity then that depraved ends should be removed, that that which was God's end in our framing, may be our end in our acting, viz. his glory, which cannot be without a change of Nature. We can never honor him supremely whom we do not supremely love: Till this be, we cannot glorify God as God, though we do things by his Command and Order; no more, than when God employed the Devil in afflicting Job : His performance cannot be said to be good, because his end was not the same with God's; he acted out of Malice, what God commanded out of Sovereignty, and for gracious designs: Had God employed an Holy Angel in his design upon Job, the Action had been good in the Affliction; because his Nature was holy, and therefore his ends holy; but bad in the Devil, because his ends were base and unworthy.

4. We may gather from hence, the difficulty of Conversion, and Mortification to follow thereupon. What is the reason men receive no more impression from the Voice of God and the Light of his Truth, than a dead man in the Grave doth from the roaring Thunder, or a blind Mole from the Light of the Sun? 'It is because our Atheism is as great as the deadness of the one, or the blindness of the other. The Principle in the heart is strong to shut the door both of the thoughts and affections against God. If a Friend oblige us, we shall act for him as for ourselves: We are won by entreaties, soft words overcome us; but our hearts are as deaf as the hardest Rock, at the call of God: Neither the joys of Heaven proposed by him can allure us, nor the flasht terrors of Hell affright us to him; as if we conceived God unable to bestow the one, or execute the other: The true reason is, God and self contest for the Deity: The Law of Sin is, God must be at the footstool; the Law of God is, Sin must be utterly deposed: Now it is difficult to leave a Law beloved, for a Law long ago discarded. The mind of man will hunt after anything; the will of man embrace anything; upon the proposal of mean Objects the Spirit of man spreads its wings, flies to catch them, becomes one with them: But attempt to bring it under the Power of God; the wings flag, the Creature looks lifeless, as though there were no spring of motion in it: 'It is as much crucified to God, as the holy Apostle was to the world: The sin of the heart discovers its strength, the more God discovers the holiness of his Will. The love of Sin hath been predominant in our Nature, has quasht a love to God, if not extinguished it

Hence also is the difficulty of Mortification. This is a work tending to the honor of God, the abasing of that inordinatley aspiring humor in ourselves. If the Nature of Man be inclined to Sin, as it is, it must needs be bent against anything that opposes it. 'It is impossible to strike any true blow at any Lust, till the true Sense of God be re-entertained in the Soyl where it ought to grow. Who can be naturally willing to crucify what is incorporated with him, his flesh? what is dearest to him, himself? Is it an easy thing for man, the Competitor with God, to turn his Arms against himself; that self should overthrow its own Empire; lay aside all its pretensions to, and designs for a God-head; to hew off its own members, and subdue its own affections? 'It is the Nature of Man to cover his sin, to hide it in his bosom ; not to destroy it; and as unwillingly part with his carnal affections, as the Legion of Devils were with the man that had been long possessed: And when he is forced and fired from one, he will endeavor to espouse some other Lust, as those Devils desired to possess Swine, when they were chased from their possession of that man.

5. Here we see the reason of unbelief. That which hath most of God in it, meets with most aversion from us: That which hath least of God, finds better and stronger inclinations in us. What is the reason, that the heart of Man is more unwilling to embrace the Gospel, than acknowledge the equity of the Law? Because there is more of God's Nature and perfection evident in the Gospel than in the Law: Besides there is more reliance on God, and distance from self commanded in the Gospel. The Law puts a man upon his own strength, the Gospel takes him off from his own bottom: The Law acknowledges him to have a power in himself, and to act for his own reward; the Gospel strips him of all his proud and towering thoughts , brings him to his due place, the foot of God; orders him to deny himself as his own Rule, Righteousness and End; and henceforth not to live to himself. This is the true reason why men are more against the Gospel than against the Law; because it doth more deify God, and debase Man. Hence it is easier to reduce men to some Moral Virtue, than to Faith; to make men blush at their outward Vices, but not at the inward impurity of their Natures. Hence it is observed; that those that asserted, that all happiness did arise from something in a man's self, as the Stoics and Epicureans did; and that a wise man was equal with God; were greater Enemies to the truths of the Gospel than others, Acts 17.18. because it lays the Ax to the root of their principal Opinion. Takes the one from their self-sufficiency, and the other from their self-gratification: It opposeth the brutish principle of the one, which placed happiness in the pleasures of the body, and the more noble principle of the other, which placed happiness in the virtue of the mind: The one was for a sensual, the other for a moral self; both disowned by the Doctrine of the Gospel.

6. It informs us consequently, who can be the Author of Grace and Conversion, and every other good Work. No practical Atheist ever yet turned to God, but was turned by God; and not to acknowledge it to God, is a part of this Atheism, since it is a robbing God of the honor of one of his most glorious Works. If this practical Atheism be natural to man ever since the first taint of Nature in Paradise, what can be expected from it but a resisting of the work of God, and setting up all the forces of Nature against the operations of Grace, till a day of power dawn and clear up upon the Soul : Not all the Angels in Heaven, or men upon Earth, can be imagined to be able to persuade a Man to fall out with himself. Nothing can turn the Tide of Nature, but a Power above Nature. God took away the sanctifying Spirit from man, as a Penalty for the first sin: Who can regain it but by his Will and Pleasure? Who can restore it but he that removed it? Since every man hath the same fundamental Atheism in him by Nature, and would be a Rule to himself and his own End; he is so far from dethroning himself, that all the strength of his corrupted Nature is alarmed up to stand to their Arms, upon any attempt God makes to regain the Fort. The Will is so strong against God, that 'tis like many wills twisted together, Eph. 2.3. Wills of the Flesh, we translate it the desires of the flesh: Like many Threds twisted in a Cable, never to be snapped asunder by a human Arm; a Power and Will above ours, can only untwist so many Wills in a knot. Man cannot rise to an acknowledgement of God without God: Hell may as well become Heaven, the Devil be changed into an Angel of Light. The Devil cannot but desire happiness; he knows the misery into which he is fallen; he cannot be desirous of that punishment he knows is reserved for him. Why doth he not sanctify God and glorify his Creator, wherein there is abundantly more pleasure than in his malicious course? Why doth he not petition to recover his ancient standing? He will not; there are Chains of Darkness upon his faculties; he will not be otherwise than he is: His desire to be God of the World sways him against his own interest; and out of love to his malice, he will not sin at a less rate to make a diminution of his punishment. Man, if God utterly refuseth to work upon him, is no better; and to maintain his Atheism, would venture a Hell. How is it possible for a man to turn himself to that God, against whom he hath a quarrel in his Nature; the most rooted and settled habit in him being to set himself in the place of God? An Atheist by Nature, can no more alter his own temper, and engrave in himself the Divine Nature, than a Rock can carve itself into the Statue of a man, or a Serpent that is an Enemy to Man, could or would raise itself to the Nobility of the human Nature. That Soul that by Nature would strip God of his Rights, cannot without a Divine Power be made conformable to him, and acknowledge sincerely and cordially the Rights and Glory of God.

7. We may here see the reason why there can be no justification by the best and strongest works of Nature. Can that which hath Atheism at the root, justify either the action or person? What strength can those works have, which have neither God's Law for their Rule, nor his Glory for their End; that are not wrought by any spiritual strength from him, nor tend with any spiritual affection to him? Can these be a foundation for the most holy God to pronounce a Creature righteous? They will justify his Justice in condemning, but cannot sway his Justice to an Absolution. Every natural man in his works, picks and chooses; he owns the Will of God no further than he can wring it to suit the law of his Members; and minds not the honor of God, but as it justles not with his own glory and secular ends. Can he be righteous that prefers his own Will and his own Honor, before the Will and Honor of the Creator? However men's actions may be beneficial to others, what reason hath God to esteem them, wherein there is no respect to him but themselves; whereby they dethrone him in their thoughts, while they seem to own him in their religious works? Every day reproves us with something different from the Rule: Thousands of wanderings offer themselves to our eyes. Can Justification be expected from that which in itself is matter of despair?

8. See here the cause of all the apostasy in the World. Practical Atheism was never conquered in such: They are still alienated from the Life of God, and will not live to God, as he lives to himself and his own honor. They loath his Rule, and distaste his Glory; are loath to step out of themselves to promote the ends of another; find not the satisfaction in him as they do in themselves: They will be Judges of what is good for them and righteous in itself, rather than admit of God to judge for them. When men draw back from Truth to Error; 'tis to such opinions which may serve more to foment and cherish their Ambition, Covetousness, or some beloved Lust that dispates with God for precedency, and is designed to be served before him, John 12.42.43. They love the praise of men more than the praise of God. A preferring man before God, was the reason they would not confess Christ, and God in him.

9. This shows us the excellency of the Gospel and Christian Religion. It sets man in his due place, and gives to God what the Excellency of his Nature requires ∴ It lays man in the dust from whence he was taken, and sets God upon that Throne where he ought to si • Man by Nature would annihilate God and deisie himself; the Gospel glorifies God and annihilates Man. In our first revolt we would be like him in knowledge; in the means he hath provided for our recovery, he designs to make us like him in Grace: The Gospel shows ourselves to be an Object of Humiliation, and God to be a glorious Object for our Imitation. The Light of Nature tells us there is a God; the Gospel gives us a more magnificent report of him: The light of Nature condemns gross Atheism, and that of the Gospel condemns and conquers spiritual Atheism in the hearts of men.

Use 2. Of Exhortation

1. Let us labor to be sensible of this Atheism in our Nature, and be humbled for it. How should we lie in the Dust, and go bowing under the humbling thoughts of it all our days? Shall we not be sensible of that whereby we spill the blood of our Souls, and give a stabb to the heart of our own Salvation? Shall we be worse than any Creature, not to bewail that which tends to our destruction? He that doth not lament it, cannot challenge the Character of a Christian, hath nothing of the divine Life and Love planted 〈◊〉 his Soul. Not a man but shall one day be sensible, when the Eternal God shall call him out to Examination, and charge his Conscience to discover every Crime, which will then own the Authority whereby it acted; when the heart shall be torn open, and the secrets of it brought to public view; and the World and Man himself shall see what a viperous Brood of corrupt Principles and Ends nested in his Heart. Let us therefore be truly sensible of it, till the consideration draw tears from our Eyes, and sorrow from our Souls: Let us urge the thoughts of it upon our hearts, till the Core of that Pride be eaten out, and our Stubborness changed into Humility: Till our Heads become Waters, and our Eyes Fountains of tears, and be a spring of Prayer to God to change the heart, and mortify the Atheism in it; and consider what a sad thing it is to be a practical Atheist: And who is not so by Nature?

1. Let us be sensible of it in ourselves. Have any of our hearts been a Soyl wherein the Fear and Reverence of God hath naturally grown? Have we a desire to know him, or a will to embrace him? Do we delight in his Will, and love the remembrance of his Name? Are our respects to him as God, equal to the speculative knowledge we have of his Nature? Is the heart wherein he hath stamped his Image, reserved for his Residence? Is not the world more affected than the Creator of the world; as though that could contribute to us a greater happiness than the Author of it? Have not Creatures as much of our love, fear, trust; nay, more than God that framed both them and us? Have we not too often relied upon our own strength, and made a Calf of our own wisdom, and said of God as the Israelites of Moses, As for this Moses we wot not what is become of him, Exod. 32.1. and given oftener the glory of our good success to our Dragg and our Net, to our Craft and our Industry, than to the wisdom and blessing of God? Are we then free from this sort of Atheism ? 'It is as impossible to have two God's at one time in one heart, as to have two Kings at one time in full power in one Kingdom. Have there not been frequent neglects of God? Have we not been deaf whilst he hath knocked at our doors; slept when he hath sounded in our Ears, as if there had been no such Being as a God in the world? How many strugglings have been against our approaches to him? Hath not folly often been committed with vain imaginations starting up in the time of Religious Service, which we would scarce vouchsafe a look to at another time, and in another business, but would have thrust them away with indignation? Had they stepped in to interrupt our worldly Affairs, they would have been troublesome Intruders, but while we are with God they are acceptable Guests. How unwilling have our hearts been to fortify themselves with strong and influencing considerations of God, before we addrest to him? Is it not too often that our lifelesness in Prayer proceeds from this Atheism; a neglect of seeing what Arguments and Pleas may be drawn from the didine perfections, to second our suit in hand, and quicken our hearts in the service? Whence are those indispositions to any spiritual duty, but because we have not due thoughts of the Majesty, Holiness, Goodness and Excellency of God? Is there any duty which leads to a more particular inquiry after him, or a more clear vision of him; but our hearts have been ready to rise up and call it cursed rather than blessed? Are not our minds bemisted with an ignorance of him, our wills drawn by aversion from him, our affections rising in distaste of him? More willing to know anything than his Nature, and more industrious to do anything than his Will? Do we not all fall under someone or other of these considerations? Is it not fit then that we should have a sense of them? 'It is to be bewailed by us, that so little of God is in our hearts, when so many evidences of the love of God are in the Creatures; that God should be so little our end, who hath been so much our Benefactor; that he should be so litte in our thoughts, who sparkles in everything which presents itself to our eyes.

2. Let us be sensible of it in others. We ought to have a just execration of the too open iniquity in the midst of us; and imitate holy David, whose tears plentifully gusht out, because men kept not God's Law. And is it not a time to exercise this pious lamentation? Hath the wicked Atheism of any age been greater, or can you find worse in Hell, than we may hear of and behold on Earth? How is the excellent Majesty of God, adored by the Angels in Heaven; despised and reproached by men on Earth; as if his name were published to be matter of their sport? What a gasping thing is a natural sense of God among men in the World? Is not the Law of God, accompanied with such dreadful threatenings and curses, made light of; as if men would place their honor in being above or beyond any sense of that glorious Majesty? How many wallow in Pleasures, as if they had been made men, only to turn brutes, and their Souls given them only for Salt to keep their bodies from putrifying? It is as well a part of Atheism not to be sensible of the abuses of God's name and Laws by others, as to violate them ourselves: What is the language of a stupid senselessness of them, but that there is no God in the world, whose glory is worth a vindication and deserves our regards?

That we may be sensible of the unworthiness of neglecting God as our Rule and end; consider,

1. The Unreasonableness of it as it concerns God.

1. First, It is a high contempt of God. It is an inverting the order of things; a making God the highest, to become the lowest, and self the lowest, to become the highest: To be guided by every base Companion, some idle vanity, some carnal interest, is to acknowledge an excellency abounding in them which is wanting in God: An equity in their orders and none in God's precepts: A goodness in their promises and a falsity in God's: As if infinite excellency were a mere vanity, and to act for God, were the debasement of our reason; to act for self or some pitiful Creature, or sordid lust, were the glory and advancement of it. To prefer any one sin before the honor of God, is as if that sin had been our Creator and Benefactor, as if it were the original cause of our being and support. Do not men pay as great a homage to that as they do to God? Do not their minds eagerly pursue it? Are not the revolvings of it in their fancies as delightful to them, as the remembrance of God to a holy Soul? Do any obey the Commands of God with more readiness, than they do the orders of their base affections? Did Peter leap more readily into the Sea to meet his Master, than many into the jaws of Hell to meet their Delilah's? How cheerfully did the Israelites part with their Ornaments for the sake of an Idol, who would not have spared a moiety for the honor of their Deliverer? If to make God our end is the principal duty in nature, then to make ourselves or anything else our end, is the greatest vice in the rank of evils.

Secondly, It is a contempt of God as the most amiable object. God is infinitely excellent and desirable, Zach. 9.17. How great is his goodness and how great is his beauty? There is nothing in him but what may ravish our affections; none that knows him but finds attractives to keep them with him: He hath nothing in him which can be a proper object of contempt, no defects or shadow of evil; there is infinite excellency to charm us and infinite goodness to allure us; the Author of our beings, the Benefactor of our lives: Why then should Man, which is his Image, be so base as to slight the beautiful original which stamped it on him? He is the most lovely object, therefore to be studied, therefore to be honored, therefore to be followed: In regard of his perfection he hath the highest right to our thoughts. All other beings were eminently contained in his essence, and were produced by his infinite power: The Creature hath nothing but what it hath from God: And is it not unworthy to prefer the Copy before the original, to fall in love with a Picture instead of the beauty it represents? The Creature which we advance to be our rule and end, can no more report to us the true amiableness of God, than a few Colours mixed and suited together upon a piece of cloth, can the moral and intellectual loveliness of the Soul of Man. To contemn God one moment is more base, than if all Creatures were contemned, by us forever; because the excellency of Creatures is to God, like that of a drop to the Sea, or a spark to the glory of inconceivable millions of Suns. As much as the excellency of God is above our conceptions, so much doth the debasing of him admit of inexpressible aggravations.

2. Consider the ingratitude in it. That we should resist that God with our hearts, who made us the work of his hands, and count him as nothing, from whom we derive all the good that we are or have: There is no contempt of Man but steps in here to aggravate our slighting of God; Because there is no relation one man can stand in to another, wherein God doth not more highly appear to man. If we abhor the unworthy carriage of a Child to a tender Father, a Servant to an indulgent Master, a Man to his obliging Friend; why do men daily act that towards God, which they cannot speak of without abhorrency, if acted by another against man? I God a being less to be regarded than man, and more worthy of contempt than a Creature? [ It would be strange if a benefactor should live in the same Town, in the same house with us and we never exchange a word with him; yet this is our case, who have the works of God in our eyes, the goodness of God in our being, the mercy of God in our daily food] yet think so little of him, converse so little with him, serve everything before him, and prefer everything above him? Whence have we our mercies but from his hand. Who, besides him, maintains our breath this moment? Would he call for our Spirits this moment, they must depart from us to attend his Command. There is not a moment wherein our unworthy carriage is not aggravated, because there is not a moment wherein he is not our guardian, and gives us not tastes of a fresh bounty. And it is no light aggravation of our Crime, that we injure him, without whose bounty in giving us our being, we had not been capable of casting contempt upon him: That he that hath the greatest stamp of his Image, Man, should deserve the Character of the worst of his Rebels: That he who hath only reason by the gift of God to Judge of the equity of the Laws of God, should swell against them as grievous, and the Government of the Lawgiver as burdensome. Can it lessen the crime to use the principle wherein we excel the beasts to the disadvantage of God, who endowed us with that principle above the beasts?

1. It is a debasing of God beyond what the Devil doth at present. He is more excusable in his present state of acting, than man is in his present refusing God for his Rule and End. He strives against a God that exerciseth upon him a vindictive Justice: We debase a God that loads us with his daily mercies. The despairing Devils are excluded from any mercy or divine patience: But we are not only under the long suffering of his patience, but the large expressions of his bounty. He would not be governed by him when he was only his bountiful Creator. We refuse to be guided by him after he hath given us the blessing of Creation from his own hand, and the more obliging blessings of Redemption by the hand and blood of his Son.

It cannot be imagined that the Devils and the damned should ever make God their end, since he hath assured them he will not be their happiness; and shut up all his perfections from their experimental notice, but those of his power to preserve them and his Justice, to punish them: They have no grant from God of ever having a heart to comply with his Will, or ever having the honor to be actively employed for his glory. They have some plea for their present contempt of God; not in regard of his nature, for he is infinitely amiable, excellent and lovely; but in regard of his administration towards them: But what plea can Man have for his Practical Atheism, who lives by his power, is sustained by his bounty, and solicited by his Spirit? What an ungrateful thing is it to put off the nature of Man for that of Devils; and dishonor God under mercy, as the Devils do under his wrathful anger?

2. It is an ungrateful contempt of God, who cannot be injurious to us. He cannot do us wrong, because he cannot be unjust, Gen. 18.25. Shall not the Judge of all the Earth do right? His nature doth as much abhor unrighteousness, as love a Communicative goodness: He never Commanded anything, but what was highly conducible to the happiness of man. Infinite goodness can no more injure man, than it can dishonor itself: It lays out itself in additions of kindness, and whiles we debase him, he continues to benefit us: And is it not an unparalleled ingratitude to turn our backs upon an object so lovely, an object so loving in the midst of varieties of allurements from him? God did Create intellectual Creatures, Angels and Men, that he might Communicate more of himself and his own goodness and holiness to man, than Creatures of a lower rank were capable of. What do we do by rejecting him as our Rule and End, but cross, as much as in us lies, God's end in our Creation, and shut our Souls against the Communications of those perfections he was so willing to bestow? We use him as if he intended us the greatest wrong, when tis impossible for him to do any to any of his Creatures.

