AwimmimmommurSi 198 NEARNESS TO GOD [BERM. xj. his love. This is your state, and this mine by nature: These areour hateful and deplorable circumstances, and yet we go on to aggravate our own guilt, to run further from God hourly, and to make haste to everlasting wretchedness, if divine grace prevent us not. III. Reflection. Is nearness to God the foundation of the creature's felicity, then howvain are all pretences to happiness, while man is a stranger to God ? Let him be surrounded with all imaginable delights of sense, or let him be furnished with all advantages of reason or na- tural knowledge, to entertain the mind; yet if he be afar off from God, he must be afar off from blessedness. Without God and without hope, is the character of the sinful world. Do the 'profane and sensual wretches boast of their pleasures, while God is not in all their thoughts ? Empty shews of pleasure, and vain shadows ! And even these shadows, these vain flatteries, are ever flying from their embraces; they delude their pursuit in this world, and shall vanish all at once at the moment of death, and leave them in everlasting sorrow. Let the sensualist sport himself in his own deceivings, and bless himself in the midst of his madness : Let the rich worldling say, " Soul take thine ease, for thy barns and thy chests are full." Let the mere philosopher glory that he has found happiness out; let him busy himself in refined subtilties, and swell in the pride of his reason : let all these pretenders to felicity, compliment each other, if they please, or call themselves the only happy men ; yet the meanest, and the weakest of all the saints, would not make an exchange with them; for the saint is brought nigh to God : And thongh his poverty here be never so great, and his understanding never so con- temptible, yet he knows this great truth well, that to exchange God for the creature, would be infinite loss, and misery unspeakable. They who never drew near to God, who never saw God in his works or his word, so as to love him above all things, and partake of his love, .must be miserable, in spite of all their pretences: They that are far from Godshall perish, Ps. lxxiii. 27. IV. Reflection. God has not utterly abandoned this world to sin and misery, while he keeps his word and his ordinances in it: For these are his appointed means of approaching to him, and steps'whereby we may climb
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