98 or SPIRITUAL MINDEDNESS. on what in particular, we may exercise our thoughts on those things above. 1. Faith will be increased and strengthened by it. Invisible things are the proper objects of faith : it is the evidence of things not seen.Heb. xi. 1. Where- fore in our thoughts of them, faith is in its proper ex- ercise, which is the principal means of its growth and increase. And hereon two things will ensue : 1. The soul will come unto a more satisfactory abiding sense of the reality of them. Things of im- agination, which maintain a value of themselves by darkness, will not bear a diligent search into them ; they lose of their reputation on every serious inquiry. If rational men would but give themselves the liberty of free inquiry by their own thoughts, it would quickly cashier the fool's paradise of Mahomet, the purgatory of the Papists, and all such creatures of imagination and superstition. But where things are real and sub- stantial, the more they are inquired into, the more they evidence their being and subsistence. It is not, there- fore, every profession of a faith of a future state of blessedness, that will realize it in our minds : and therefore, for the most part, it is rather a notion that men have of heavenly things, which they do not con- tradict, than any solid satisfaction in, or spiritual sense of, their reality; for these are things that eye hath not seen nor ear heard, nor will enter into the heart of man to conceive; whose existence, nature, and real state, are not easily comprehended ; but through the continual exercise of holy thoughts about them, the soul obtains an entrance into the midst of them, finding in them both durable substance and riches. There is no way, therefore, to strengthen faith to any degree, but by a daily contemplation on
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