OP SPIRITUAL MINDEDNESS. 73 engaged in your earthly affairs. Sometimes, no doubt, with all that are true believers it is so. ' Or ever I was aware, saith the spouse, my soul made me as the chariots of Aminadab.' Cant. vi. 12. Grace in her own soul surprised her into a ready willing frame for spiritual communion with Christ, when she was intent on other occasions. But if these thoughts of heavenly things so arising in us, bear no proportion with the other sort, it is an evidence what frame and principle is predominant in us. 2. There are amultitude of thoughts in the minds of men, which are vain, useless, and altogeher unprofita- ble. These ordinarily, through a dangerous mistake, are looked on as not sinful, because, as it is supposed, the matter of them is not so ; and therefore men rather shake them off for their folly, and their guilt. But they arise from a corrupt fountain, and wofully pollute both the mind and conscience. Wherever there are vain thoughts, there is sin. Jerem. iv. 14. Such are those numberless imaginations, whereby men fancy themselves ' to be what they are not, to do what they do not, to enjoy what they enjoy not, to dispose of themselves and others,' at their pleasure. That our nature is liable to such a pernicious folly, which some of tenacious fancies have turned into madness, we are beholden alone to our cursed apostacy from God, and the vainity that possessed our minds thereon. Hence the prince of Tyrus thought ' he was a God, and sat in the seat of God.' Ezek. xxviii. 2. So it hath been with others ; and in those, in whom such imaginations are kept within some better order and bounds, yet being traced to their original, they will be found to spring, some of them, immediately from pride, some from sensual lusts, some from the love of the world, 7
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