3. Consider the misery which will attend such a temper if it continue predominant. Those that thrust God away as their happiness and end, can expect no other, but to be thrust away by him as to any relief and Compassion. A distance from God here can look for nothing, but a remoteness from God hereafter. When the Devil, a Creature of vast Endowments, would advance himself above God, and instruct man to commit the same sin he is Cursed above all Creatures. When we will not acknowledge him a God of all glory, we shall be separated from him as a God of all comfort: All they that are afar off shall perish, Psa. 73.27. This is the spring of all woe. What the Prodigal suffered, was because he would leave his Father and live of himself. Whosoever is ambitious to be his own Heaven; will it last find his Soul to become its own Hell. As it loved all things for itself, so it shall be grieved with all things for itself. As it would be its own God against the right of God, it shall then be its own tormenter by the Justice of God.

2. Duty, Watch against this Atheism and be daily employed in the mortification of it. In every action we should make the inquiry, what is the rule I observe? Is it God's Will or my own? Whether do my intentions tend, to set up God or self? As much as we destroy this, we abate the power of sin: These two things are the head of the Serpent in us, which we must be bruising by the power of the Cross. Sin is nothing else but a turning from God and centring in self, and most in the inferior part of self: If we bend our force against those two self -Will, and self -Ends, we shall intercept Atheism at the Spring head, take away that which doth constitute and animate all sin: The sparks must vanish, if the fire be quenched which affords them fuel. They are but two short things to ask in every undertaking: Is God my Rule in regard of his Will? Is God my End in regard of his glory? All sin lies in the neglect of these, all grace lies in the practice of them.

Without some degree of the mortification of these, we cannot make profitable and comfortable approaches to God. When we come with Idols in our hearts, we shall be answered according to the multitude and the baseness of them too. What expectation of a good look from him can we have, when we come before him with undeifying thoughts of him; a Petition in our mouths and a Sword in our hearts to stab his honor?

To this purpose,

1. Be often in the views of the excellencies of God. When we have no intercourse with God by delightful Meditations, we begin to be estranged from him, and prepare ourselves to live without God in the world. Strangness is the Mother and Nurse of disaffection: We slight men sometimes because we know them not. The very beasts delight in the Company of men, when being tamed and familiar, they become acquainted with their disposition. A daily converse with God would discover so much of loveliness in his nature, so much of sweetness in his ways, that our injurious thoughts of God would wear off, and we should count it our honor to contemn ourselves and magnify him. By this means a slavish fear which is both a dishonor to God and a torment to the Soul, and the root of Atheism, will be cast out, and an ingenious fear of him wrought in the heart. Exercised thoughts on him would issue out in affections to him, which would engage our hearts to make him both our rule and our end. This course would stifle any temptations to gross Atheism, wherewith good Souls are sometimes haunted, by confirming us more in the belief of a God; and discourage any attempts, to a deliberate practical Atheism: We are not like to espouse any principle which is confuted by the delightful converse we daily have with him. The more we thus enter into the presence Chamber of God, the more we cling about him with our affections; the more vigorous and lively will the true Notion of God grow up in us, and be able to prevent anything which may dishonor him and debase our Souls.

Let us therefore consider him as the only happiness: Set up the true God in our understandings; possess our hearts with a deep sense of his desirable excellency above all other things. This is the main thing we are to do in order to our great business: All the directions in the world with the neglect of this, will be insignificant Ciphers. The neglect of this is Common, and is the basis of all the mischiefs which happen to the Souls of men.

2. To this purpose, Prize and study the Scripture. We can have no delight in Meditation on him, unless we know him; and we cannot know him but by the means of his own Revelation: When the Revelation is despised, the Revealer will be of little esteem. Men do not throw off God from being their rule, till they throw off Scripture from being their guide; and God must needs be cast off from being an end, when the Scripture is rejected from being a Rule: Those that do not care to know his Will, that love to be ignorant of his nature, can never be affected to his honor. Let therefore the subtleties of reason veil to the Doctrine of faith, and the humor of the Will to the Command of the word.

3. Take heed of sensual pleasures, And be very watchful and cautious in the use of those comforts God allows us. Job was afraid when his Sons feasted, that they should Curse God in their hearts. It was not without cause that the Apostle Peter joined sobriety with watchfulness and Prayer, 1 Pet. 4.7. The end of all things is at hand, be ye therefore sober and watch unto Prayer. A moderate use of worldly comforts. Prayer is the great acknowledgment of God, and too much sensuality is a hindrance of this, and a step to Atheism. Belshazzar's lifting himself up against the Lord, and not glorifying of God, is charged upon his sensuality, Dan. 5.23. Nothing is more apt to quench the Notions of God, and root out the Conscience of him, than an addictedness to sensual pleasures. Therefore take heed of that snare.

4. Take heed of sins against knowledge. The more sins against knowledge are committed, the more careless we are, and the more careless we shall be of God and his honor. We shall more fear his judicial power, and the more we fear that, the more we shall disaffect that God in whose hand vengeance is, and to whom it doth belong. Atheism in conversation proceeds to Atheism in affection, and that will endeavor to sink into Atheism in opinion and Judgment.

The Sum of the Whole.

And now consider in the whole what has been spoken.

1. Man would set himself up as his own Rule. He disowns the Rule of God, is unwilling to have any acquaintance with the Rule God sets him, negligent in using the means for the knowledge of his Will; and Endeavors to shake it off when any notices of it breaks in upon him. When he cannot expel it, he hath no pleasure in the Consideration of it, and the heart swells against it. When the Notions of the Will of God are entertained, it is on some other Consideration, or with wavering and unsettled affections. Many times men design to improve some lust by his truth. This unwillingness respects Truth as tis most Spiritual and holy; as it most relates and leads to God; as it is most contrary to self. He is guilty of Contempt of the Will of God, which is seen in every presumptuous breach of his Law. In the natural aversions to the declaration of his Will and mind which way soever he turns. In slighting that part of his Will which is most for his honor. In the awkwardness of the heart, when it is to pay God a service. A constraint in the first engagement, slightness in the service, in regard of the matter; in regard of the frame, without a natural vigor. Many distractions, much weariness, in deserting the Rule of God, when our expectations are not answered upon our service, in breaking promises with God.

Man naturally owns any other Rule, rather than that of God's prescribing. The Rule of Satan; the Will of Man; In complying more with the dictates of Men than the Will of God; In observing that which is materially so, not because it is his Will, but the injunctions of Men. In obeying the Will of Man when it is contrary to the Will of God. This Man doth in order to the setting up himself. This is natural to Man as he is corrupted. Men are disatisfied with their own Consciences when they contradict the desires of self. Most actions in the world are done, more because they are agreeable to self, than as they are honorable to God: As they are agreeable to natural and moral self or sinful self. 'It is evident in neglects of taking God's directions upon emergent occasions. In counting the actions of others to be good or bad, as they suit with or spurn against our fancies and humors. Man would make himself the Rule of God, and give laws to his Creator: In striving against his Law: Disapproving of his Methods of Government in the world; in impatience in our particular concerns; envying the gifts and prosperity of others: Corrupt matter or ends of Prayer or praise: Bold interpretations of the Judgments of God in the world. Mixing Rules in the Worship of God with those which have been ordained by him. Suting interpretations of Scripture with our own minds and humors. Falling off from God after some fair compliances, when his Will grates upon us and crosseth ours.

2. Man would be his own end. This is natural and universal. This is seen in frequent self applauses and inward overweening reflections. In ascribing the glory of what we do or have to ourselves. In desire of self pleasing Doctrines. In being highly concerned in injuries done to ourselves, and little or not at all concerned for injuries done to God. In trusting in ourselves. In workings for Carnal self against the light of our own Consciences, this is a usurping God's prerogative, vilifying God, destroying God. Man would make anything his end or happiness rather than God. This appears in the fewer thoughts we have of him than of anything else. In the greedy pursuit of the world. In the strong addictedness to sensual pleasures. In paying a service upon any success in the world to instruments more than to God. This is a debasing God in setting up a Creature; But more in setting up a base lust: It is a denying of God. Man would make himself the end of all Creatures. In pride; using the Creatures contrary to the end God hath appointed. This is to dishonor God; And it is Diabolical. Man would make himself the end of God. In loving God, because of some self pleasing benefits distributed by him. In abstinence from some sins, because they are against the interest of some other beloved Corruption. In performing duties merely for a selfish interest which is evident in unwealdiness in Religious duties where self is not concerned. In calling upon God only in a time of necessity. In begging his assistance to our own projects, after we have by our own Craft laid the Plot. In impatience upon a refusal of our desires. In selfish aims we have in our duties. This is a vilifying God, a dethroning him. In unworthy imaginations of God, universal in Man by nature. Hence spring Idolatry, Superstition, Presumption, the common disease of the world. This is a vilifying God; worse than Idolatry, worse than absolute Atheism. Natural desires to be distant from him. No desires for the remembrance of him. No desires of converse with him. No desires of a through return to him. No desire of any close imitation of him.

A DISCOURSE UPON GOD'S BEING A SPIRIT.

THE words are part of the Dialogue between our Savior, and the Samaritan Woman. Christ intending to return from Judea to Galilee, passed through the Country of Samaria, a place inhabited not by Jews, but a mixed Company of several Nations, and some remainders of the posterity of Israel, who escaped the Captivity and were returned from Assyria; and being weary with his Journey, arrived about the sixth hour or noon (according to the Jews reckoning the time of the day) at a Well that Jacob had digged, which was of great account among the Inhabitants for the Antiquity of it, as well as the usefulness of it, in supplying their necessities: He being thirsty, and having none to furnish him wherewith to draw water, at last comes a Woman from the City, whom he desires to give him some water to drink. The Woman perceiving him by his Language or Habit to be a Jew, wonders at the question, since the hatred the Jews bore the Samaritans was so great, that they would not vouchsafe to have any Commerce with them, not only in Religious, but Civil affairs, and Common Offices belonging to Man-kind. Hence our Savior takes occasion to publish to her the Doctrine of the Gospel; and excuseth her rude Answer by her Ignorance of him: And tells her, that if she had asked him a greater matter, even that which concerned her Eternal Salvation, he would readily have granted it, notwithstanding the rooted hatred between the Jews and Samaritans; and bestowed a water of a greater virtue, the water of life. The Woman is no less astonished at his reply, than she was at his first demand. It was strange to hear a Man speak of giving living water, to one of whom he had begged the water of that Spring, and had no Vessel to draw any to quench his own thirst. She therefore demands whence he could have this water that he speaks of, since she conceived him not greater than Jacob, who had digged that Well and drunk of it. Our Savior desirous to mak a progress in that work, he had begun, extols the Water he spake of, above this of the Well, from its particular virtue, fully to refresh those that drank of it, and be as a Cooling and Comforting Fountain within them, of more efficacy than that without. The Woman conceiving a good opinion of our Savior, desires to partake of this Water, to save her pains in coming daily to the Well, not apprehending the Spirituality of Christ's discourse to her: Christ finding her to take some pleasure in his Discourse, partly to bring her to a sense of her sin, before he did Communicate the excellency of his grace, bids her return back to the City and bring her Husband with her to him: She freely acknowledges that she had no Husband, whether having some check of Conscience at present for the unclean life she led, or loath to lose so much time in the gaining this water so much desired by her: Our Savior takes an occasion from this to lay open her sin before her, and to make her sensible of her own wicked life and the prophetic excellency of himself; and tells her, she had had five Husbands to whom she had been false, and by whom she was divorced, and the person she now dwelt with was not her lawful Husband, and in living with him she violated the Rights of Marriage, and increased guilt upon her Conscience. The Woman being affected with this discourse, and knowing him to be stranger, that could not be certified of those things but in an extraordinary way, begins to have a high esteem of him as a Prophet. And upon this opinion she esteems him able to decide a question which had been Canvast between them and the Jews about the place of Worship. Their Fathers Worshipping in that Mountain, and the Jews affirming Jerusalem to be a place of worship: She pleads the Antiquity of the worship in this place: Abraham having built an Altar there, Gen. 12.7. and Jacob upon his return from Syria. And surely had the place been capable of an exception, such persons as they and so well acquainted with the Will of God, would not have pitched upon that place to Celebrate their worship.

Antiquity hath too too often bewitched the minds of Men, and drawn them from the revealed Will of God. Men are more willing to imitate the outward actions of their famous Ancestors, than conform themselves to the revealed Will of their Creator. The Samaritans would imitate the Patriarchs in the place of worship, but not in the faith of the worshippers.

Christ answers her, that this question would quickly be resolved by a new state of the Church which was near at hand, and neither Jerusalem which had now the precedency, nor that Mountain should be of anymore value in that concern than any other place in the world: But yet to make her sensible of her sin, and that of her Country-men, tells her, that their Worship in that Mountain was not according to the Will of God, he having long after the Altars built in this place fixed Jerusalem as the place of Sacrifices; besides, they had not the knowledge of that God which ought to be worshipped by them, but the Jews had the true object of Worship and the true manner of worship according to the declaration God had made of himself to them. But all that service shall vanish, the veil of the Temple shall be rent in twain, and that Carnal worship give place to one more Spiritual; shadows shall fly before substance, and truth advance itself above figures, and the worship of God shall be with the strength of the Spirit; such a worship, and such worshippers doth the Father seek: For God is a Spirit, and those that Worship him must Worship him in Spirit and in truth. The design of our Savior is to declare, that God is not taken with external worship invented by men, no nor Commanded by himself; and upon that this reason, because he is a Spiritual essence, infinitely above gross and Corporeal matter, and is not taken with that pomp which is a pleasure to our Earthly imaginations.

〈 in non-Latin alphabet 〉 . Some translate it just as the words lie. Spirit is God: But it is not unusual both in the old and New Testament languages, to put the predicate before the subject, as Psal. 5.9. Their throat is an open Sepulcher, in the Hebrew a Sepulcher open their throat. So Psa. 111.3. His work is honorable and glorious. Heb. Honor and glory his work: And there wants not one example in the same Evangelist, Joh. 1.1. And the word was God. Greek and God was the word: In all, the predicate or what is ascribed, is put before the subject to which it is ascribed.

One tells us, and he an head of a party, that hath made a disturbance in the Church of God, that this place is not aptly brought to prove God to be a Spirit: And the reason of Christ runs not thus, God is of a Spiritual Essence, and therefore must be worshipped with a Spiritual worship; for the Essence of God is not the Foundation of his worship, but his Will; for then we were not to worship him with a Corporal worship, because he is not a body; but with an invisible and Eternal worship because he is invisible and eternal.

But the nature of God is the foundation of worship, the Will of God is the Rule of worship; the matter and manner is to be performed according to the Will of God. But is the nature of the object of worship to be excluded? No, as the object is, so ought our Devotion to be, Spiritual as he is Spiritual. God in his Commands for worship respected the discovery of his own nature; in the Law he respected the discovery of his mercy and justice, and therefore Commanded a worship by Sacrifices; a Spiritual worship without those institutions would not have declared those Attributes, which was God's end to display to the world in Christ: And though the nature of God is to be respected in worship, yet the obligations of the Creature are to be considered. God is a Spirit therefore must have a Spiritual worship: The Creature hath a body as well as a Soul, and both from God; and therefore ought to worship God with the one as well as the other, since one as well as the other is freely bestowed upon him.

The Spirituality of God was the foundation of the change from the Judaical carnal worship to a more Spiritual and Evangelical.

[God is a Spirit.]

That is, he hath nothing Corporeal, no mixture of matter, not a visible substance, a bodily form. He is a Spirit, not a bare Spiritual substance: But an understanding willing Spirit, holy, wise, good and just. Before Christ spake of the Father, the first person in the Trinity: Now he speaks of God Essentially: The word Father is personal, the word God essential. So that our Savior would render a reason, not from any one person in the blessed Trinity, but from the Divine nature, why we should worship in Spirit, and therefore makes use of the word God, the being a Spirit being Common to the other persons with the Father.

This is the reason of the proposition, verse 23. Of a Spiritual Worship. Every nature delights in that which is like it, and distastes that which is most different from it. If God were Corporeal, he might be pleased with the victims of beasts, and the beautiful Magnificence of Temples, and the noise of Music: But being a Spirit, he cannot be gratified with carnal things: He demands something better and greater than all those, that Soul which he made, that Soul which he hath endowed, a Spirit of a frame suitable to his nature. He indeed appointed Sacrifices and a Temple, as shadows of those things which were to be most acceptable to him in the Messiah, but they were imposed only till the time of Reformation.

[Must Worship him.]

Not they may, or it would be more agreeable to God to have such a manner of worship: But they must. It is not exclusive of bodily worship; for this were to exclude all public worship in societies, which cannot be performed without reverential postures of the body. The Gestures of the body are helps to worship and declarations of Spiritual acts. We can scarcely worship God with our Spirits without some tincture upon the outward-man. But he excludes all acts merely Corporeal, all resting upon an external service and devotion, which was the Crime of the Pharisees, and the general persuasion of the Jews as well as Heathens, who used the outward Ceremonies, not as signs of better things, but as if they did of themselves please God, and render the worshippers accepted with him, without any suitable frame of the inward man: It is as if he had said, now you must separate yourselves from all carnal modes to which the service of God is now tied, and render a worship chiefly consisting in the affectionate motions of the heart, and accommodated more exactly to the condition of the object, who is a Spirit.

[In Spirit and Truth]

The Evangelical Service now required, has the advantage of the former; that was a Shadow and Figure, this the Body and Truth. Spirit, say some, is here opposed to the legal Ceremonies; Truth, to hypocritical services; or rather truth is opposed to shadows, and an opinion of worth in the outward action; 'tis principally opposed to external Rites, because our Savior saith, v. 23. The hour comes, and • o • is, &c. Had it been opposed to Hypocrisy, Christ had said no new thing: For God always required Truth in the inward parts, and all true Worshippers had served him with a sincere Conscience and single Heart. The old Patriarchs did worship God in Spirit and Truth, as taken for sincerity: Such a Worship was always, and is perpetually due to God; because he always was, and eternally will be a Spirit. And it is said, the Father seeks such to worship him; not shall seek: He always sought it; it always was performed to him by one or other in the world: And the Prophets had always rebuked them, for resting upon their outward Solemnities, Isa. 58.7. and Micah. 6.8. But a Worship without legal Rites was proper to an Evangelical State and the times of the Gospel; God having then exhibited Christ, and brought into the world the substance of those shadows, and the end of those institutions: There was no more need to continue them, when the true reason of them was ceased. All Laws do naturally expire, when the true reason upon which they were first framed, is changed.

Or by Spirit may be meant, such a Worship as is kindled in the heart by the breath of the holy Ghost. Since we are dead in sin, a spiritual light and flame in the heart suitable to the nature of the object of our worship, cannot be raised in us without the operation of a supernatural Grace: And though the Fathers could not worship God without the Spirit; yet in the Gospel-times, there being a fuller effusion of the Spirit, the Evangelical State is called the administration of the Spirit, and the newness of the Spirit, in opposition to the legal Economy, entitled the oldness of the Letter. The Evangelical State is more suited to the Nature of God than any other: Such a Worship God must have, whereby he is acknowledged to be the true Sanctifier and Quickner of the Soul. The nearer God doth approach to us, and the more full his manifestations are; the more spiritual is the Worship we return to God. The Gospel pares off the rugged parts of the Law, and Heaven shall remove what is material in the Gospel, and change the Ordinances of Worship into that of a Spiritual Praise.

In the words there is,

• 1. A Proposition [God is a Spirit.] The Foundation of all Religion.
• 2. An Inference [they that worship him, &c.]

As God, a Worship belongs to him; as a Spirit, a spiritual Worship is due to him, in the inference we have.

• 1. The manner of Worship [in Spirit and Truth]
• 2. The necessity of such a Worship [must]

The Proposition declares the Nature of God; the Inference, the Duty of Man.

The Observations lie plain.

Ob. 1. God is a pure spiritual Being. [He is a Spirit]

2. The Worship due from the Creature to God, must be agreeable to the Nature of God, and purely spiritual.

3. The Evangelical State is suited to the Nature of God.

For the first,

D. God is a pure spiritual Being.

'It is the Observation of one, that the plain assertion of God's being a Spirit, is found but once in the whole Bible, and that is in this place; which may well be wondered at; because God is so often described with hands, feet, eyes and ears in the form and figure of a Man. The spiritual Nature of God, is deducible from many places; but not anywhere, as I remember, asserted totidem verbis, but in this Text: Some allege that place, 2 Cor. 3.17. the Lord is that Spirit, for the proof of it; but that seems to have a different sense: In the Text the Nature of God is described; in that place, the operations of God in the Gospel. [ 'It is not the Ministry of Moses, or that old Covenant, which communicates to you that Spirit it speaks of; but it is the Lord Jesus, and the Doctrine of the Gospel delivered by him, whereby this Spirit and Liberty is dispensed to you: He opposes here the Liberty of the Gospel to the Servitude of the Law] 'It is from Christ, that a Divine Virtue diffuseth itself by the Gospel; 'tis by him, not by the Law, that we partake of that Spirit.

