TO TH POOR 'IN SPIRIT. Mr dearly beloved fellowChristians, Whose souls are taken up With the careful thoughts öf attaining and maintaining peace with God, who are vile in your own eyes, and value the blood and Spirit, and wordof your Redeemer, and the hope of the saints in their approaching blessedness, before all the pomp and vanities of this world, and resolve to give up yourselves to his conduct, who is become "the author of eternal salvation to all' them that obey him;" for you do I publish the following directions,.and to you it is that I direct this preface. The only glorious and infinite God, who made the worlds, and upholdeth them by his word, who is at- tended with millions of his glorious angels, and praised continually by his hèavenly hosts ; who' pulleth down the mighty from their seats and scattereth the proud in the imaginations of their hearts, and maketh his enemies lick the dust ; towhom the kings andcon- querors of the earth are as the most silly worms, and the whole world, is nothing, and lighter than vanity, which he will shortly turn into flames before your eyes ; this God bath sent me to you, with that joyful message, which needs no more but your believing entertainment, to make it sufficient to raise you from the dust, and banish those terrors and troubles from your hearts, and help you to live like the sons of God. He commanded' me, to tell you, that he takes notice of your sorrows. He stands by when you see him not, and say, he bath forsaken you. He mindsyou with thegreat- est tenderness, when you say, he bath forggtten you. He number- eth your sighs. $e bottles up your tears. The groans of your heart do reach his own. He takes it unkindly, that you are sosus- piciocs of him, and that all that he bath done for you in the work of redemption, and all the gracious workings of his Spirit on your souls, and all your own peculiar experiences of his goodness, can raise you to no higher 'apprehensions of his love ! Shall not love be acknowledged to be love, when it is grown to a,miracle ?'when it surpasseth comprehension ! ,Must the Lord set up love and mercy in the work of redemption, to be equally admired with his otnnipotency manifested in the creation? and call forth the world VOL. f. 30
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTcyMjk=