mrsc. x.] THE FORETASTE OF.HE\AVEN. 533 wondrous words of power to every . plant and animal; " be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth," Gen. 1. 22, and lo, in a long succession of near six . thousand years, the earth has been covered all over with herbs and plants, with shrubs and tall trees, in all their beauty .and dimensións. The air hath been filled with birds and insects, the seas and rivers with fish, and the dry land with beasts and men, even to this present day. When all this philosophy is changed into devotion, it must also be transformed into divine and unutterable Joy " Nor are these things too low and mean for the con. templation of heavenly beings ; for God is seen in all of them : there is not a spire of grass but the power and wisdom of a God are visible therein. And it is certain the heavenly beings must be sometimes employed in the contemplation of many of these lower wonders. The plants and beasts in desolate regions, where no man in- habits, and in distant and foreign oceans and rivers, where the fishy shoals in all their variety and númbers, in all their successions and generations for near six thousand years, were never seen or known by any of the sons of men ; these seem to have been created in vain, if no "heavenly beings are acquainted with them, nor raise a revenue of glory to him that made them. " This almighty power, therefore, which made this huge universe, which sustains the frame of it every moment, and secures it from dissolving; this power, which brings forth the stars in their order, and worms and creeping things in their innumerable millions, and governs all the motions of them to the purposes of divine glory, must needs affect a contemplative soul with , raptures of pleasing meditation and in these sublime meditations, by the aids of the Divine Spirit, a soul on earth may get near to heaven. And with what religious and unknown pleasure at such a season doth it shrink its own being, as it were, into an atom, and lie in the dust and adore !" 4. " The all-sufficiency of the great God 'to form and to supply every creature with all that it can want or desire," is another perfection of the divine nature, wh ch is better known in heaven than it ever was here uup ' cartl), and affords another scene of astonishment and. 2314
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