The Spirituality of God, is as evident as his Being. If we grant that God is, we must necessarily grant that he cannot be corporeal; because a Body is of an imperfect Nature. It will appear incredible to any that acknowledge God the first Being and Creator of all things, that he should be a massy heavy Body, and have Eyes and Ears, Feet and hands as we have.

For the explication of it.

1. Spirit is taken various ways in Scripture. It signifies sometimes an aereal substance, as Psal. 11.6. A horrible Tempest: Heb. A Spirit of Tempest: Sometimes the breath, which is a thin substance, Gen. 6.17. All Flesh wherein is the breath of Life: Heb. Spirit of Life. A thin substance, though it be material and corporeal, is called Spirit: And in the bodies of living Creatures, that which is the principle of their actions is called Spirits; the animal and vital Spirits: And the finer parts extracted from Plants and Minerals, we call Spirits: Those volatile parts separated from that gross matter wherein they were immersed, because they come nearest to the nature of an incorporeal substance: And from this notion of the word, 'tis translated to signify those substances that are purely immaterial, as Angels, and the Souls of Men. Angels are called Spirits, Psal. 104.4. who makes his Angels Spirits ; And not only good Angels are so called, but evil Angels, Mark 1.27. Souls of men are called Spirits, Eccl. 12. And the Soul of Christ is called so, John 19.30. whence God is called the God of the Spirits of all Flesh, Numb. 22.16. and Spirit is opposed to Flesh, Isa. 31.3. the Egyptians are Flesh and not Spirit. And our Savior gives us the notion of a Spirit to be something above the nature of a Body, Luke 24.39. not having flesh and bones, extended parts, loads of gross matter. 'It is also taken for those things which are active and efficacious; because activity, is of the nature of a Spirit. Caleb had another Spirit, Num. 14.24. an active affection. The vehement motions of sin are called Spirit, Hos. 4.12. the Spirit of Whoredoms, in that sense that Pro. 29.11. a Fool utters all his mind, all his Spirit, he knows not how to restrain the vehement motions of his mind. So that the notion of a Spirit is, that it is a fine immaterial substance, an active being, that acts itself and other things. A mere Body cannot act itself; as the Body of Man cannot move without the Soul, no more than a Ship can move itself without Wind and Waves.

So God is called a Spirit, as being not a Body, not having the greatness, figure, thickness or length of a Body, wholly separate from anything of flesh and matter. We find a Principle within us nobler than that of our Bodies; and therefore we conceive the Nature of God, according to that which is more worthy in us, and not according to that which is the vilest part of our Natures. God is a most spiritual Spirit, more spiritual than all Angels, all Souls: As he exceeds all in the nature of Being, so he exceeds all in the nature of Spirit: He hath nothing gross, heavy, material in his Essence.

2. When we say God is a Spirit, 'tis to be understood by way of Negation. There are two ways of knowing or describing God: By way of affirmation, affirming that of him in a way of eminency, which is excellent in the Creature; as when we say God is wise, good: The other, by way of negation, when we remove from God in our conceptions, what is tainted with imperfection in the Creature. The first ascribes to him whatsoever is excellent; the other separates from him whatsoever is imperfect. The first is like a Limning, which adds one Colour to another to make a comely Picture; the other is like a Carving, which pares and cuts away whatsoever is superfluous, to make a complete Statue. This way of negation is more easy; we better understand what God is not, than what he is; and most of our knowledge of God, is by this way: As when we say God is infinite, immense, immutable, they are negatives: He hath no limits, is confined to no place, admits of no change. When we remove from him what is inconsistent with his Being, we do more strongly assert his Being, and know more of him when we elevate him above all, and above our own capacity. And when we say God is a Spirit, 'tis a negation; he is not a Body; he consists not of various parts, extended one without and beyond another: He is not a Spirit so as our Souls are, to be the form of any Body: A Spirit, not as Angels and Souls are, but infinitely higher; we call him so, because in regard of our weakness, we have not any other term of excellency to express or conceive of him by: We transfer it to God in honor, because Spirit is the highest excellency in our nature: Yet we must apprehend God above any Spirit, since his Nature is so great, that he cannot be declared by human speech, perceived by human sense, or conceived by human understanding.

The second thing, That God is a Spirit.

Some among the Heathens imagined God to have a Body; some thought him to have a Body of Air, some a Heavenly Body, some a human Body: And many of them ascribed bodies to their God's; but bodies without blood, without corruption; bodies made up of the finest and thinnest Atoms; such bodies, which if compared with ours, were as no bodies. The Saddures also, who denied all Spirits, and yet acknowledged a God, must conclude him to be a Body and no Spirit. Some among Christians have been of that opinion. Tertullian is charged by some, and excused by others: And some Monks of Egypt were so fierce for this Error, that they attempted to kill one Theophilus a Bishop, for not being of that Judgment.

But the wiser Heathens were of another mind, and esteemed it an unholy thing to have such imaginations of God. And some Christians have thought God only to be free from anything of body, because he is omnipresent, immutable, he is only incorporeal and spiritual; all things else, even the Angels are clothed with bodies, though of a neater matter and a more active frame than ours; a pure spiritual Nature they allowed to no Being but God. Scripture and Reason meet together to assert the spirituality of God. Had God had the Lineaments of a Body, the Gentiles had not fallen under that accusation of changing his Glory into that of a Corruptible Man .

This is signified by the name God gives himself, Exod. 3.14. I am that I am, a simple, pure, uncompounded Being, without any created mixture; as infinitely above the being of Creatures, as above the conceptions of Creatures, Job. 37.23. Touching the Almighty, we cannot find him out. He is so much a Spirit, that he is the Father of Spirits, Heb. 12.9. The Almighty Father is not of a Nature inferior to his Children: The Soul is a Spirit, it could not else exert actions without the assistance of the body, as the act of Understanding itself, and its own nature, the act of willing and willing things against the incitements and interest of the Body: It could not else conceive of God, Angels and immaterial substances: It could not else be so active, as with one glance to fetch a compass from Earth to Heaven, and by a sudden motion, to elevate the understanding from an earthly thought, to the thinking of things as high as the highest Heavens. If we have this opinion of our Souls which in the nobleness of their acts surmount the Body, without which the Body is but a dull unactive piece of clay; we must needs have a higher conception of God, than to clogg him with any matter, though of a finer temper than ours: We must conceive of him by the perfections of our Souls, without the vileness of our Bodies. If God made Man according to his Image, we must raise our thoughts of God according to the noblest part of that Image, and imagine the Exemplar or Copy, not to come short, but to exceed the thing copyed by it. God were not the most excellent substance, if he were not a Spirit: Spiritual substances are more excellent than bodily; the Soul of Man more excellent than other Animals; Angels more excellent than Men: They contain in their own nature, whatsoever dignity there is in the inferior Creatures. God must have therefore an excellency above all those, and therefore is entirely remote from the conditions of a Body.

'It is a gross conceit therefore to think that God is such a Spirit as the Air is; for that is to be a body as the Air is, though it be a thin one; and if God were no more a Spirit than that, or than Angels, he would not be the most simple Being: Yet some think that the spiritual Deity was represented by the Air in the Ark of the Testament. It was unlawful to represent him by any Image that God had prohibited: Every thing about the Ark had a particular signification: The Gold and other Ornaments about it signified something of Christ, but were unfit to represent the Nature of God: A thing purely invisible and falling under nothing of sense, could not represent him to the mind of Man: The Air in the Ark was the fittest, it represented the invisibility of God, Air being imperceptible to our eyes. Air diffuseth itself through all parts of the world, it glides through secret passages into all Creatures, it fills the space between Heaven and Earth; there is no place wherein God is not present.

To evidence this,

1. If God were not a Spirit, he could not be Creator. All multitude begins in, and is reduced to unity. As above multitude there is an absolute unity; So above mixed Creatures, there is an absolute simplicity: You cannot conceive number without conceiving the beginning of it in that which was not number, viz. a unite: You cannot conceive any mixture, but you must conceive some simple thing to be the Original and Basis of it. The works of Art done by rational Creatures, have their Foundation in something Spiritual. Every Artificer, Watch-maker, Carpenter hath a model in his own mind of the work he designs to frame: The material and outward Fabric is squared according to an inward and Spiritual Idea. A Spiritual Idea speaks a Spiritual faculty as the subject of it. God could not have an Idea of that vast number of Creatures he brought into being; if he had not had a Spiritual Nature. The wisdom whereby the world was Created could never be the fruit of a Corporeal nature; such natures are not capable of understanding and comprehending the things which are within the compass of their nature, much less of produ- them: And therefore beasts which have only Corporeal faculties, move to objects by the force of their sense, and have no knowledge of things as they are comprehended by the understanding of Man. All acts of wisdom speak an intelligent and Spiritual agent: The effects of wisdom, goodness, power are so great and admirable, that they bespeak him a more perfect and eminent being, than can possibly be beheld under a bodily shape. Can a Coporeal substance put Wisdom in the inward parts, and give understanding to the heart?

2. If God were not a pure Spirit, he could not be one. If God had a body, consisting of distinct members, as ours; or all of one nature, as the water and air are, yet he were then capable of division, and therefore could not be entirely one. Either those parts would be finite or infinite; if finite, they are not parts of God; for to be God and finite is a contradiction: If infinite, then there are as many infinites, as distinct members, and therefore as many Deities: Suppose this body had all parts of the same nature as air and water hath, every little part of air is as much air as the greatest, and every little part of water is as much water as the Ocean; so every little part of God would be as much God as the whole; as many particular Deities to make up God, as little Atoms to compose a body: What can be more absurd? If God had a body like a human body, and were compounded of body and Soul, of substance and quality, he could not be the most perfect unity; he would be made up of distinct parts, and those of a distinct nature, as the members of a human body are: Where there is the greatest unity, there must be the greatest simplicity; but God is one: As he is free from any change, so he is void of any multitude, Deut. 6.4. The Lord our God is one Lord.

3. If God had a body as we have, he would not be invisible. Every material thing is not visible: The Air is a body yet invisible, but it is sensible; the cooling quality of it is felt by us at every breath, and we know it by our touch, which is the most material sense. Every body, that hath Members like to bodies, is visible: But God is invisible. The Apostle reckons it amongst his other perfections, 1 Tim. 1.17. Now unto the King, Eternal, Immortal, Invisible: He is invisible to our sense, which beholds nothing but material and coloured things; and incomprehensible to our understanding that conceives nothing but what is finite. God is therefore a Spirit uncapable of being seen, and infinitely uncapable of being understood. If he be invisible, he is also Spiritual. If he had a body, and hid it from our eyes, he might be said not to be seen, but could not be said to be invisible. When we say a thing is visible, we understand that it hath such qualities which are the objects of sense, though we may never see that, which is in its own nature is to be seen. God hath no such qualities as fall under the perception of our sense. His works are visible to us, but not his God-head. The nature of a human body is to be seen and handled, Christ gives us such a description of it, Luke 24.39. Handle me and see, for a Spirit hath not flesh and bones as you see me have: But man hath been so far from seeing God, that it is impossible he can see him, 1 Tim. 6.16. There is such a disproportion between an infinite object and a finite sense and understanding, that it is utterly impossible either to behold or comprehend him. But if God had a body more luminous and glorious than that of the Sun, he would be as well visible to us as the Sun, though the immensity of that light would dazzle our eyes, and forbid any close inspection into him by the virtue of our sense: We have seen the shape and figure of the Sun, but no man hath ever seen the shape of God. If God had a body he were visible, though he might not perfectly and fully be seen by us. As we see the Heavens, though we see not the extension, latitude and greatness of them. Tho God hath manifested himself in a bodily shape, Gen. 18.1. And elsewhere, Jehovah appeared to Abraham: Yet the substance of God was not seen, no more than the substance of Angels was seen in their Apparitions to men. A body was formed to be made visible by them, and such actions done in that body, that spake the person that did them, to be of a higher eminency than a bare Corporeal Creature: Sometimes a representation is made to the inward sense and imagination, as to Michaiah, and to Isa. 6. chap. 1. But they saw not the essence of God, but some Images and figures of him proportioned to their sense or imagination. The Essence of God no man ever saw, nor can see. Joh. 1.18.

Nor doth it follow, that God hath a body, because Jacob is said to see God Face to Face, Gen. 32.30. And Moses had the like privilege, Deut. 34.10. This only signifies a fuller and clearer manifestation of God, by some representations offered to the bodily sense, or rather to the inward Spirit: For God tells Moses he could not see his Face, Exod. 33.20. And that none ever saw the similitude of God, Deut. 4.15. Were God a Corporeal substance he might in some measure be seen by Corporeal eyes.

4. If God were not a Spirit, he could not be infinite. All bodies are of a finite nature: Every body is material, and every material thing is terminated. The Sun, a vast body, hath a bounded greatness: The Heavens of a mighty bulk, yet have their limits. If God had a body he must consist of parts, those parts would be bounded and limited, and whatsoever is limited is of a finite virtue, and therefore below an infinite nature. Reason therefore tells us, that the most excellent nature, as God is, cannot be of a Corporeal condition; because of the limitation and other actions which belong to everybody. God is infinite, for the Heaven of Heavens cannot contain him, 2 Chron. 2.6. The largest Heavens, and those imaginary spaces beyond the world, are no bounds to him. He hath an essence beyond the bounds of the world, and cannot be included in the vastness of the Heavens. If God be infinite, then he can have no parts in him; if he had, they must be finite, or infinite: Finite parts can never make up an infinite being. A vessel of Gold of a pound weight cannot be made of the quantity of an ounce. Infinite parts they cannot be, because then every part would be equal to the whole, as infinite as the whole, which is contradictory. We see in all things every part is less than the whole bulk that is composed of it: As every Member of a Man is less than the whole body of Man: If all the parts were finite, then God in his Essence were finite; and a finite God is not more excellent than a Creature: So that if God were not a Spirit, he could not be infinite.

5. If God were not a Spirit, he could not be an independent being. Whatsoever is compounded of many parts, depends either essentially or integrally upon those parts; as the essence of a man depends upon the conjunction and union of his two main parts, his Soul, and Body; when they are separated the essence of a Man ceaseth; and the perfection of a man depends upon every Member of the Body; So that if one be wanting the perfection of the whole is wanting: As if a man hath lost a limb, you call him not a perfect man; because that part is gone upon which his perfection as an entire man did depend: If God therefore had a body, the perfection of the Deity would depend upon every part of that body; and the more parts he were compounded of, the more his dependency would be multiplied according to the number of those parts of the body: For that which is compounded of many parts is more dependent than that which is compounded of fewer.

And because God would be a dependent being if he had a body, he could not be the first being; for the compounding parts are in order of nature before that which is compounded by them; as the soul and body are before the man which results from the union of them. If God had parts and bodily Members as we have, or any composition, the Essence of God would result from those parts, and those parts be supposed to be before God. For that which is a part, is before that whose part it is. As in Artificial things you may conceive it: All the parts of a Watch or Clock, are in time before that Watch which is made by setting those parts together. In natural things, you must suppose the Members of a Body framed, before you can call it a Man: So that the parts of this body are before that which is constituted by them. We can conceive no other of God, if he were not a pure, entire, unmixed Spirit: If he had distinct parts, he would depend upon them; those parts would be before him; his Essence would be the effect of those distinct parts, and so he would not be absolutely and entirely the first Being: But he is so, Isa. 44.6. I am the first, and I am the last. He is the first; nothing is before him: Whereas if he had bodily parts, and those finite, it would follow, God is made up of those parts which are not God; and that which is not God, is in order of Nature before that which is God. So that we see if God were not a Spirit, he could not be independent.

6. If God were not a Spirit, he were not immutable and unchangeable. His immutability depends upon his simplicity. He is unchangeable in his Essence, because he is a pure and unmixed spiritual Being. Whatsoever is compounded of parts, may be divided into those parts, and resolved into those distinct parts which make up and constitute the Nature. Whatsoever is compounded, is changeable in its own nature, though it should never be changed. Adam who was constituted of Body and Soul, had he stood in Innocence, had not died; there had been no separation made between his Soul and Body whereof he was constituted, and his Body had not resolved into those principles of Dust from whence it was extracted. Yet in his own nature he was dissoluble into those distinct parts whereof he was compounded: And so the glorified Saints in Heaven, after the Resurrection, and the happy meeting of their Souls and Bodies in a new Marriage knot, shall never be dissolved: yet in their own nature they are mutable and dissoluble, and cannot be otherwise, because they are made up of such distinct parts that may be separated in their own nature, unless sustained by the grace of God: They are immutable by Will, the Will of God, not by Nature. God is immutable by Nature as well as Will: As he hath a necessary Existence, so he hath a necessary Unchangeableness, Mal. 3.6. I the Lord change not. He is as unchangeable in his Essence, as in his Veracity and Faithfulness: They are perfections belonging to his Nature. But if he were not a pure Spirit, he could not be immutable by Nature.

7. If God were not a pure Spirit, He could not be omnipresent. He is in Heaven above, and the Earth below: He fills Heaven and Earth. The Divine Essence is at once in Heaven and Earth; but it is impossible a Body can be in two places at one and the same time. Since God is everywhere, he must be spiritual. Had he a Body, he could not penetrate all things; he would be circumscribed in place. He could not be everywhere but in parts, not in the whole; one member in one place, and another in another; for to be confined to a particlar place, is the property of a Body: But since he is diffused through the whole World; higher than Heaven, deeper than Hell; longer than the Earth, broader than the Sea; he hath not any corporeal matter. If he had a Body wherewith to fill Heaven and Earth, there could be no Body besides his own: 'It is the Nature of Bodies to bound one another, and hinder the extending of one another. Two Bodies cannot be in the same place in the same point of Earth, one excludes the other: And it will follow hence, that we are nothing, no substances, mere illusions; there could be no place for any Body else. If his Body were as bigg as the World; as it must be, if with that he filled Heaven and Earth, there would not be room for him to move a hand or a foot, or extend a finger; for there would be no place remaining for the motion.

8. If God were not a Spirit, he could not be the most perfect Being. The more perfect anything is in the rank of Creatures, the more spiritual and simple it is, as Gold is the more pure and perfect that hath least mixture of other Metals. If God were not a Spirit, there would be Creatures of a more excellent Nature than God; as Angels and Souls, which the Scripture calls Spirits, in opposition to Bodies. There is more of perfection in the first notion of a Spirit, than in the notion of a Body. God cannot be less perfect than his Creatures, and contribute an excellency of being to them which he wants himself. If Angels and Souls possess such an excellency, and God want that excellency; he would be less than his Creatures, and the excellency of the Effect, would exceed the excellency of the Cause. But every Creature, even the highest Creature, is infinitely short of the perfection of God; for whatsoever excellency they have, is finite and limited; 'tis but a spark from the Sun, a drop from the Ocean; but God is unboundedly perfect in the highest manner, without any limitation; and therefore above Spirits, Angels, the highest Creatures that were made by him: An infinite sublimity, a pure act, to which nothing can be added, from which nothing can be taken. In him there is light and no darkness, spirituality without any matter, perfection without any shadow or taint of imperfection: Light pierceth into all things, preserves its own purity, and admits of no mixture of anything else with it.

Question. It may be said, If God be a Spirit, and it is impossible he can be otherwise than a Spirit; how comes God so often to have such Members as we have in our Bodies, ascribed to him; not only a Soul, but particular bodily parts; as heart, arms, hands, eyes, ears, face and back-parts? And how is it that he is never called a Spirit in plain words, but in this Text by our Savior?

Answ. 'It is true, many parts of the Body, and natural affections of the human nature, are reported of God in Scripture. Head, Eyes and Eye-lids, Apple of the Eye, Mouth, &c. our Affections also, Grief, Joy, Anger, &c. But it is to be considered,

1. That this is in condescension to our weakness. God being desirous to make himself known to Man, whom he created for his Glory, humbles as it were his own Nature to such representations, as may suit and assists the capacity of the Creature: Since by the condition of our nature nothing erects a notion of itself in our understanding, but as it is conducted in by our sense. God hath served himself of those things which are most exposed to our sense, most obvious to our understandings, to give us some acquaintance with his own Nature, and those things which otherwise we were not capable of having any notion of. As our Souls are linked with our Bodies, so our knowledge is linked with our sense; that we can scarce imagine anything at first but under a corporeal form and figure, till we come by great attention to the Object, to make by the help of reason, a separation of the spiritual substance from the corporeal fancy, and consider it in its own nature. We are not able to conceive a Spirit, without some kind of resemblance to something below it; nor understand the actions of a Spirit, without considering the operations of a human Body in its several Members. As the Glories of another Life are signified to us by the pleasures of this; so the Nature of God, by a gracious condescension to our capacities, is signified to us by a likeness to our own. The more familiar the things are to us which God uses to this purpose, the more proper they are to teach us what he intends by them.

Answ. 2. All such representations are to signify the acts of God, as they hear some likeness to those, which we perform by those members he ascribes to himself. So that those members ascribed to him, rather note his visible operations to us, than his invisible Nature; and signify that God doth some works like to those which men do, by the assistance of those Organs of their Bodies. So the wisdom of God is called his Eye, because he knows that with his mind, which we see with our eyes. The efficiency of God is called his Hand and Arm; because as we act with our hands, so doth God with his Power. The divine Efficacies are signified: By his eyes and ears, we understand his Omniscience; by his face, the manifestation of his Favor; by his mouth the revelation of his Will; by his nostrils, the acceptation of our Prayers; by his bowels, the tenderness of his Compassion; by his heart, the sincerity of his Affections: by his hand, the strength of his Power; by his feet, the ubiquity of his Presence. And in this, he intends instruction and comfort: By his eyes he signifies his watchfulness over us: By his ears, his readiness to hear the cries of the oppressed: By his Arm, his Power; an Arm to destroy his Enemies, and an Arm to relieve his People. All those are attributed to God to signify divine actions, which he doth without bodily organs, as we do with them.

3. Consider also, that only those members which are the instruments of the noblest actions, and under that consideration, are used by him to represent a notion of him to our minds. Whatsoever is perfect and excellent, is ascribed to him, but nothing that savors of imperfection. The heart is ascribed to him, it being the principle of vital actions, to signify the Life that he hath in himself: Watchful and discerning eyes, not sleepy and lazy ones: A mouth to reveal his Will, not to take in food. To eat and sleep are never ascribed to him, nor those parts that belong to the preparing or transmitting nourishment to the several parts of the body, as stomach, liver, reins, nor bowels under that consideration, but as they are significant of compassion; but only those parts are ascribed to him whereby we acquire knowledge, as eyes and ears, the Organs of learning and wisdom: Or to Communicate it to others, as the mouth, lips, tongue, as they are the Instrmments of speaking, not of tasting: Or those parts which signify strength and power, or whereby we perform the actions of Charity for the relief of others: Taste, and touch, senses that extend no further than to Corporeal things, and are the grossest of all the senses, are never ascribed to him.

It were worth consideration, whither this describing God by the Members of an human body were so much figuratively to be understood, as with respect to the incarnation of our Savior, who was to assume the human nature and all the Members of a human body.

Asaph speaking in the person of God, Psal. 78.1. I will open my mouth in Parables: In regard of God it is to be understood figuratively, but in regard of Christ literally, to whom it is applied, Matt. 13.34.35. And that Apparition, Isa. 6. which was the appearance of Jehovah, is applied to Christ, John 12.40.41.

After the report of the Creation, and the forming of man, we read of God's speaking to him, but not of God's appearing to him in any visible shape: A voice might be formed in the air to give man notice of his duty; some way of info •• a • i • n he must have what positive Laws he was to observe, besides that Law w •• ch w •• •• graven in his nature, which we call the Law of nature: And without a voice the knowledge of the Divine Will could not be so conveniently communicated to man: Tho God was heard in a voice, he was not seen in a shape: But after the fall we several times read of his appearing in such a form. Tho we read of his speaking before man's committing of sin, yet not of his walking, which is more Corporeal, till afterwards: [Tho God would not have man believe him to be Corporeal, yet he judged it expedient to give some prenotices of that Divine incarnation which he had promised. ]

5. Therefore we must not conceive of the visible Deity according to the letter of such expressions, but the true intent of them. Tho the Scripture speaks of his eyes and arm, yet it denies them to be arms of flesh. We must not conceive of God according to the Letter, but the design of the Metaphor. When we hear things described by Metaphorical expressions for the clearing them up to our fancy, we conceive not of them under that garb, but remove the veil by an act of our reason: When Christ is called a Sun, a Vine, Bread, is any so stupid as as to conceive him to be a Vine with material branches and Clusters; or be of the same nature with a Loaf? But the things designed by such Metaphors are obvious to the conception of a mean understanding. If we would conceive God to have a body like a man, because he describes himself so, we may conceit him to be like a Bird, because he is mentioned with wings; or like a Lyon or Leopard, because he likens himself to them in the Acts of his strength and fury. He is called a rock, a horn, fire, to note his strength and wrath: If any be so stupid as to think God to be really such, they would make him not only a man, but worse than a Monster.

Onkelos, the Chaldee Paraphrast upon parts of the Scripture, was so tender of expressing the Notion of any Corporeity in God, that when he meets with any expressions of that nature, he translates them according to the true intent of them; as when God is said to descend, Gen. 11.5. which implies a local motion, a motion from one place to another, he translates it, and God revealed himself. We should conceive of God according to the design of the expressions: When we read of his eyes, we should conceive his Omniscience; of his hand his power; of his sitting, his immutability; of his Throne, his Majesty; and conceive of him as surmounting, not only the grossness of bodies, but the Spiritual excellency of the most dignified Creatures; something so perfect, great, spiritual, as nothing can be conceived higher and purer.

Christ, saith one, is truly Deus figuratus; and for his sake, was it more easily permitted to the Jews to think of God in the shape of a man.

Use. If God be a pure Spiritual being, then

1. Man is not the image of God, according to his external bodily form and figure. The image of God in man consisted not in what is seen, but in what is not seen; not in the conformation of the members, but rather in the Spiritual faculties of the Soul; or most of all in the holy endowments of those faculties, Eph. 4.24. That ye put on the new man which after God is Created in righteousness and true holiness. The image which is restored by redeeming grace, was the image of God by Original nature. The image of God cannot be in that part which is common to us with beasts, but rather in that wherein we excel all living Creatures, in reason, understanding, and an immortal Spirit. God expressly saith, that none saw a similitude of him Deut. 4.15, 16. which had not been true, if man in regard of his body had been the image and similitude of God; for then a figure of God had been seen every day, as often as we saw a man or beheld ourselves. Nor would the Apostles argument stand good, Acts 17.29. That the Godhead is not like to stone graven by art, if we were not the offspring of God and bore the stamp of his nature in our Spirits rather than our bodies. It was a fancy of Eugubinus, that when God set upon the actual Creation of man, he took a bodily form for an Exemplar of that which he would express in his work, and therefore that the words of Moses are to be understood of the body of man; because there was in Man such a shape which God had then assumed. To let alone God's forming himself a body for that work as a groundless fancy; Man can in no wise be said to be the image of God, in regard of the substance of his body; but beasts may as well be said to be made in the Image of God, whose bodies have the same Members as the body of Man for the most part, and excel Men in the acuteness of the senses and swiftness of their motion, agility of body, greatness of strength, and in some kind of ingenuities also, wherein Man hath been a Scholar to the brutes, and beholden to their skill. The Soul comes nearest the nature of God, as being a Spiritual substance; yet considered singly in regard of its Spiritual substance, cannot well be said to be the image of God: A beast, because of its Corporeity, may as well be called the image of a Man; for there is a greater similitude between man and a brute in the rank of bodies, than there can be between God and the highest Angels, in the rank of Spirits. If it doth not consist in the substance of the Soul, much less can it in any similitude of the body. This Image consisted partly in the state of man, as he had dominion over the Creatures; partly in the nature of man as he was an intelligent being, and thereby was capable of having a grant of that Dominion; but principally in the conformity of the Soul with God in the frame of his Spirit and the holiness of his actions. Not at all in the figure and form of his body Physically, though morally there might be, as there was a rectitude in the body as an instrument to conform to the holy motions of the soul, as the holiness of the soul sparkled in the actions and members of the body. If man were like God because he hath a body, whatsoever hath a body, hath some resemblance to God, and may be said to be in part his image: But the truth is, the essence of all Creatures cannot be an image of the immense essence of God.

2. If God be a pure Spirit; It is unreasonable to frame any Image or picture of God. Some Heathens have been wiser in this than some Christians: Pythagoras forbad his Scholars to engrave any shape of him upon a Ring, because he was not to be comprehended by sense, but conceived only in our minds; our hands are as unable to fashion him as our eyes to see him. The ancient Romans worshipped their God's 170. years before any material representations of them; and the Ancient Idolatrous Germans thought it a wicked thing to represent God in a human shape. Yet some, and those no Romanists, labor to defend the making Images of God in the resemblance of man; because he is so represented in Scripture, he may be, saith one conceived so in our minds and figured so to our sense. If this were a good reason, why may he not be pictured as a Lyon, Horn, Eagle, Rock, since he is under such Metaphors shadowed to us? The same ground there is for the one as for the other: What though man be a nobler Creature, God hath no more the body of a man, than that of an Eagle; and some perfections in other Creatures represent some excellencies in his nature and actions, which cannot be figured by a human shape, as strength by the Lyon, swiftness and readiness by the wings of the Bird. But God hath absolutely prohibited the making any Image whatsoever of him, and that with terrible threatenings, Exod. 20.5. I the Lord am a jealous God visiting the iniquities of the Fathers upon their Children, and Deut. 5.8, 9. After God had given the Israelites the Commandment wherein he forbad them to have any other God's before him, he forbids all figuring of him by the hand of man; not only Images, but any likness of him either by things in Heaven, in the earth or in the water. How often doth he discover his indignation by the Prophets against them that offer to mould him in a Creature form? This law was not to serve a particular dispensation or to endure a particular time, but it was a declaration of his Will, invariable in all places and all times; being founded upon the immutable nature of his being, and therefore agreeable to the Law of nature; otherwise not chargeable upon the Heathens. And therefore when God had declared his nature and his works in a stately and Majestick eloquence, he demands of them, To whom they would liken him, or what likeness they would compare unto him? Isa. 40.18. Where they could find anything that would be a lively image and resemblance of his infinite excellency? Founding it upon the infiniteness of his nature, which necessarily implies the Spirituality of it. God is infinitely above any Statue; and those that think to draw God by a stroke of a pensil, or form him by the engravings of Art, are more stupid than the Statues themselves.

To show the unreasonableness of it; Consider,

1. It is impossible to fashion any image of God. If our more capacious Souls cannot grasp his nature, our weaker sense cannot frame his image: It is more possible of the two, to comprehend him in our minds, than to frame him in an image to our sense. He inhabits inaccessible light: As it is impossible for the eye of man to see him, tis impossible for the art of man to paint him upon walls, and carve him out of wood. None knows him but himself, none can describe him but himself. Can we draw a figure of our own Souls, and express that part of ourselves, wherein we are most like to God? Can we extend this to any bodily figure and divide it into parts? How can we deal so with the Original Copy, whence the first draught of our Souls was taken, and which is infinitely more Spiritual than Men or Angels? No Corporeal thing can represent a Spiritual substance; there is no proportion in nature between them. God is a simple, infinite, immense, eternal, invisible, incorruptible being: A Statue is a compounded, finite, limited, temporal, visible and corruptible body. God is a living Spirit; but a Statue, nor sees, nor hears, nor perceives anything. But suppose God had a body, tis impossible to mould an Image of it in the true glory of that body: Can the Statue of an excellent Monarch represent the Majesty and air of his Countenance, though made by the skillfullest workman in the world? If God had a body in some measure suited to his excellency, were it possible for Man to make an exact Image of him, who cannot picture the light, heat, motion, magnitude and dazzling property of the Sun? The excellency of any Corporeal nature of the least Creature, the temper, instinct, artifice, are beyond the power of a Carving tool; much more is God.

2. To make any Corporeal representations of God is unworthy of God. 'It is a disgrace to his nature. Whosoever thinks a Carnal corruptible Image to be fit for a representation of God, renders God no better than a Carnal and Corporeal being. 'It is a kind of debasing an Angel, who is a Spiritual nature, to represent him in a bodily shape, who is as far removed from any fleshliness as Heaven from Earth; much more to degrade the glory of the Divine nature to the lineaments of a man. The whole stock of Images is but a lie of God, Jer. 10, 8, 14. A Doctrine of vanities and falsehood: It represents him in a false garb to the world, and sinks his glory into that of a corruptible Creature. It impairs the reverence of God in the minds of men, and by degrees may debase men's apprehensions of God, and be a means to make them believe he is such a one as themselves; and that not being free from the figure, he is not also free from the imperfections of their bodies. Corporeal Images of God were the fruits of base imaginations of him; and as they sprung from them, so they contribute to a greater corruption of the notions of the Divine nature: The Heathens begun their first representations of him by the Image of a corruptible Man, then of birds, till they descended, not only to four footed beasts, but creeping things, even Serpents, as the Apostle seems to intimate in his enumeration, Rom. 1.23. It had been more honorable to have continued in human representations of him, than have sunk so low as beasts and Serpents, the baser Images; though the first had been infinitely unworthy of him, he being more above a man, though the noblest Creature, than Man is above a Worm, a Toad, or the most despicable creeping thing upon the Earth. To think we can make an Image of God of a piece of Marble, or an Ingot of Gold, is a greater debasing of him, than it would be of a great Prince, if you should represent him in the statue of a Frog. When the Israelites represented God by a Calf, 'tis said, they sinned a great sin, Exod. 32.31. And the sin of Jeroboam, who intended only a representation of God by the Calves at Dan and Bethel, is called more emphatically, the wickedness of your wickedness, the very skum and dregs of wickedness. As men debased God by this, so God debased men for this; he degraded the Israelites into Captivity under the worst of their Enemies, and punished the Heathens with spiritual Judgments, as uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, Rom. 1.24. which is repeated again in other expressions, v. 26, 27. as a meet recompense for their disgracing the spiritual nature of God. Had God been like to Man, they had not offended in it: But I mention this, to show a probable reason of those base lusts which are in the midst of us, that have scarce been exceeded by any Nation, viz. the unworthy and unspiritual conceits of God, which are as much a debasing of him as material Images were when they were more rife in the world; and may be as well the cause of those spiritual Judgments upon men, as the worshipping molten and carved Images were the cause of the same upon the Heathen.

3. Yet this is natural to Man. Wherein we may see the contrariety of Man to God. Though God be a Spirit, yet there is nothing Man is more prone to, than to represent him under a corporeal form. The most famous Guides of the Heathen world have fashioned him, not only according to the more honorable Images of men, but beastialized him in the form of a Brute. The Egyptians, whose Country was the School of Learning to Greece, were notoriously guilty of this brutishness in worshiping an Ox for an Image of their God; and the Philistines their Dagon in a figure composed of the Image of a Woman and a Fish: Such representations were ancient in the Oriental parts. The God's of Laban that he accuseth Jacob of stealing from him, are supposed to be little figures of men. Such was the Israelites Golden-Calf; their worship was not terminated on the Image, but they worshipped the true God under that representation: They could not be so brutish as to call a Calf their Deliverer, and give so him great a Title, ( these be thy God's oh Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt, Exod. 32.4.) or that which they knew belonged to the true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They knew the Calf to be formed of their Ear-rings; but they had consecrated it to God as a representation of him: Though they chose the form of the Egyptian Idol; yet they knew that Apis, Osiris and Isis the God's the Egyptians adored in that figure, had not wrought their Redemption from Bondage, but would have used their force, had they been possessed of any, to have kept them under the Yoke, rather than have freed them from it: The Feast also which they celebrated before that Image, is called by Aaron the Feast of the Lord, Exod. 32.5. a Feast to Jehovah, the incommunicable name of the Creator of the world: 'It is therefore evident, that both the Priest and the People pretended to serve the true God, not any false Divinity of Egypt: That God who had rescued them from Egypt with a mighty hand, divided the Red-Sea before them, destroyed their Enemies, conducted them, fed them by miracle, spoken to them from Mount Sinai, and amazed them by his Thundrings and Lightnings when he instructed them by his Law; a God they could not so soon forget. And with this representing God by that Image, they are charged by the Psalmist, Psal. 106.19, 20. they made a Calf in Horeb, and changed their glory into the similitude of an Ox that eateth Grass: They changed their glory, that is, God the glory of Israel; so that they took this figure for the Image of the true God of Israel, their own God; not the God of any other Nation in the world. Jeroboam intended no other by his Calves, but Symbols of the presence of the true God, instead of the Ark and the Propitiatory which remained among the Jews. We see the inclination of our Natures in the practice of the Israelites; a People chosen out of the whole world to bear up God's name, and preserve his glory: And in that the Images of God were so soon set up in the Christian Church; and to this day, the picture of God in the shape of an old man, is visible in the Temples of the Romanists.

'It is prone to the Nature of Man.

4. To represent God by a corporeal Image, and to worship him in and by that Image, is Idolatry. Though the Israelites did not acknowledge the Calf to be God, nor intended a worship to any of the Egyptian Deities by it; but worshipped that God in it, who had so lately and miraculously delivered them from a cruel Servitude; and could not in natural reason judge him to be clothed with a bodily shape, much less to be like an Ox that eateth grass; yet the Apostle brings no less a charge against them, than that of Idolatry, 1 Cor. 10.7. he calls them Idolaters, who before that Calf kept a Feast to Jehovah, citing Exod. 32.5. Suppose we could make such an Image of God as might perfectly represent him; yet since God hath prohibited it, shall we be wiser than God? He hath sufficiently manifested himself in his Works without Images: He is seen in the Creatures; more particularly in the Heavens, which declare his Glory. His Works are more excellent representations of him, as being the works of his own hands, than anything that is the Product of the Art of Man. His Glory sparkles in the Heavens, Sun, Moon and Stars, as being magnificent pieces of his Wisdom and Power; yet the kissing the hand to the Sun or the Heavens, as representatives of the Excellency and Majesty of God, is Idolatry in Scripture account, and a denial of God; a prostituting the glory of God to a Creature: Either the worship is terminated on the Image itself, and then it is confessed by all to be Idolatry, because it is a giving that worship to a Creature which is the sole right of God; or not terminated in the Image, but in the Object represented by it; 'tis then a foolish thing; we may as well terminate our worship on the true Object without, as with an Image. An erected Statue is no sign or symbol of God's special presence, as the Ark, Tabernacle, Temple were. It is no part of divine institution; has no Authority of a Command to support it; no Cordial of a promise to encourage it; and the Image being infinitely distant from, and below the Majesty and Spirituality of God, cannot constitute one object of worship with him. To put a Religious Character upon any Image formed by the corrupt imagination of Man, as a representation of the invisible and spiritual Deity; is to think the Godhead to be like silver and gold, or stone graven by art and man's device.

3. This Doctrine will direct us in our conceptions of God, as a pure perfect Spirit, than which nothing can be imagined more perfect, more pure, more spiritual.

1. We cannot have an adequate or suitable conception of God: He dwells in inaccessible light; inaccessible to the acuteness of our fancy, as well as the weakness of our sense. If we could have thoughts of him, as high and excellent as his Nature; our conceptions must be as infinite as his Nature. All our imaginations of him cannot represent him, because every created species is finite; it cannot therefore represent to us a full and substantial notion of an infinite Being. We cannot speak or think worthily enough of him, who is greater than our words, vaster than our understandings. Whatsoever we speak or think of God, is handed first to us by the notice we have of some perfection in the Creature, and explains to us some particular excellency of God, rather than the fullness of his Essence. No Creature, nor all Creatures together, can furnish us with such a magnificent notion of God, as can give us a clear view of him. Yet God in his word is pleased to step below his own excellency, and point us to those excellencies in his works, whereby we may ascend to the knowledge of those excellencies which are in his Nature. But the Creatures, whence we draw our lessons being finite, and our understandings being finite, 'tis utterly impossile to have a notion of God commensurate to the immensity and spirituality of his Being. [ God is not like to visible Creatures, nor is there any proportion between him and the most spiritual]. We cannot have a full notion of a spiritual Nature; much less can we have of God, who is a Spirit above Spirits. No Spirit can clearly represent him: The Angels that are great Spirits, are bounded in their extent, finite in their being, and of a mutable Nature.

Yet though we cannot have a suitable conception of God, we must not content ourselves without any conception of him. 'It is our sin not to endeavor after a true notion of him: 'It is our sin to rest in a mean and low notion of him, when our reason tells us we are capable of having higher: But if we ascend as high as we can, though we shall then come short of a suitable notion of him; this is not our sin, but our weakness. God is infinitely superior to the choicest conceptions; not only of a sinner, but of a Creature. If all conceptions of God below the true nature of God were sin, there is not a holy Angel in Heaven free from sin; because though they are the most capacious Creatures, yet they cannot have such a Notion of an infinite being as is fully suitable to his nature, unless they were infinite as he himself is.

2. But however, we must by no means conceive of God, under a human or Corporeal shape. Since we cannot have conceptions honorable enough for his nature, we must take heed we entertain not any which may debase his nature: Tho we cannot comprehend him as he is, we must be careful not to fancy him to be what he is not. 'It is a vain thing to conceive him with human lineaments: We must think higher of him, than to ascribe to him so mean a shape: We deny his Spirituality when we fancy him under such a form: He is Spiritual, and between that which is Spiritual and that which is Corporeal, there is no resemblance. Indeed Daniel saw God in a human form, Daniel. 7.9. The Ancient of days did sit, whose garment was white as snow, and the hairs of his head like pure Wool; he is described as coming to Judgment; tis not meant of Christ probably, because Christ ver. 13. is called the Son of Man coming near to the Ancient of days. This is not the proper shape of God, for no man hath seen his shape. It was a vision wherein such representations were made, as were accomodated to the inward sense of Daniel; Daniel saw him in a rapture or ecstasy, wherein outward senses are of no use: God is described, not as he is in himself, of a human form, but in regard of his fitness to Judge: White notes the purity and simplicity of the Divine nature: Ancient of days in regard of his eternity; white hair in regard of his prudence and wisdom, which is more eminent in age than youth, and more fit to discern causes and to distinguish between right and wrong. Visions are riddles and must not be understood in a literal sense. We are to watch against such determinate conceptions of God. Vain imaginations do easily infest us; Tinder will not sooner take fire than our natures kindle into wrong Notions of the Divine Majesty. We are very apt to fashion a God like ourselves: We must therefore look upon such representations of God, as accommodated to our weakness: And no more think them to be literal descriptions of God, as he is in himself, than we will think the image of the Sun in the water to be the true Sun in the Heavens. We may indeed conceive of Christ as man, who hath in Heaven the vestment of our nature, and is Deus figuratus, though we cannot conceive the God-head under a human shape.

1. To have such a fancy is to disparage and wrong God. A Corporeal fancy of God is as ridiculous in itself and as injurious to God, as a wooden Statue. The capricios of our imagination are often more monstrous than the images which are the works of art: It is as irreligious to measure God's essence by our line, his perfections by our imperfections, as to measure his thoughts and actings by the weakness and unworthiness of our own. This is to limit an infinite essence, and pull him down to our scanty measures, and render that which is inconceivably above us, equal with us. It is impossible we can conceive God after the manner of, we a body but must bring him down to the proportion of a body, which is to diminish his glory, and stoop him below the dignity of his nature. God is a pure Spirit, he hath nothing of the nature and tincture of a body; whosoever therefore conceives of him as having a bodily form, though he fancy the most beautiful and comely body, instead of owning his dignity, detracts from the supereminent excellency of his nature and blessedness. When men fancy God like themselves in their Corporeal nature, they will soon make a progress, and ascribe to him their corrupt nature; and while they clothe him with their bodies, invest him also in the infirmities of them. God is a jealous God, very sensible of any disgrace, and will be as much incensed against an inward Idolatry as an outward: That Command which forbad Corporeal images, would not indulge carnal imaginations, since the nature of God is as much wronged by unworthy images erected in the fancy as by statues carved out of stone or metals: One as well as the other is a deserting of our true spouse and committing Adultery, one with a material image, and the other with a carnal Notion of God. Since God humbles himself to our apprehensions, we should not debase him in thinking him to be that in his nature, which he makes only a resemblance of himself to us.

2. To have such fancies of God, will obstruct and pollute our worship of him. How is it possible to give him a right worship, of whom we have so debasing a Notion? We shall never think a corporeal Deity, worthy of a dedication of our Spirits. The hating Instruction, and casting God's word behind the back, is charged upon the imagination they had, that God was such a one as themselves, Psal. 50.17.21. Many of the wiser Heathens did not judge their Statues to be their God's, or their God's to be like their Statues; but suited them to their politick designs; and judged them a good invention to keep people within the bounds of Obedience and Devotion, by such visible figures of them, which might imprint a reverence and fear of those God's upon them: But these were false measures: A despised and undervalued God, is not an Object of Petition or Affection: Who would address seriously to a God he has low apprehensions of? The more raised thoughts we have of him, the viler sense we shall have of ourselves: They would make us humble and self abhorrent in our supplications to him, Job. 42.6. wherefore I abhor myself, &c.

3. Though we must not conceive of God, as of a human or Corporeal shape; yet we cannot think of God, without some reflection upon our own being. We cannot conceive him to be an intelligent being, but we must make some comparison between him and our own understanding nature, to come to a knowledge of him. Since we are enclosed in bodies, we apprehend nothing but what comes in by sense, and what we in some sort measure by sensible Objects. And in the consideration of those things, which we desire to abstract from sense, we are fain to make use of the assistances of sense and visible things: And therefore when we frame the highest notion, there will be some similitude of some corporeal thing in our fancy; and though we would spiritualize our thoughts, and aim at a more abstracted and raised understanding, yet there will be some dregs of matter sticking to our conceptions; yet we still judge by argument and reasoning, what the thing is we think of under those material Images. A corporeal Image will follow us, as the shadow doth the body: While we are in the body, and surrounded with fleshly matter, we cannot think of things without some help from corporeal representations: Something of sense will interpose itself in our purest conceptions of spiritual things; for the faculties which serve for contemplation, are either corporeal, as the sense and fancy, or so allied to them, that nothing passes into them but by the Organs of the body; so that there is a natural inclination to figure nothing but under a corporeal notion, till by an attentive application of the mind and reason to the object thought upon, we separate that which is bodily from that which is spiritual, and by degrees ascend to that true notion of that we think upon, and would have a due conception of in our mind. Therefore God tempers the declaration of himself to our weakness, and the condition of our Natures: He condescends to our littleness and narrowness, when he declares himself by the similitude of bodily members. As the light of the Sun is tempered, and diffuseth itself to our sense through the air and vapors, that our weak eyes may not be too much dazzled with it: Without it we could not know or judge of the Sun, because we could have no use of our sense, which we must have before we can judge of it in our understanding: So we are not able to conceive of spiritual Beings in the purity of their own nature, without such a temperament, and such shadows to usher them into our minds. And therefore we find the Spirit of God accommodates himself to our contracted and teddered capacities, and uses such expressions of God, as are suited to us in this state of flesh wherein we are: And therefore because we cannot apprehend God in the simplicity of his own Being, and his undivided Essence, he draws the representations of himself from several Creatures and several actions of those Creatures: As sometimes he is said to be angry, to walk, to sit, to fly; not that we should rest in such conceptions of him, but take our rise from this foundation, and such perfections in the Creatures, to mount up to a knowledge of God's nature by those several steps, and conceive of him by those divided Excellencies, because we cannot conceive of him in the purity of his own Essence. We cannot possibly think or speak of God, unless we transfer the names of created perfections to him; yet we are to conceive of them in a higher manner when we apply them to the Divine Nature, than when we consider them in the several Creatures formally, exceeding those perfections and excellencies which are in the Creature, and in a more excellent manner: [as one saith, though we cannot comprehend God without the help of such resemblances, yet we may without making an Image of him; so that inability of ours excuseth those apprehensions of him from any way offending against his Divine Nature] These are not notions so much suited to the nature of God as the weakness of man: They are helps to our meditations, but ought not to be formal conceptions of him. We may assist ourselves in our apprehensions of him, by considering the subtlety and spirituality of Air; and considering the members of a body, without thinking him to be air, or to have any corporeal member. Our reason tells us, that whatsoever is a body, is limited and bounded; and the notion of infiniteness and bodiliness, cannot agree and consist together: And therefore what is offered by our fancy should be purified by our reason.

4. Therefore we are to elevate and refine all our notions of God, and spiritualize our conceptions of him. Every man is to have a conception of God; therefore he ought to have one of the highest elevation. Since we cannot have a full notion of him, we should endeavor to make it as high and as pure as we can. Though we cannot conceive of God, but some corporeal representations or images in our minds will be conversant with us, as motes in the Air when we look upon the Heavens; yet our conceptions may and must rise higher: As when we see the draught of the Heavens and Earth in a Globe, or a Kingdom in a Map, it helps our conceptions, but doth not terminate them: We conceive them to be of a vast extent, far beyond that short description of them: So we should endeavor to refine every representation of God, to rise higher and higher, and have our apprehensions still more purified; separating the perfect from the imperfect, casting away the one, and greatening the other; conceive him to be a Spirit diffused through all, containing all, perceiving all. All the perfections of God are infinitely elevated above the excellencies of the Creatures; above whatsoever can be conceived by the clearest and most piercing understanding. The Nature of God as a Spirit, is infinitely superior to whatsoever we can conceive perfect in the notion of a created Spirit. Whatsoever God is, he is infinitely so: He is infinite Wisdom, infinite Goodness, infinite Knowledge, infinite Power, infinite Spirit, infinitely distant from the weakness of Creatures, infinitely mounted above the excellencies of Creatures: As easy to be known that he is, as impossible to be comprehended what he is.

Conceive of him as excellent, without any imperfection: A Spirit without parts; great without quantity; perfect without quality; everywhere without place; Powerful without members; understanding without ignorance; wise without reasoning; light without darkness; infinitely more excelling the beauty of all Creatures, than the light in the Sun pure and unviolated exceeds the splendor of the Sun dispersed and divided through a cloudy and misty Air: And when you have risen to the highest, conceive him yet infinitely above all you can conceive of Spirit; and acknowledge the infirmity of your own minds. And whatsoever conception comes into your minds, say this is not God; God is more than this: If I could conceive him, he were not God; for God is incomprehensibly above whatsoever I can say, whatsoever I can think and conceive of him.

4. Inference. If God be a Spirit, no corporeal thing can defile him. Some bring an Argument against the Omnipresence of God, that it is a disparagement to the Divine Essence to be everywhere, in nasty Cottages, as well as beautiful Palaces and garnished Temples. What place can defile a Spirit? Is Light, which approaches to the nature of Spirit polluted by shining upon a Dung-hill, or a Sun-beam tainted by darting upon a Quag-mire? Doth an Angel contract any soil, by stepping into a nasty Prison to deliver Peter? What can steam from the most noisesome body, to pollute the spiritual nature of God? As he is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity , so he is of a more spiritual substance, than to contract any physical pollution from the places where he doth diffuse himself. Did our Savior who had a true body, derive any taint from the Lepers he touched, the diseases he cured, or the Devils he expel'd? God is a pure Spirit; plungeth himself into no filth; is dashed with no spot by being present with all bodies. Bodies only receive defilement from bodies.

5. Inference. If God be a Spirit, he is active and communicative. He is not clogged with heavy and sluggish matter, which is cause of dullness and inactivity. The more subtle thin, and approaching nearer the Nature of a Spirit anything is, the more diffusive it is. Air is a gliding substance; spreads itself through all Regions; pierceth into all bodies; it fills the space between Heaven and Earth; there is nothing but partakes of the virtue of it. Light, which is an emblem of Spirit, insinuates itself into all places, refresheth all things. As Spirits are fuller, so they are more overflowing, more piercing, more operative than bodies. The Egyptian Horses were weak things, because they were Flesh and not Spirit : The Soul being a Spirit conveys more to the Body, than the Body can to it. What cannot so great a Spirit do for us? What cannot so great a Spirit work in us? God being a Spirit above all Spirits, can pierce into the Center of all Spirits; make his way into the most secret recesses; stamp what he pleases: 'It is no more to him to turn our Spirits, than to make a Wilderness become Waters, and speak a Chaos into a beautiful frame of Heaven and Earth: He can act our souls with infinite more ease, than our souls can act our bodies; he can fix in us what motions, frames, inclinations he pleases; he can come and settle in our hearts with all his Treasures. 'It is an encouragement to confide in him, when we petition him for spiritual Blessings: As he is a Spirit, he is possessed with spiritual Blessings. A Spirit delights to bestow things suitable to its Nature, do Bodies are to communicate what is agreeable to theirs: As he is a Father of Spirits, we may go to him for the Welfare of our Spirits; he being a Spirit, is as able to repair our Spirits, as he was to create them.

As he is a Spirit, he is indefatigable in acting: The members of the body tire and flagg; but whoever heard of a Soul wearied with being active? Whoever heard of a weary Angel? In the purest Simplicity, there is the greatest Power, the most efficacious Goodness, the most reaching Justice to affect the Spirit, that can insinuate itself everywhere to punish wickedness without weariness, as well as to comfort goodness. God is active, because he is Spirit; and if we be like to God, the more spiritual we are, the more active we shall be.

6. Inference. God being a Spirit, is immortal. His being immortal, and being invisible are joined together. Spirits are in their nature incorruptible; they can only perish by that hand that framed them. Every compounded thing is subject to mutation; but God being a pure and simple Spirit, is without corruption, without any shadow of change. Where there is composition, there is some kind of repugnancy of one part against the other; and where there is repugnancy, there is a capability of dissolution. God in regard of his infinite spirituality, hath nothing in his own nature contrary to it; can have nothing in himself which is not himself. The world perishes; friends change and are dissolved; bodies molder, because they are mutable. God is a Spirit in the highest excellency and glory of Spirits; nothing is beyond him; nothing above him; no contrariety within him: This is our comfort, if we devote ourselves to him; this God is our God; this Spirit is our Spirit; this is our all, our immutable, our incorruptible support; a Spirit that cannot die and leave us.

7. Inference. If God be a Spirit, we see how we can only converse with him by our Spirits. Bodies and Spirits are not suitable to one another: We can only see, know, embrace a Spirit with our Spirits. He judges not of us by our corporeal actions, nor our external devotions, by our masks and disguises: He fixes his eye upon the frame of the heart, bends his ear to the groans of our Spirits: He is not pleased with outward pomp: He is not a Body; therefore the beauty of Temples, delicacy of Sacrifices, fumes of Incense are not grateful to him; by those or any external action, we have no communion with him: A Spirit when broken, is his delightful Sacrifice ; We must therefore have our Spirits fitted for him, be renewed in the spirit of our minds , that we may be in a posture to live with him, and have an intercourse with him. We can never be united to God, but in our Spirits: Bodies unite with Bodies, Spirits with Spirits. The more spiritual anything is, the more closely doth it unite. Air hath the closest union, nothing meets together sooner than that, when the parts are divided by the interposition of a body.

8. Inference. If God be a Spirit, he can only be the true satisfaction of our Spirits. Spirit can only be filled with Spirit. Content flows from likeness and suitableness: As we have a resemblance to God in regard of the spiritual nature of our Soul, so we can have no satisfaction but in him. Spirit can no more be really satisfied with that which is corporeal, than a beast can delight in the company of an Angel. Corporeal things can no more fill a hungry Spirit, than pure Spirit can feed an hungry Body. God the highest Spirit, can only reach out a full content to our spirits. Man is Lord of the Creation; nothing below him can be fit for his converse; nothing above him offers itself to his converse but God. We have no correspondence with Angels: The influence they have upon us, the protection they afford us, is secret and undiscerned; but God the highest Spirit offers himself to us in his Son, in his Ordinances, is visible in every Creature, presents himself to us in every providence; to him we must seek; in him we must rest. God had no rest from the Creation, till he had made Man; and Man can have no rest in the Creation, till he rests in God. God only is our dwelling place; our Souls should only long for him; our Souls should only wait upon him. The Spirit of Man never riseth to its original glory, till it be carried up on the wings of Faith and Love to its original Copy. The face of the Soul looks most beautiful, when it is turned to the face of God the Father of Spirits; when the derived Spirit is fixed upon the original Spirit, drawing from it Life and Glory. Spirit is only the receptacle of Spirit. God as Spirit is our Principle; we must therefore live upon him. God as Spirit, hath some resemblance to us as his Image; we must therefore only satisfy ourselves in him.

9. Inference. If God be a Spirit, we should take most care of that wherein we are like to God. Spirit is nobler than Body; we must thererefore value our Spirits above our Bodies: The Soul as Spirit, partakes more of the Divine Nature, and deserves more of our choicest cares. If we have any love to this Spirit, we should have a real affection to our own Spirits, as bearing a stamp of the spiritual Divinity, the chiefest of all the works of God; as it is said of Behemoth, Job. 40.19.. That which is most the Image of this immense Spirit, should be our Darling: So David calls his Soul, Psal. 35.17. Shall we take care of that wherein we partake not of God, and not delight in the Jewel which hath his own Signature upon it? God was not only the Framer of Spirits, and the End of Spirits; but the Copy and Exemplar of Spirits. God partakes of no corporeity, he is pure Spirit. But how do we act, as if we were only matter and body! We have but little kindness for this great Spirit as well as our own, if we take no care of his immediate offspring, since he is not only Spirit, but the Father of Spirits.

10. Inference. If God be a Spirit, let us take heed of those sins which are spiritual. Paul distinguisheth between the filth of the Flesh, and that of the Spirit : By the one we defile the Body; by the other we defile the Spirit, which in regard of its Nature is of kin to the Creator. To wrong one who is near of kin to a Prince, is worse than to injure an inferior Subject. When we make our Spirits, which are most like to God in their Nature, and framed according to his Image, a stage to act vain imaginations, wicked desires, and unclean affections, we wrong God in the excellency of his Work, and reflect upon the nobleness of the Pattern; we wrong him in that part where he hath stamped the most signal Character of his own spiritual nature; we defile that whereby we have only converse with him as a Spirit, which he hath ordered more immediately to represent him in this Nature, than all corporeal things in the world can, and make that Spirit with whom we desire to be joined, unfit for such a knot. God's Spirituality is the root of his other perfections. We have already heard, he could not be infinite, omnipresent, immutable without it. Spiritual sins are the greatest root of bitterness within us: As grace in our Spirits renders us more like to a spiritual God; so spiritual sins bring us into a conformity to a degraded Devil. Carnal sins change us from men to brutes, and spiritual sins devest us of the Image of God for the Image of Satan. We should by no means make our Spirits a Dung-hill, which bear upon them the Character of the spiritual Nature of God, and were made for his residence: Let us therefore behave ourselves towards God in all those ways which the spiritual nature of God requires us.

A DISCOURSE OF Spiritual Worship.

HAVING thus dispatched the first proposition, God is a Spirit; It will not be amiss to handle the inference our Savior makes from that proposition, which is the second observation propounded.

Doct. That the Worship due from us to God ought to be Spiritual and Spiritually performed.

Spirit and Truth are understood variously. Either we are to Worship God,

1. Not by legal ceremonies. The Evangelical administration, being called Spirit in opposition to the legal ordinances as carnal; and Truth in opposition to them as typical. As the whole Judaical service is called flesh; so the whole Evangelical service is called Spirit. Or Spirit may be opposed to the worship at Jerusalem, as it was carnal; Truth, to the worship on the Mount Gerizim, because it was false. They had not the true object of worship, nor the true Medium of worship as those at Jerusalem had. Their worship should cease, because it was false; and the Jewish worship should cease, because it was carnal.

There is no need of a Candle, when the Sun spreads it beams in the Air; no need of those Ceremonies, when the Sun of righteousness appeared: They only served for Candles to instruct and direct men till the time of his coming. The shadows are chased away by the displaying the substance, so that they can be of no more use in the worship of God, since the end for which they were instituted, is expired; and that discovered to us in the Gospel which the Jews sought for in vain, among the baggage and stuff of their Ceremonies.

2. With a Spiritual and sincere frame. In Spirit, i. e. with Spirit; with the inward operations of all the faculties of our Souls, and the cream and flower of them: And the reason is, because there ought to be a worship suitable to the nature of God. And as the worship was to be Spiritual, so the exercise of that worship ought to be in a Spiritual manner. It shall be a worship in Truth, because the true God shall be adored without those vain imaginations, and fantastic resemblances of him, which were common among the blind Gentiles, and contrary to the glorious nature of God, and unworthy ingredients in Religious services. It shall be a worship in Spirit, without those carnal rites the degenerate Jews rested on: Such a posture of Soul which is the life and ornament of every service God looks for at your hands: There must be some proportion between the object adored and the manner in which we adore it. It must not be a mere Corporeal worship, because God is not a body; but it must rise from the Center of our Soul, because God is a Spirit. If he were a body, a bodily worship might suit him, Images might be fit to represent him; but being a Spirit, our bodily services enter us not into communion with him. Being a Spirit we must banish from our minds all carnal imaginations of him, and separate from our Wills all cold and dissembled affections to him. We must not only have a loud voice, but an elevated Soul; not only a bended knee, but a broken heart; not only a supplicating tone, but a groaning Spirit; not only a ready ear for the word, but a receiving heart; and this shall be of greater value with him, than the most costly outward services offered at Gerizim or Jerusalem.

Our Savior certainly meant not by worshipping in Spirit, only the matter of the Evangelical service, as opposed to the legal administration, without the manner wherein it was to be performed. It is true, God always sought a worship in Spirit; he expected the heart of the worshipper should join with his instituted rights of adoration in every exercise of them: But he expects such a carriage more under the Gospel administration, because of the clearer discoveries of his nature made in it, and the greater assistances conveyed by it.

I shall therefore,

• 1. Lay down some general propositions.
• 2. Shew what this Spiritual worship is.
• 3. Why we must offer to God a Spiritual service.
• 4. The Use.

1. Some general propositions.

Proposition, 1. First. The right exercise of worship is founded upon and riseth from the Spirituality of God. The first ground of the worship we render to God, is the infinite excellency of his nature, which is not only one attribute, but results from all: For God, as God, is the object of worship; and the Notion of God consists not in thinking him wise, good, just, but all those infinitely beyond any Conception. And hence it follows that God is an object infinitely to beloved and honored. His goodness is sometimes spoken of in Scripture as a motive of our homage. Psal. 130.4. There is forgiveness with thee that thou mayest be feared. Fear in the Scripture dialect signifies the whole worship of God. Acts 10.35. But in every Nation he that fears him is accepted of him. If God should act towards men according to the rigors of his Justice due to them for the least of their Crimes, there could be no exercise of any affection but that of despair, which could not engender a worship of God which ought to be joined with love, not with hatred. The beneficence and patience of God and his readiness to pardon men is the reason of the honor they return to him. And this is so evident a motive, that generally the Idolatrous world rankt those Creatures in the number of their God's, which they perceived useful and neficial to man-kind; as the Sun and Moo • , the Egyptians the Ox, &c. And the more beneficial anything appeared to mankind, the higher station men gave it in the rank of their deities, and bestowed a more peculiar and solemn worship upon it. Men worshipped God to procure or continue his favor, which would not have been acted by them, had they not conceived it a pleasing thing to him to be merciful and gracious.

Sometimes his Justice is proposed to us as a motive of worship, Heb. 12.28, 29. Serve God with Reverence and Godly fear, for our God is a consuming fire; which includes his holiness, whereby he doth hate sin, as well as his wrath, whereby he doth punish it. Who but a mad and totally brutish person, or one that was resolved to make war against heaven, could behold the effects of God's anger in the world, consider him in his Justice as a consuming fire, and despise him, and rather be drawn out by that consideration to blasphemy and despair, than to seek all ways to appease him? Now though the infinite power of God, his unspeakable wisdom, his incomprehensible goodness, the holiness of his nature, the vigilance of his Providence, the bounty of his hand signify to man, that he should love and honor him, and are the motives of worship; yet the Spirituality of his nature is the rule of worship, and directs us to render our duty to him with all the powers of our Soul. As his goodness beams out upon us, worship is due in Justice to him; and as he is the most excellent nature, veneration is due to him in the highest manner with the choicest affections.

So that indeed the Spirituality of God comes chiefly into consideration in matter of worship: All his perfections are grounded upon this: He could not be infinite, immutable, omniscient if he were a Corporeal being: We cannot give him a worship unless we Judge him worthy, excellent and deserving a worship at our hands: And we cannot Judge him worthy of a worship, unless we have some apprehensions and admirations of his infinite virtues: And we cannot apprehend and admire those perfections, but as we see them as causes shining in their effects. When we see therefore the frame of the world to be the work of his power; the order of the world to be the fruit of his wisdom, and the usefulness of the world to be the product of his goodness: We find the motives and reasons of worship; and weighing that this power, wisdom, goodness, infinitely transcend any corporeal nature; we find a rule of worship, that it ought to be offered by us in a manner suitable to such a nature, as is infinitely above any bodily Being. His being a Spirit declares what he is, his other perfections declare what kind of Spirit he is. All God's perfections suppose him a Spirit; all center in this: His wisdom doth not suppose him merciful, or his mercy suppose him omniscient: There may be distinct notions of those, but all suppose him to be of a spiritual nature. How cold and frozen will our devotions be, if we consider not his omniscience, whereby he discerns our hearts? How carnal will our services be, if we consider him not as a pure Spirit? In our offers to, and transactions with men, we deal not with them as mere Animals, but as rational Creatures; and we debase their natures if we treat them otherwise: And if we have not raised apprehensions of God's spiritual nature in our treating with him, but allow him only such frames as we think fit enough for men; we debase his spirituality to the littleness of our own Being: We must therefore possess our Souls with this, we shall else render him no better than a fleshly service. We do not much concern ourselves in those things, of which we are either utterly ignorant, or have but slight apprehensions of.

That is the first Proposition; The right exercise of worship is grounded upon the spirituality of God.

Propos. 2. This spiritual worship of God is manifest by the light of Nature, to be due to him. In reference to this, consider,

1. The outward means or matter of that worship which would be acceptable to God, was not known by the light of Nature. The Law for a Worship, and for a spiritual worship, by the faculties of our Souls was natural, and part of the Law of Creation; though the determination of the particular acts, whereby God would have this homage testified, was of positive institution, and depended not upon the Law of Creation Though Adam in Innocence knew God was to be worshipped; yet by Nature he did not know by what outward acts he was to pay this respect, or at what time he was more solemnly to be exercised in it than at another: This depended upon the directions God as the sovereign Governor and Law-giver should prescribe. You therefore find the positive institutions of the Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, and the determination of the time of worship, Gen. 2.3.17. Had there been any such notion in Adam naturally, as strong as that other, that a worship was due to God, there would have been found some relics of these modes universally consented to by Mankind, as well as of the other: But though all Nations have by an universal consent concurred in the acknowledgment of the Being of God, and his right to adoration, and the obligation of the Creature to it; and that there ought to be some public rule and polity in matters of Religion; (for no Nation hath been in the world without a worship, and without external acts and certain ceremonies to signify that worship) yet their modes and rites have been as various as their climates, unless in that common notion of sacrifices, not descending to them by nature, but tradition from Adam; and the various ways of worship have been more provoking than pleasing: Every Nation suited the kind of worship to their particular ends and polities they designed to rule by. How God was, to be worshipped, is more difficult to be discerned by Nature with its eyes out, than with its eyes clear. The pillars upon which the worship of God stands, cannot be discerned without revelation, no more than blind Sampson could tell where the pillars of the Philistines Theatre stood, without one to conduct him. What Adam could not see with his sound eyes, we cannot with our dim eyes; He must be told from Heaven, what worship was fit for the God of Heaven. 'It is not by Nature that we can have such a full prospect of God as may content and quiet us; This is the noble effect of Divine Revelation; He only knows himself, and can only make himself known to us. It could not be supposed, that an infinite God should have no perfections but what were visible in the works of his hands; and that these perfections should not be infinitely greater, than as they were sensible in their present effects: This had been to apprehend God a limited Being, meaner than he is. Now 'tis impossible to honor God as we ought, unless we know him as he is; and we could not know him as he is, without divine revelation from himself; for none but God can acquaint us with his own nature: And therefore the nations void of this conduct, heaped up modes of worship from their own imaginations, unworthy of the Majesty of God, and below the nature of man: A rational man would scarce have owned such for signs of honor, as the Scripture mentions in the services of Baal and Dagon. Much less an infinitely wise and glorious God: And when God had signified his mind to his own people, how unwilling were they to rest satisfied with God's determination, but would be warping to their own inventions, and make God's, and ways of worship to themselves? As in the matter of the Golden Calf, as was lately spoken of.

2. Tho the outward manner of worship acceptable to God, could not be known without revelation, and those revelations might be various; yet the inward manner of worship with our Spirits was manifest by nature. And not only manifest by nature to Adam in Innocence, but after his fall, and the scales he had brought upon his understanding by that fall. When God gave him his positive institutions before the fall, or whatsoever additions God should have made, had he persisted in that state; or when he appointed him after his fall to testify his acknowledgment of him by Sacrifices, there needed no Command to him to make those acknowledgments by those outward ways prescribed to him, with the intention and prime affection of his Spirit: This nature would instruct him in without revelation: For he could not possibly have any semblance of reason to think, that the offering of beasts, or the presenting the first fruits of the increase of the ground, as an acknowledgment of God's Sovereignty over him and his bounty to him, was sufficient without devoting to him that part wherein the Image of his Creator did consist: He could not but discern by a reflection upon his own being, that he was made for God as well as by God: [For it is a natural principle, of which the Apostle speaks, Rom. 11.36. For of him and through him and to him are all things, &c.] That the whole, whereof he did consist was due to God; and that his Body, the dreggy and dusty part of his nature, was not fit to be brought alone before God, without that nobler principle, which he had by Creation linked with it. Nothing in the whole law of nature, as it is informed of Religion, was clearer next to the being of God, than this manner of worshipping God with the mind and Spirit. And as the Gentiles never sunk so low into the mud of Idolatry, as to think the Images they worshipped were really their God's, but the representations, or habitations of their God's; so they never deserted this principle in the Notion of it, that God was to be honored with the best they were, and the best they had: As they never denied the being of a God in the Notion, though they did in the practice; so they never rejected this principle in Notion, though they did, and now most men do, in the inward observation of it: It was a maxim among them that God was men's, animus, mind and Spirit, and therefore was to be honored with the mind and Spirit: That religion did not consist in the Ceremonies of the body, but the work of the Soul; Whence, the speech of one of them; Sacrifice to the God's not so much clothed with purple garments as a pure heart: And of another. God regards not the multitude of the Sacrifices, but the disposition of the Sacrificer. It is not fit we should deny God the Cream and Flower, and give him the flotten part and the stalks. And with what Reverence and intention of mind they thought their worship was to be performed, is evident by the Priests crying out often, hoc age, Mind this, let your Spirits be intent upon it.

This could not but result

(1.) From the knowledge of ourselves. It is a natural principle, God hath made us and not we ourselves, Psal. 100.1, 2. Man knows himself to be a rational Creature: As a Creature he was to serve his Creator, and as a rational Creature with the best part of that rational nature he derived from him. By the same act of reason that he knows himself to be a Creature, he knows himself to have a Creator: That this Creator is more excellent than himself, and that an honor is due from him to the Creator for framing of him; and therefore this honor was to be offered to him by the most excellent part which was framed by him. Man cannot consider himself as a thinking, understanding being; but he must know that he must give God the honor of his thoughts, and worship him with those faculties whereby he Thinks, Wills, and Acts. He must know his faculties were given him to act, and to act for the glory of that God who gave him his Soul and the faculties of it; and he could not in reason think they must be only active in his own service, and the service of the Creature, and idle and unprofitable in the service of his Creator. With the same Powers of our Soul whereby we contemplate God, we must also worship God: We cannot think of him but with our Minds, nor love him but with our Will; and we cannot worship him without the acts of thinking and loving, and therefore cannot worship him without the exercise of our inward faculties: How is it possible then for any man that knows his own nature, to think that extended hands, bended knees and lifted up eyes were sufficient acts of worship, without a quickened and active Spirit?

(2) From the knowledge of God. As there was a knowledge of God by nature, so the same nature did dictate to Man that God was to be glorified as God: The Apostle implies the inference in the charge he brings against them for neglecting it. We should speak of God as he is, said one ; and the same reason would inform them that they were to act towards God as he is. The excellency of the Object required a worship according to the dignity of his Nature; which could not be answered but by the most serious inward affection, as well as outward decency; and a want of this, cannot but be judged to be unbecoming the Majesty of the Creator of the world, and the excellency of Religion. No Nation, no person did ever assert, that the vilest part of man was enough for the most excellent Being, as God is: That a bodily service could be a sufficient acknowledgment of the greatness of God, or a sufficient return for the bounty of God. Man could not but know that he was to act in Religion, conformably to the Object of Religion, and to the excellency of his own Soul: The notion of a God was sufficient to fill the mind of man with admiration and reverence, and the first conclusion from it would be to honor God, and that he have all the affection placed on him, that so infinite and spiritual a Being did deserve: The progress then would be, that this excellent Being was to be honored with the motions of the Understanding and Will; with the purest and most spiritual powers in the nature of man; because he was a spiritual Being, and had nothing of matter mingled with him. Such a brutish imagination, to suppose that blood and fumes, beasts and incense could please a Deity without a spiritual frame, cannot be supposed to befall any but those that had lost their reason in the rubbish of sense. Meer rational nature could never conclude, that so excellent a Spirit would be put off with a mere animal service; an attendance of matter and body without Spirit, when they themselves of an inferior nature, would be loath to sit down contented with an outside service from those that belong to them: So that this instruction of our Savior, that God is to be worshipped in Spirit and Truth, is conformable to the sentiments of nature, and drawn from the most undeniable principles of it. The excellency of God's nature, and the excellent constitution of human faculties, concur naturally to support this persuasion: This was as natural to be known by men, as the necessity of Justice and Temperance for the support of human societies and bodies. 'It is to be feared that if there be not among us such brutish apprehensions, there are such brutish dealings with God in our services against the light of nature; when we place all our worship of God in outward attendances and drooping countenances, with unbelieving frames and formal devotions; when Prayer is muttered over in private slightly, as a Parrot learns lessons by rote, not understanding what it speaks, or to what end it speaks it; not glorifying God in Thought and Spirit, with Understanding and Will.

3. Spiritual Worship therefore was always required by God, and always offered to him by one or other. Man had a perpetual obligation upon him to such a worship from the nature of God, and what is founded upon the nature of God is invariable. This and that particular mode of worship may wax old as a Garment, and as a Vesture may be folded up and changed, as the expression is of the Heavens : But God endures forever; his spirituality fails not, therefore a worship of him in Spirit must run through all ways and rites of Worship. God must cease to be Spirit, before any service but that which is spiritual, can be accepted by him. The light of Nature is the light of God; the light of nature being unchangeable, what was dictated by that, was always and will always be required by God. The worship of God being perpetually due from the Creature, the worshipping him as God is as perpetually his right. Though the outward expressions of this Honor were different, one way in Paradise (for a worship was then due, since a solemn time for that worship was appointed) another under the Law, another under the Gospel; the Angels also worship God in Heaven, and fall down before his Throne; yet though they differ in rites, they agree in this necessary ingredient: All rites though of a different shape, must be offered to him, not as Carcasses, but animated with the affections of the Soul. Abel's Sacrifice had not been so excellent in God's esteem, without those gracious habits and affections working in his Soul . Faith works by Love; his heart was on fire as well as his Sacrifice. Cain rested upon his Present, perhaps thought he had obliged God; he depended upon the outward Ceremony, but sought not for the inward purity: It was an offering brought to the Lord ; he had the right object but not the right manner, Gen. 4.7. If thou dost well, shalt thou not be accepted? And in the Command afterwards to Abraham, Walk before me, and be thou perfect, was the direction in all our religious acts and walkings with God. A sincere act of the Mind and Will, looking above and beyond all Symbolls; extending the Soul to a pitch far above the Body, and seeing the day of Christ through the veil of the Ceremonies, was required by God: And though Moses by God's order had instituted a multitude of carnal Ordinances, Sacrifices, Washings, Oblations of sensible things, and recomended to the people the diligent observation of those Statutes by the allurements of promises, and denouncing of threatenings; as if there were nothing else to be regarded, and the true workings of Grace were to be buried under a heap of Ceremonies; yet sometimes he doth point them to the inward worship, and by the Command of God, requires of them the Circumcision of the Heart, Deut. 10.16. the turning to God with all their heart, and all their Soul, Deut. 30.10. whereby they might recollect, that it was the engagement of the Heart, and the worship of the Spirit that was most agreeable to God; and that he took not any pleasure in their observance of Ceremonies, without true Piety within, and the true purity of their thoughts.

4. 'It is therefore as much every man's duty to worship God in Spirit, as it is their duty to worship him. Worship is so due to him as God, as that he that denies it, disowns his Deity: And spiritual worship is so due, that he that waves it denies his spirituality. 'It is a debt of Justice we owe to God to worship him, and it is as much a debt of Justice to worship him according to his Nature. Worship is nothing else but a rendering to God the honor that is due to him; and therefore the right posture of our Spirits in it, is as much or more due, than the material worship in the modes of his own prescribing; that is grounded both upon his Nature, and upon his Command; this only upon his Command; that is perpetually due, whereas the Channel wherein outward worship runs may be dried up, and the River diverted another way: Such a worship wherein the mind thinks of God, feels a sense of God, has the Spirit consecrated to God, the Heart glowing with affections to God: 'It is else a mocking God with a feather. A rational Nature must worship God with that wherein the Glory of God doth most sparkle in him. God is most visible in the frame of the Soul, 'tis there his Image glitters: He hath given us a Jewel as well as a Case, and the Jewel as well as the Case we must return to him: The Spirit is God's gift, and must return to him : It must return to him in every service morally, as well as it must return to him at last physically. 'It is not fit we should serve our Maker only with that which is the Brute in us, and withhold from him that which doth constitue us reasonable Creatures; we must give him our bodies, but a living Sacrifice . If the Spirit be absent from God when the Body is before him, we present a dead Sacrifice; 'It is morally dead in the duty, though it be naturally alive in the posture and action. 'It is not an indifferent thing whether we shall worship God or no, nor is it an indifferent thing whether we shall worship him without Spirits or no: As the excellency of man's knowledge consists in knowing things as they are in Truth; so the excellency of the Will in willing things as they are in goodness. As it is the excellency of Man to know God as God; so it is no less his excellency, as well as his duty, to honor God as God. As the obligation we have to the Power of God for our Being, binds us to a worship of him; so the obligation we have to his bounty for fashioning us according to his own Image, binds us to an exercise of that part wherein his Image doth consist. God hath made all things for himself, Pro. 16.4. that is, for the evidence of his own goodness and wisdom: We are therefore to render him a glory according to the the excellency of his nature, discovered in the frame of our own. It is as much our sin not to glorify God as God, as not to attempt the glorifying of him at all: It is our sin not to worship God as God, as well as to omit the testifying any respect at all to him. As the divine nature is the object of worship, so the Divine perfections are to be honored in worship: We do not honor God if we honor him not as he is; we honor him not as a Spirit, if we think him not worthy of the ardors and ravishing admirations of our Spirits. If we think the Devotions of the body are sufficient for him, we contract him into the condition of our own being; and not only deny him to be a Spiritual nature, but dash out all those perfections which he could not be possessed of, were he not a Spirit.

5. The Ceremonial law was abolished to promote the Spirituality of Divine worship. That service was gross, carnal, calculated for an infant and sensitive Church: It consisted in rudiments, the Circumcision of the flesh, the blood and smoke of Sacrifices, the steams of incense, observation of days, distinction of meats, Corporal purifications; every leaf of the law is clogged with some rite to be particularly observed by them: The Spirituality of worship lay veild under a thick clo • ld, that the people could not behold the glory of the Gospel, which lay covered under those shadows, 2 Cor. 3.13. They could not steadfastly look to the •• d of that which is abolished: They understood not the Glory and Spiritual intent of the law and therefore came short of that Spiritual frame in the worship of God, which was their duty. And therefore in opposition to this administration, the worship of God under the Gospel is called by our Savior in the Text, a worship in Spirit; more Spiritual for the matter, more Spiritual for the motives, and more Spiritual for the manner and frames of worship.

(1.) This legal service is called flesh in Scripture, in opposition to the Gospel which is called Spirit. The ordinances of the Law, though of Divine institution, are dignified by the Apostle with no better a title than Carnal ordinances, and a Carnal Command: But the Gospel is called the Ministration of the Spirit, as being attended with a special and Spiritual efficacy on the minds of men. And when the degenerate Galatians, after having tasted of the pure streams of the Gospel, turned about to drink of the thicker streams of the Law, the Apostle tells them, that they begun in the Spirit and would now be made perfect in the flesh. They would leave the righteousness of faith for a justification by works. The moral law which is in its own nature Spiritual, in regard of the abuse of it, in expectation of justification by the outward works of it, is called flesh: Much more may the Ceremonial administration, which was never intended to run parallel with the moral, nor had any foundation in nature as the other had.

That whole Economy consisted in sensible and material things which only touched the flesh; 'It is called the letter and the oldness of the Letter; as Letters which are but empty sounds of themselves, but put together and formed into words, signify something to the mind of the hearer or reader: An old Letter, a thing of no efficacy upon the Spirit, but as a law written upon paper. The Gospel hath an efficacious Spirit attending it strongly working upon the mind and Will; and moulding the Soul into a Spiritual frame for God, according to the Doctrine of the Gospel; the one is old and decays, the other is new and increaseth daily.

And as the law itself is called flesh, so the observers of it and resters in it are called Israel after the flesh, And the Evangelical worshipper is called a Jew after the Spirit. Rom. 2.29. They were Israel after the flesh as born of Jacob, not Israel after the Spirit as born of God; and therefore the Apostle calls them Israel and not Israel. Israel after a carnal birth, not Israel after a Spiritual: Israel in the Circumcision of the flesh, not Israel by a regeneration of the heart.

(2.) The legal Ceremonies were not a fit means to bring the heart into a Spiritual frame. They had a Spiritual intent; the Rock and Manna prefigured the Salvation and Spiritual nourishment by the Redeemer. The Sacrifices were to point them to the Justice of God in the punishment of sin, and the mercy of God in substituting them in their steads, as types of the Redeemer and the ransom by his blood. The Circumcision of the flesh was to instruct them in the Circumcision of the heart: They were flesh in regard of their matter, weakness and cloudiness: Spiritual in regard of their intent and signification: They did instruct, but not efficaciously work strong Spiritual affections in the Soul of the worshipper. They were weak and beggarly elements; had neither wealth to enrich nor strength to nourish the Soul: They could not perfect the Comers to them, or put them into a frame agreeable to the nature of God, nor purge the Conscience from those dead and dull dispositions which were by nature in them: Being Carnal they could not have an efficacy to purify the Conscience of the offerer and work Spiritual effects: Had they continued without the exhibition of Christ, they could never have wrought any change in us or purchased any favor for us. At the best they were but shadows, and came inexpressibly short of the efficacy of that person and state whose shadows they were. The shadow of a man is too weak to perform what the man himself can do, because it wants the life, Spirit and activity of the substance: The whole pomp and scene was suited more to the sensitive than the intellectual nature; and like pictures pleased the fancy of Children, rather than improved their reason. The Jewish state, was a state of Child-hood, and that administration a Pedagogy. The Law was a Schoolmaster fitted for their weak and Childish Capacity, and could no more Spiritualize the heart, than the teachings in a Primer-School can enable the mind, and make it fit for affairs of State: And because they could not better the Spirit, they were instituted only for a time, as elements delivered to an infant age, which naturally lives a life of sense, rather than a life of reason. It was also a servile state, which doth rather debase than elevate the mind; rather Carnalize than Spiritualize the heart: Besides, tis a sense of mercy that both melts and elevates the heart into a Spiritual frame: There is forgiveness with thee that thou mayest be feared: And they had in that state but some glimmerings of mercy in the daily bloody intimations of Justice: There was no Sacrifice for some sins, but a cutting off without the least hints of pardon; and in the yearly remembrance of sin, there was as much to shiver them with fear, as to possess than with hopes: And such a state which always held them under the Conscience of sin, could not produce a free Spirit, which was necessary for a worship of God according to his nature.

(3.) In their use they rather hindered than furthered a Spiritual worship. In their own nature they did not tend to the obstructing a Spiritual worship; for then they had been contrary to the nature of Religion, and the end of God who appointed them: Nor did God cover the Evangelical Doctrine under the clouds of the legal administration, to hinder the people of Israel from perceiving it; but because they were not yet capable to bear the splendor of it, had it been clearly set before them. The shining of the face of Moses was too dazzling for their weak eyes, and therefore there was a necessity of a veil, not for the things themselves, but the weakness of their eyes. The carnal affections of that people sunk down into the things themselves; stuck in the outward pomp, and pierced not through the veil to the Spiritual intent of them. And by the use of them without rational conceptions they besotted their minds and became senseless of those Spiritual motions required of them. Hence came all their expectations of a Carnal Messiah; the veil of Ceremonies was so thick and the film upon their eyes so condensed, that they could not look through the veil to the Spirit of Christ. They beheld not the Heavenly Canaan for the beauty of the earthly, nor minded the regeneration of the Spirit, while they rested upon the purifications of the flesh: The prevalency of sense and sensitive affections diverted their minds from enquiring into the intent of them. Sense and matter are often cloggs to the mind, and sensible objects are the same often to Spiritual motions. Our Souls are never more raised, than when they are abstracted from the entanglements of them. A pompous worship made up of many sensible objects, weakens the Spirituality of Religion: Those that are most zealous for outward, are usually most cold and indifferent in inward observances: And those that overdo in carnal modes, usually underdo in Spiritual affections.

This was the Jewish state. The nature of the Ceremonies being pompous and earthly by their show and beauty, meeting with their weakness and Childish affections, filled their eyes with an outward luster; allured their minds, and detained them from seeking things higher and more Spiritual: The kernel of those rites lay concealed in a thick shell, the Spiritual glory was little seen, and the Spiritual sweetness little tasted: Unless the Scripture be diligently searched, it seems to transfer the worship of God from true faith and the Spiritual motions of the heart, and stake it down to outward observances, and the opus operatum. Besides, the voice of the Law did only declare Sacrifices, and invited the Worshipper to them, with a promise of the atonement of Sin, turning away the wrath of God. It never plainly acquainted them, that those things were Types and Shadows of something future, that they were only outward purifications of the Flesh: It never plainly told them at the time of appointing them, that those Sacrifices could not abolish Sin, and reconcile them to God. Indeed we see more of them since their death and dissection, in that one Epistle to the Hebrews, than can be discerned in the five Books of Moses. Besides, Man naturally affects a carnal Life, and therefore affects a carnal Worship; He designs the gratifying his sense, and would have a Religion of the same nature. Most men have no mind to busy their reasons about the things of sense, and are naturally unwilling to raise them up to those things which are allied to the spiritual nature of God; and therefore the more spiritual any Ordinance is, the more averse is the heart of man to it. There is a simplicity of the Gospel from which our minds are easily corrupted by things that pleasure the sense, as Eve was by the curiosity of her eye, and the liquorishness of her Palate From this Principle hath sprung all the Idolatry in the world. The Jews knew they had a God who had delivered them, but they would have a sensible God to go before them : And the Papacy at this day, is a Witness of the truth of this natural Corruption.

4. Upon these accounts therefore God never testified himself well pleased with that kind of Worship. He was not displeased with them as they were his own institution, and ordained for the representing (though in an obscure manner) the glorious things of the Gospel; nor was he offended with those people's observance of them: For since he had commanded them, it was their duty to perform them, and their sin to neglect them: But he was displeased with them as they were practiced by them, with Souls as morally carnal in the practices, as the Ceremonies were materially carnal in their substance. It was not their disobedience to observe them; but it was a disobedience, and a contempt of the end of the institution to rest upon them; to be warm in them, and cold in morals: They fed upon the Bone, and neglected the Marrow; pleased themselves with the Shell, and sought not for the Kernel: They joined not with them the internal Worship of God, Fear of him, with Faith in the promised Seed, which lay veiled under those Coverings, Hos. 6.6. I desired Mercy, and not Sacrifice; and the Knowledge of God, more than burnt Offerings: And therefore he seems sometimes weary of his own institutions, and calls them not his own, but their Sacrifices, their Feasts, Isa. 1.11, 14. They were his by appointment, theirs by abuse: The Institution was from his goodness and condescension, therefore his; the corruption of them was from the vice of their Nature; therefore theirs. He often blamed them for their carnality in them; showed his dislike of placing all their Religion in them; gives the Sacrificers upon that account, no better a title, than that of the Princes of Sodom and Gomorrah : And compares the Sacrifices themselves to the cutting off a Dog's Neck, Swines Blood, and the Murder of a Man. And indeed God never valued them, or expressed any delight in them: He despised the Feasts of the Wicked, Amos 5.21. and had no esteem for the material Offerings of the Godly, Psal. 50.13. Will I eat the flesh of Bulls, or drink the blood of Goats? which he speaks to his Saints and People, before he comes to reprove the Wicked; which he begins v. 16. But to the Wicked, God said, &c. So slightly he esteemed them, that he seems to disown them to be any part of his Command when he brought his People out of the Land of Egypt, Jer. 7.21. I spake not to your Fathers, nor commanded them concerning burnt Offerings and Sacrifices. He did not value and regard them, in comparison of that inward frame which he had required by the moral Law; that being given before the Law of Ceremonies, obliged them in the first place, to an observance of those Precepts. They seemed to be below the Nature of God, and could not of themselves please him. None could in reason persuade themselves, that the death of a Beast, was a proportionable Offering for the sin of a Man, or ever was intended for the expiation of Transgression. In the same rank are all our bodily services under the Gospel: A loud voice without Spirit; bended bulrushes without inward affections, are no more delightful to God, than the Sacrifices of Animals: 'It is but a change of one Brute for another of a higher species; a mere Brute, for that part of man which hath an agreement with Brutes: Such a service is a mere animal service, and not spiritual.

5. And therefore God never intended that sort of Worship to be durable, and had often mentioned the change of it for one more spiritual. It was not good or evil in itself; whatsoever goodness it had, was solely derived to it by institution, and therefore it was mutable: It had no conformity with the spiritual nature of God who was to be worshipped, nor with the rational nature of man who was to worship: And therefore he often speaks of taking away the New-Moons, and Feasts, and Sacrifices and all the ceremonial Worship, as things he took no pleasure in; to have a Worship more suited to his excellent Nature: But he never speaks of removing the Gospel Administration, and the worship prescribed there, as being more agreeable to the nature and perfections of God, and displaying them more illustriously to the World.

The Apostle tells us, it was to be disannulled because of its weakness : A determinate time was fixed for its duration, till the accomplishment of the truth figured under that Pedagogy . Some of the modes of that worship being only typical, must naturally expire and be insignificant in their use, upon the finishing of that by the Redeemer, which they did prefigure: And other parts of it, though God suffered them so long because of the weakness of the Worshipper; yet because it became not God to be always worshipped in that manner, he would reject them, and introduce another more spiritual and elevated. Incense and a pure Offering should be offered everywhere unto his Name.

He often told them he would make a new Covenant by the Messiah, and the old should be rejected; that the former things should not be remembered, and the things of old no more considered, when he should do a new thing in the Earth : Even the Ark of the Covenant, the Symbol of his presence, and the glory of the Lord in that Nation should not anymore be remembered and visited ; That the Temple and Sacrifices should be rejected, and others established; That the Order of the Aaronical Priest-hood should be abolished, and that of Melchizedek set up in the stead of it in the Person of the Messiah to endure for ever : That Jerusalem should be changed; a new Heaven and Earth created; a Worship more conformable to Heaven, more advantageous to Earth. God had proceeded in the removal of some parts of it, before the time of taking down the whole furniture of this house: The Pot of Manna was lost; Urim and Thumim ceased; the glory of the Temple was diminish'd; and the ignorant people wept at the sight of the one, without raising their Faith and Hope in the consideration of the other, which was promised to be filled with a spiritual glory. And as soon as ever the Gospel was spread in the World, God thundered out his judgments upon that place in which he had fixed all those legal Observances, so that the Jews in the Letter and Flesh, could never practice the main part of their worship, since they were expelled from that place where it was only to be celebrated. 'It is one thousand six hundred years since they have been deprived of their Altar, which was the foundation of all the Levitical-worship, and have wandered in the world without a Sacrifice, a Prince or Priest, an Ephod or Teraphim.

And God fully put an end to it in the Command he gave to the Apostles; and in them to us in the presence of Moses and Elias, to hear his Son only, Matth. 17.5. Behold a voice out of the Cloud, which said, this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased, hear him. And at the death of our Savior, testified it to that whole Nation and the World, by the rending in twain the veil of the Temple.

The whole frame of that service, which was carnal, and by reason of the corruption of Man, weakened, is nulled; and a spiritual worship is made known to the world, that we might now serve God in a more spiritual manner, and with more spiritual frames.

6. Proposition, The Service and worship the Gospel settles, is spiritual, and the performance of it more spiritual. Spirituality is the Genius of the Gospel, as Carnality was of the Law; the Gospel is therefore called Spirit: We are abstracted from the employments of Sense, and brought nearer to a Heavenly State. The Jews had Angels Bread poured upon them; we have Angels Service prescribed to us; the Praises of God; Communion with God in Spirit, through his Son Jesus Christ, and stronger foundations for spiritual affections. 'It is called a reasonable service, tis suited to a rational nature, though it finds no friendship from the Corruption of reason. It prescribes a service fit for the reasonable faculties of the Soul, and advanceth them while it employs them. The word reasonable may be translated, word service, as well as reasonable service; an Evangelical service in opposition to a Law service. All Evangelical service is reasonable, and all truly reasonable service is Evangelical.

The matter of the worship is Spiritual; it consists in love of God, faith in God, recourse to his goodness, Meditation on him and Communion with him. It lays aside the Ceremonial, Spiritualizeth the moral: The Commands that concerned our duty to God, as well as those that concerned our duty to our Neighbor, were reduced by Christ to their Spiritual intention.

The Motives are Spiritual; tis a state of more grace as well as of more truth, supported by Spiritual promises, beaming out in Spiritual privileges; heaven comes down in it to Earth, to Spiritualize Earth for Heaven.

The manner of worship is more Spiritual; higher flights of the Soul, stronger ardours of affections, sincerer aims at his glory; mists are removed from our minds, Cloggs from the Soul, more of love than fear; faith in Christ kindles the affections and works by them.

The assistances to Spiritual worship are greater. The Spirit doth not drop, but is plentifully poured out. It doth not light sometimes upon, but dwells in the heart. Christ suited the Gospel to a Spiritual heart, and the Spirit changeth a carnal heart to make it fit for a Spiritual Gospel. He blows upon the Garden and causes the spices to flow forth. And often makes the Soul in worship like the Chariots of Aminadab in a quick and nimble motion: Our blessed Lord and Savior by his death discovered to us the nature of God; and after his ascension sent his Spirit to fit us for the worship of God and converse with him.

One Spiritual Evangelical believing breath is more delightful to God, than millions of Altars made up of the richest pearls, and smoking with the costliest oblations, because it is Spiritual: And a mite of Spirit is of more worth than the greatest weight of flesh. One holy Angel is more excellent than a whole world of mere bodies.

7. Proposition. Yet the worship of God with our bodies is not to be rejected upon the account that God requires a Spiritual worship. Tho we must perform the weightier duties of the Law, yet we are not to omit and leave undone the lighter precepts. Since both the Magnalia and minutula legis, the greater, and the lesser duties of the Law, have the stamp of Divine authority upon them.

As God under the Ceremonial Law did not Command the worship of the body, and the observation of outward rites without the engagement of the Spirit; so neither doth he Command that of the Spirit, without the peculiar attendance of the body.

The Schwelk sendians denied bodily worship. And the indecent postures of many in public attendance, intimate no great care either of Composing their bodies or Spirits. A morally discomposed body intimates a tainted heart.

Our Bodies as well as our Spirits are to be presented to God. Our bodies in lieu of the Sacrifices of Beasts, as in the Judaical institutions; body for the whole man; a living Sacrifice, not to be slain, as the Beasts were, but living a new life, in a holy posture, with Crucified affections: This is the inference the Apostle makes of the privileges of Justification, Adoption, Coheirship with Christ, which he had before discoursed of; Privileges conferred upon the person and not upon a part of man.

1. Bodily worship is due to God. He hath a right to an Adoration by our bodies as they are his by Creation; his right is not diminished but increased by the blessing of Redemption, 1 Cor. 6.20. For you are bought with a price, therefore glorify God in your bodies and your Spirits, which are God's. The Body as well as the Spirit is redeemed, since our Savior suffered Crucifixion in his body, as well as Agonies in his Soul: Body is not taken here for the whole man, as it may be in Rom. 12. But for the material part of our nature, it being distinguished from the Spirit: If we are to render to God an obedience with our bodies, we are to render him such Acts of worship with our bodies, as they are capable of. As God is the Father of Spirits, so he is the God of all flesh: Therefore the flesh he hath framed of the Earth, as well as the noble portion he hath breathed into us, cannot be denied him without apalpable in justice: The service of the body we must not deny to God, unless we will deny him to be the author of it, and the exercise of his providential care about it. The mercies of God are renewed every day upon our bodies as well as our Souls, and therefore they ought to express a fealty to God for his bounty everyday; [ both are from God, both should be for God. Man consists of Body and Soul, the service of Man is the service of both. The body is to be Sanctified as well as the Soul, and therefore to be offered to God as well as the Soul. Both are to be glorified, both are to glorify: As our Savior's Divinity was manifested in his body, so should our Spirituality in ours. To give God the service of the body and not of the Soul, is hypocrisy; to give God the service of the Spirit and not of the body, is sacrilege; to give him neither, Atheism.] If the only part of man that is visible were exempted from the service of God, there could be no visible Testimonies of piety given upon any occasion: Since not a moiety of man, but the whole is God's Creature, he ought to pay a homage with the whole and not only with a moiety of himself.

2. Worship in societies is due to God, but this cannot be without some bodily expressions. The law of nature doth as much direct men to combine together in public societies for the acknowledgment of God, as in Civil Communities for self preservation and order, And the notice of a society for Religion is more Ancient than the mention of Civil associations for Politick Government, Gen. 4.26. Then began men to call upon the name of the Lord, viz. In the time of Seth. No question but Adam had worshipped God before as well as Abel, and a Family-Religion had been preserved; but as mankind increased in distinct Families, they knit together in Companies to solemnize the worship of God. Hence as some think, those that incorporated together for such ends, were called the Sons of God: Sons by profession, though not Sons by Adoption: As those of Corinth were Saints by profession, though in such a Corrupted Church they could not be all so by regeneration; yet Saints, as being of a Christian society and calling upon the name of Christ, that is, worshipping God in Christ, though they might not be all Saints in Spirit and Practice. So Cain and Abel met together to worship, Gen, 4.3. at the end of the days, at a set time. God settled a public worship among the Jews, instituted Synagogues for their Convening together, whence called the Synagogues of God. The Sabbath was instituted to acknowledge God a Common Benefactor. Public worship keeps up the Memorials of God in a world prone to Atheism, and a sense of God in a heart prone to forgetfulness. The Angels sung in Company, not singly at the Birth of Christ, and praised God not only with a simple elevation of their Spiritual nature, but audibly by forming a voice in the air: Affections are more lively, Spirits more raised in public than private; God will Credit his own ordinance. Fire increaseth by laying together many Coals on one place; so is devotion inflamed by the union of many hearts and by a joint presence: Nor can the approach of the last day of Judgment, or particular Judgments upon a Nation give a Writ of ease from such assemblies. Heb. 10.25. Not forsaking the assembling ourselves together, but so much the more as you see the day approaching: Whether it be understood of the day of Judgment, or the day of the Jewish destruction and the Christian persecution, the Apostle uses it as an argument to quicken them to the observance, not to encourage them to a neglect. Since therefore natural light informs us, and Divine institution Commands us, publicly to acknowledge ourselves the Servants of God, it implies the service of the body: Such acknowledgments cannot be without visible Testimonies, and outward exercises of devotion, as well as inward affections. This promotes God's honor, checks others profaneness, allures men to the same expressions of duty. And though there may be hypocrisy and an outward garb without an inward frame; yet better a moiety of worship, than none at all; better acknowledge God's right in one than disown it in both.

3. Jesus Christ the most Spiritual worshipper worshipped God with his body. He Prayed orally, and kneeled, Father if it be thy Will, &c. He blessed with his mouth, Father I thank thee. He lifted up his eyes as well as elevated his Spirit, when he praised his Father for mercy received, or begged for the blessings his Disciples wanted. The strength of the Spirit must have vent at the outward members. The holy men of God have employed the body in significant expressions of worship: Abraham in falling on his face, Paul in kneeling, employing their Tongues, lifting up their hands. Tho Jacob was bedrid, yet he would not worship God without some devout expression of Reverence; tis in one place leaning upon his staff; in another bowing himself upon his beds head: The reason of the diversity is in the Heb. word, which without vowels may be red Mittah a bed, or Matteh a staff; howsoever, both signify a Testimony of adoration by a reverent gesture of the body. Indeed in Angels and separated Souls a worship is performed purely by the Spirit; but whiles the Soul is in conjunction with the body, it can hardly perform a serious act of worship, without some tincture upon the outward man and reverential composure of the body: Fire cannot be in the clothes, but it will be felt by the members; nor flames be pent up in the Soul without bursting out in the body: The heart can no more restrain itself from breaking out, than Joseph could enclose his affections, without expressing them in tears to his Brethren. We Believe, and therefore speak.

To conclude; God hath appointed some parts of worship which cannot be performed without the body, as Sacraments; we have need of them because we are not wholly spiritual and incorporeal Creatures.

The Religion, which consists in externals only, is not for an intellectual nature: A worship purely intellectual is too sublime for a nature allied to sense and depending much upon it: The Christian mode of worship is proportioned to both; It makes the sense to assist the mind, and elevates the spirit above the sense: Bodily worship helps the spiritual: The members of the body reflect back upon the heart, the voice bars distractions, the tongue sets the heart on fire in good as well as in evil. It is as much against the light of nature to serve God without external significations, as to serve him only with them without the intention of the mind. As the invisible God declares himself to men by visible works and signs, so should we declare our invisible frames by visible expressions: God hath given us a soul and body in conjunction, and we are to serve him in the same manner he hath framed us.

2. The second thing I am to show, is, what Spiritual worship is. In general, the whole Spirit is to be employed: The name of God is not sanctified but by the engagement of our Souls.

Worship is an Act of the understanding, applying itself to the knowledge of the excellency of God and actual thoughts of his Majesty, recognizing him as the supreme Lord and Governor of the world, which is natural knowledge; beholding the glory of his Attributes in the Redeemer, which is Evangelical knowledge: This is the sole act of the Spirit of Man. The same reason is for all our worship as for our thanksgiving: This must be done with understanding, Psal. 47.7. Sing ye praise with understanding, with a knowledge and sense of his greatness, goodness and Wisdom. It is also an act of the Will, whereby the Soul adores and reverenceth his Majesty, is ravished with his amiableness, embraceth his goodness, enters itself into an intimate Communion with this most lovely object, and pitcheth all his affections upon him.

We must worship God understandingly; tis not else a reasonable service: The nature of God and the Law of God abhor a blind offering; we must worship him heartily, else we offer him a dead Sacrifice: A reasonable service is that wherein the mind doth truly act something with God. All Spiritual acts must be acts of reason, otherwise they are not human acts, because they want that principle which is constitutive of man, and doth difference him from other Creatures: Acts done only by sense are the acts of a brute; acts done by reason are the acts of a man; That which is only an act of sense, cannot be an act of Religion: The sense without the conduct of reason is not the subject of Religious acts, for then beasts were capable of Religion as well as Men: There cannot be Religion where there is not reason; and there cannot be the exercise of Religion, where there is not an exercise of the rational faculties. Nothing can be a Christian act, that is not a human act: Besides, all worship must be for some end; the worship of God must be for God; tis by the exercise of our rational faculties, that we only can intend an end: An Ignorant and Carnal worship is a brutish worship.

Particularly,

1. Spiritual Worship is a Worship from a spiritual Nature. Not only Physically spiritual, so our Souls are in their frame; but morally spiritual, by a renewing principle. The heart must be first cast into the Mould of the Gospel, before it can perform a Worship required by the Gospel. Adam living in Paradise, might perform a spiritual worship; but Adam fallen from his rectitude, could not: We being Heirs of his Nature, are Heirs of his Impotence: Restoration to a spiritual Life, must precede any act of spiritual Worship. As no work can be good, so no worship can be spiritual, till we are created in Christ . Christ is our Life . As no natural action can be performed without life in the root or heart, so no spiritual act without Christ in the Soul: Our being in Christ, is as necessary to every spiritual act, as the union of our Soul with our Body, is necessary to natural action. Nothing can exceed the limits of its nature; for then it should exceed itself in acting, and do that which it hath no principle to do. A Beast cannot act like a Man, without partaking of the nature of a Man; nor a Man act like an Angel, without partaking of the Angelical nature: How can we perform spiritual acts, without a spiritual principle. Whatsoever worship proceeds from the corrupted nature, cannot deserve the title of spiritual worship, because it springs not from a spiritual habit. If those that are evil cannot speak good things, those that are carnal cannot offer a spiritual service. Poison is the fruit of a Vipers nature, Mat. 12.34. Oh, Generation of Vipers, how can you being evil speak good things? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. As the root is, so is the fruit. If the Soul be habitually carnal, the worship cannot be actually spiritual: There may be an intention of Spirit, but there is no spiritual principle as a root of that intention. A heart may be sensibly united with a duty, when it is not spiritually united with Christ in it. Carnal motives, and carnal ends may fix the mind in an act of worship, as the sense of some pressing affliction may enlarge a man's mind in Prayer. Whatsoever is agreeable to the nature of God, must have a stamp of Christ upon it; a stamp of his grace in performance, as well as of his mediation in the acceptance. The Apostle lived not, but Christ lived in him ; the Soul worships not, but Christ in him: Not that Christ performs the act of Worship; but enables us spiritually to worship, after he enables us spiritually to live. As God counts not any Soul living but in Christ, so he counts not any a spiritual Worshipper but in Christ. The goodness and fatness of the fruit comes from the fatness of the Olive wherein we are engrafted: We must find healing in Christ's wings, before God can find spirituality in our services. All worship issuing from a dead nature, is but a dead service: A living action cannot be performed, without being knit to a living root.

2. Spiritual Worship is done by the influence, and with the assistance of the Spirit of God. A Heart may be spiritual, when a particular act of Worship may not be spiritual. The Spirit may dwell in the Heart, when he may suspend his influence on the act. Our worship is then spiritual, when the fire that kindles our affections comes from Heaven, as that fire upon the Altar wherewith the Sacrifices were consumed. God tastes a sweetness in no service, but as it is dressed up by the hand of the Mediator, and hath the Air of his own Spirit in it: They are but natural acts, without a supernatural assistance: Without an actual influence, we cannot act from spiritual motives, nor for spiritual ends, nor in a spiritual manner. We cannot mortify a Lust without the Spirit , nor quicken a service without the Spirit. Whatsoever corruption is killed, is slain by his Power; whatsoever duty is spiritualized, is refined by his Breath. He quickens our dead bodies in our Resurection ; He renews our dead Souls in our Regeneration; He quickens our carnal services in our adorations: The choicest acts of worship are but infirmities, without his auxiliary help . We are Loggs, unable to move ourselves, till he raise our faculties to a pitch agreeable to God; puts his hand to the duty, and lifts that up and us with it. Never any great act was performed by the Apostles to God, or for God, but they are said to be filled with the Holy-Ghost. Christ could not have been conceived immaculate as that holy thing, without the Spirits overshadowing the Virgin; nor any spiritual act conceived in our heart, without the Spirits moving upon us, to bring forth a living Religion from us. The acts of worship are said to be in the Spirit, Supplication in the Spirit ; not only with the strength and affection of our own Spirits, but with the mighty operation of the Holy-Ghost, if Jude may be the Interpreter . The Holy-Ghost exciting us; impelling us, and firing our Souls by his divine flame; raising up the affections, and making the Soul cry with a holy importunity Abba Father. To render our worship spiritual, we should, before every engagement in it, implore the actual presence of the Spirit, without which we are not able to send forth one spiritual breath or groan; but be Wind-bound like a Ship without a Gale, and our worship be no better than carnal. How doth the Spouse solicit the Spirit with an awake oh North-wind, and come thou South-wind, &c.

3. Spiritual Worship is done with Sincerity: When the heart stands right to God, and the Soul performs what it pretends to perform: When we serve God with our Spirits, as the Apostle, Rom. 1.9. God is my Witness, whom I serve with my Spirit in the Gospel of his Son: This is not meant of the Holy-Ghost; for the Apostle would never have called the Spirit of God, his own Spirit; but with my Spirit, that is a sincere frame of heart. A Carnal-worship, whether under the Law or Gospel, is when we are busied about external rites, without an inward compliance of Soul. God demands the heart; my Son give me thy heart; not give me thy tongue, or thy lips, or thy hands; these may be given without the heart, but the heart can never be bestowed without these as its attendants. A heap of services can be no more welcome to God, without our Spirits, than all Jacob's Sons could be to Joseph, without the Benjamin he desired to see. God is not taken with the Cabinet, but the Jewel: He first respected Abel's Faith and Sincerity, and then his Sacrifice; he disrespected Cain's Infidelity and Hypocrisy, and then his Offering. [For this cause he rejected the Offerings of the Jews, the Prayers of the Pharisees, and the Alms of Ananias and Sapphira, because their hearts and their duties were at a distance from one another. In all spiritual Sacrifices, our Spirits are God's portion. Under the Law, the Reins were to be consumed by the Fire on the Altar, because the secret intentions of the heart were signified by them, Psal. 7.9. The Lord trieth the Heart and the Reins. It was an ill Omen among the Heathen, if a Victim wanted a heart. The Widows Mites with her heart in them, were more esteemed than the richer Offerings without it.] Not the quantity of service, but the will in it, is of account with this infinite Spirit. All that was to be brought for the framing of the Tabernacle, was to be offered willingly with the heart. The more of Will, the more of Spirituality and Acceptableness to God, Psal. 119.108. Accept the Free-will-offering of my lips. Sincerity is the Salt which seasons every Sacrifice. The heart is most like to the object of worship: The heart in the body is the spring of all vital actions; and a spiritual Soul is the spring of all spiritual actions. How can we imagine God can delight in the mere service of the Body, anymore than we can delight in converse with a Carcass?

Without the heart 'tis no worship: 'It is a Stage-play; an acting a part without being that person really which is acted by us: A Hypocrite in the notion of the word, is a Stage-player. We may as well say a man may believe with his body, as worship God only with his body. Faith, is a great ingredient in Worship; and it is with the heart Man believes unto Righteousness. We may be truly said to worship God, though we want perfection; but we cannot be said to worship him, if we want sincerity: A Statue upon a Tomb, with eyes and hands lifted up, offers as good and true a service; it wants only a voice, the gestures and postures are the same; nay, the service is better; 'tis not a mockery; it represents all that it can be framed to: But to worship without our Spirits, is a presenting God with a Picture, an Echo, Voice and nothing else; a Complement; a mere Lye; a compassing him about with Lyes . Without the heart, the tongue is a Lyar, and the greatest Zeal, dissembling with him. To present the Spirit, is to present with that which can never naturally die; to present him only the Body, is to present him that which is every day crumbling to dust, and will at last lie rotting in the Grave: To offer him a few Raggs easily torn; a Skin for a Sacrifice, a thing unworthy the Majesty of God; a fixed eye and elevated hands, with a sleepy Heart and earthly Soul are pitiful things for an ever blessed and glorious Spirit: Nay, it is so far from being spiritual, that it is Blasphemy; To pretend to be a Jew outwardly, without being so inwardly, is in the Judgment of Christ to blaspheme . And is not the same title to be given with as much reason to those that pretend a worship and perform none? Such a one is not a spiritual Worshipper, but a blaspheming Devil in Samuel 's Mantle.

4. Spiritual Worship is performed with an unitedness of heart. The heart is not only now and then with God, but united to fear or worship his name. A spiritual duty must have the engagement of the Spirit, and the thoughts tied up to the spiritual Object: The union of all the parts of the heart together with the body, is the life of the body; and the moral union of our hearts, is the life of any duty. A heart quickly flitting from God, makes not God his treasure; he slights the worship, and therein affronts the Object of Worship. All our thoughts ought to be ravished with God; bound up in him as in a bundle of life: But when we start from him to gaze after every feather, and run after every bubble; we disown a full and affecting excellency, and a satisfying sweetness in him. When our thoughts run from God, 'tis a testimony we have no spiritual affection to God: Affection would stake down the thoughts to the Object affected: 'It is but a Mouth-love, as the Prophet phraseth it : But their hearts go after their Covetousness: Covetous Objects pipe, and the heart danceth after them; and thoughts of God are shifted off, to receive a multitude of other imaginations: The heart and the service stayed a while together, and then took leave of one another. The Psalmist still found his heart with God when he awaked; still with God in spiritual affections, and fixed meditations. A carnal heart is seldom with God, either in or out of worship: If God should knock at the heart in any duty, it would be found not at home, but straying abroad. Our worship is spiritual, when the door of the heart is shut against all Intruders, as our Savior commands in Closet-duties : It was not his meaning, to command the shutting the Closet-door, and leave the Heart-door open for every thought that would be apt to haunt us. Worldly affections are to be laid aside, if we would have our worship spiritual. This was meant by the Jewish custom of wiping or washing off the dust of their feet, before their entrance into the Temple; and of not bringing money in their girdles. To be spiritual in worship, is to have our Souls gathered and bound up wholly in themselves, and offered to God. Our Loins must be girt, as the fashion was in the Eastern Countries, where they wore long Garments, that they might not waver with the Wind, and be blown between their legs, to obstruct them in their travel: Our faculties must not hang loose about us. He is a carnal Worshipper, that gives God but a piece of his heart, as well as he that denies him the whole of it; that hath some thoughts pitched upon God in worship, and as many willingly upon the World. David sought God, not with a moity of his heart, but with his whole heart; with his entire frame : He brought not half his heart, and left the other in the possession of another Master. It was a good lesson Pythagoras gave his Scholars , Not to make the Observance of God a work by the by. If those Guests be invited, or entertained kindly, or if they come unexpected, the spirituality of that worship is lost; the Soul kicks down what it wrought before: But if they be Brow-beaten by us, and our grief, rather than our pleasure; they divert our spiritual intention from the work in hand, but hinder not God's acceptance of it as spiritual; because they are not the acts of our Will, but offenses to our Wills.

5. Spiritual Worship is performed with a spiritual activity and sensibleness of God. With an active Understanding to meditate on his excellency; and an active Will to embrace him when he drops upon the Soul. If we understand the amiableness of God, our affections will be ravished; if we understand the immensity of his goodness, our Spirits will be enlarged. We are to act with the highest intention, suitable to the greatness of that God with whom we have to do, Psal. 150.2. Praise him according to his excellent greatness: Not that we can worship him equally, but in some proportion, the frame of the heart is to be suited to the excellency of the Object: Our spiritual strength is to be put out to the utmost, as Creatures that act naturally do: The Sun shines, and the Fire burns to the utmost of their natural power. This is so necessary, that David a spiritual Worshipper prays for it before he sets upon acts of adoration, Psal. 80.18. quicken us, that we may call upon thy Name: As he was loath to have a drowsy faculty, he was loath to h •• a drowsy instrument, and would willingly have them as lively as himself, Psal. 57.8. Awake up my glory; awake Psaltery and Harp; I myself will awake early: How would this Divine Soul serve himself up to God, and be turned into nothing but a holy flame? Our Souls must be boiling hot when we serve the Lord . The heart doth no less burn when it Spiritually comes to God, than when God doth Spiritually approach to it. A Nabal's heart, one as cold as a stone, cannot offer up a Spiritual service.

Whatsoever is enjoined us as our duty, ought to be performed with the greatest intensness of our Spirit. As it is our duty to pray, so it is our duty to pray with the most fervent importunity. It is our duty to love God, but with the purest and most sublime affections: Every Command of God requires the whole strength of the Creature to be employed in it. That love to God, wherein all our duty to God is summed up, is to be with all our strength, with all our might, &c. Tho in the Covenant of grace he hath mitigated the severity of the Law, and requires not from us such an elevation of our affections as was possible in the state of innocence, yet God requires of us the utmost moral industry to raise our affections to a pitch, at least equal to what they are in other things: What strength of affections we naturally have, ought to be as much and more excited in acts of worship than upon other occasions and our ordinary works. As there was an inactivity of Soul in worship and a quickness to sin, when sin had the dominion; so when the Soul is Spiritualized, the temper is changed; there is an inactivity to sin and an ardor in duty: The more the Soul is dead to sin the more it is alive to God, and the more lively too in all that concerns God and his honor. For grace being a new strength added to our natural, determines the affections to new objects and excites them to a greater vigor. And as the hatred of sin is more sharp, the love to everything that destroys the dominion of it, is more strong. And acts of worship may be reckoned as the chiefest batteries against the power of this inbred enemy. When the Spirit is in the Soul, like the Rivers of waters flowing out of the belly, the Soul hath the activity of a River, and makes hast to be swallowed up in God, as the streams of the River in the Sea. Christ makes his people Kings and Priests to God; first Kings, then Priests: Gives first a Royal temper of heart, that they may offer Spiritual Sacrifices as Priests: Kings and Priests to God acting with a magnificent Spirit in all their motions to him: We cannot be Spiritual Priests, till we be Spiritual Kings. The Spirit appeared in the likeness of fire, and where he resides, Communicates like fire purity and activity.

Dullness is against the light of nature. I do not remember that the Heathen ever offered a Snail to any of their false Deities, nor an Ass, but to Priapus their unclean Idol; but the Persians Sacrificed to the Sun a Horse, a swift and generous Creature. God provided against those in the Law, Commanding an Asses Firstling, the offspring of a sluggish Creature, to be Redeemed, or his neck broke; but by no means to be offered to him. God is a Spirit infinitely active, and therefore frozen and benumbed frames are unsuitable to him: He rides upon a Cherub and flies, he comes upon the wings of the wind, he rides upon a swift cloud; and therefore demands of us not a dull reason, but an active Spirit: God is a living God, therefore must have a lively service. Christ is life, and slothful adorations are not fit to be offered up in the name of life. The worship of God is called wrestling in Scripture, and Paul was a striver in the service of his Master, in an agony. Angels worship God Spiritually with their wings on; and when God Commands them to worship Christ, the next Scripture quoted is, that he makes them flames of fire.

If it be thus, how may we charge ourselves? What Paul said of the sensual Widow, that she is dead while she lives, we may say often of our Selves, we are dead while we worship. Our hearts are in duty as the Jews were in deliverances; as those in a dream; by which unexpectedness, God shown the greatness of his care and mercy; and we attend him as men in a dream whereby we discover our negligence and folly. This activity doth not consist in outward acts. The body may be hot and the heart may be faint; but in an inward stirring, meltings, flights. In the highest raptures the body is most insensible. Strong Spiritual affections are abstracted from outward sense.

6. Spiritual worship is performed with acting Spiritual habits. When all the living springs of Grace are opened, as the Fountains of the deep were in the deluge, the Soul and all that is within it, all the Spiritual impresses of God upon it, erect themselves to bless his holy name.

This is necessary to make a worship Spiritual. As natural agents are determined to act suitable to their proper nature; So rational agents, are to act conformable to a rational being: When there is a conformity between the act and the nature whence it flows, tis a good act in its kind; if it be rational, tis a good rational act, because suitable to its principle: As a Man endowed with reason must act suitable to that endowment, and exercise his reason in his acting; So a Christian endued with Grace must act suitable to that nature, and exercise his Grace in his acting. Acts done by a natural inclination are no more human acts, than the natural acts of a beast may be said to be human; Tho they are the acts of a Man as he is the efficient cause of them, yet they are not human acts, because they arise not from that principle of Reason which denominates him a man. So acts of worship performed by a bare exercise of reason, are not Christian and Spiritual acts, because they come not from the principle which constitutes him a Christian; Reason is not the principle, for then all rational Creatures would be Christians: They ought therefore to be acts of a higher principle; Exercises of that Grace whereby Christians are what they are: Not but that rational acts in worship are due to God; for worship is due from us as men; and we are settled in that rank of being by our reason. Grace doth not exclude reason, but ennobles it, and calls it up to another form: But we must not rest in a bare rational worship, but exert that principle whereby we are Christians. To worship God with our reason, is to worship him as Men: To worship God with our grace, is to worship him as Christians, and so Spiritually: But to worship him only with our bodies, is no better than Brutes.

Our desires of the word are to issue from the regenerate principle, 1 Pet. 2.2. As new born babes desire the sincere milk of the word: It seems to be not a comparison but a restriction. All worship must have the same spring, and be the exercise of that principle; otherwise we can have no Communion with God. Friends that have the same habitual dispositions, have a fundamental fitness for an agreeable converse with one another; but if the temper wherein their likeness consists, be languishing, and the string out of tune, there is not an actual fitness; and the present indisposition breaks the converse, and renders the Company troublesome. Tho we may have the habitual graces which compose in us a resemblance to God, yet for want of acting those suitable dispositions, we render ourselves unfit for his converse, and make the worship, which is fundamentally Spiritual, to become actually carnal. As the Will cannot naturally act to any object, but by the exercise of its affections: So the heart cannot Spiritually act towards God, but by the exercise of graces. This is God's Music: Eph. 5.19.