of publishing atheism, by disguising it. I mistake in saying new; for it would be easy to prove, that the miserable Spinoza had not the glory of inventing it; he only revived a pagan notion *. He says that there is a God, but that this God is only the universality and assemblage of creatures: that every being is a modification of God; and that the sun is God as giving light, that aliments are God, as affording nourishment; and so of the rest. What a system! What an abominable system! But this system, all abominable as it is, hath, however, some truth, or some foundation. God is not diffused through all these different beings: God is not divided: but he possesseth all the perfections of the universe, and it is by this notion of God, that the true religion is distinguished from superstition. The superstitious, struck with the beauty of some particular being, made that being the object of their adoration. One, struck with the beauty of the stars, said, the stars were gods. Another, astonished at the splendor of the sun, said, the sun was God. Democritus, surprised at the beauty of fire, said, God was material fire. Chrysippus, amazed at the beauty of that necessity, which causeth every thing to answer its destination, said, God was fate. Parmenides, affected with the beautiful extent of heaven and earth, said, God was that extent.

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But God is all this, because he eminently possesseth all this. An ancient heathen said of Camillus, that he was the whole Roman republic to him and Toxaris, when he had procured Anacharsis the acquaintance of Solon, said to him: This is Athens, this is Greece; thou art no longer a stranger, thou hast seen the whole. Let us sanctify this thought by applying it to God. God is all the Roman republic, all Greece, the whole world

*See Dr. Clarke on the attributes. Vol. 1. prop. 3.

and all its inhabitants. Yes, he is the beauty of the stars, the brightness of the sun, the purity of fire, the subtility of ethereal matter, the expanse of heaven and the law of fate; he is the sagacity of the politician, the penetration of the philosopher, the bravery of the soldier, the undaunted courage, and the cautious coolness of the general. If, among these qualities, there be any incompatible with the purity of his essence, and therefore inapplicable to him, yet in this sense they belong to him, all are subject to his empire, and act only by his will. He is, as an ancient writer expresseth it, a boundless ocean of existence. From this ocean of ex istence all created beings, like so many rivulets, flow. From this ocean of light proceeded the sun with its brightness, the stars with their glitter, along with all the brilliancies of other beings that approach their nature. From this ocean of wisdom come those profound politicians, who penetrate the deepest recesses of the human heart; hence those sublime philosophers, who explore the heavens by the marvels of dioptrics, and descend into the bowels of the earth by their knowledge of nature; and hence all those superior genuisses, who cultivate the sciences, and the liberal arts, and who constitute the beauty of the intelligent world. In him we live, and move, and have our being, Acts xvii. 28. We breathe his air, and we are animated by his spirit; it is his power that upholds, his know ledge that informs, and his wisdom that conducts us.

3. The Essence of God is unchangeable in its exercise. Creatures only pass from nothing to existence, and from existence to nothing. Their existence is rather a continued variation than a permanent state; and they are all carried away with the same vicissitudes. Hardly are we children before we become men: hardly are we arrived at

manhood before we become old; and as soon as we become old we die. We love to-day what we hated yesterday, and to-morrow we shall hate what to-day we love. David hath given us a just definition of man. He defines him a He defines him a phantom, who only appears, and who appears only in a vain show, Psalm xxxix. 6. But I the Lord change not Mal. iii. 6. the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, Heb. xiii. 8. He is, as it were, the fixed point, on which revolve all the creatures in the universe, without partaking himself of their revolutions.

4. Finally, the divine Essence is eternal in its duration: Hast thou known, saith our prophet, that he is the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth? When we attempt to measure the duration of God, by tracing it beyond the first periods of this universe, we lose ourselves in the unfathomable depths of eternity: we heap ages upon ages, millions of years upon millions of years but no beginning of his existence can we find. And when we endeavor to stretch our thoughts, and to penetrate the most remote futurity, again we heap ages upon ages, millions of years upon millions of years, and lose ourselves again in the abyss, perceiving, that he can have no end, as he had no beginning. He is the Ancient of Days, Dan. vii. 9. The Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last; he is, he was, he is to come, Rev. i. 8. Before the mountains were brought forth, before the earth and the world were formed, even from everlasting to everlasting he is God, Psal. xc. 2. And when the mountains shall be dissolved, when the foundations of the earth shall be destroyed, when all sensible objects shall be folded up like a vesture, Heb. i. 12,

he will be the everlasting God, will be when they exist no more, as he was before they existed at all.

Secondly, Having judged of the grandeur of God by the sublimity of his essence, judge of it by the immensity of his works. The prophet invites us to this meditation in the words of my text. It is he that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in. Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things. It is he who bringeth out their host by number, he calleth them all by names. By the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power, not one faileth. But who can pretend to discuss, in a single article of one sermon, a subject which whole volumes could not contain? For if there be a subject, in which simple narration resembles rhetorical bombast, it is undoubtedly this.

A novice is frightened at hearing what astronomers assert; that the sun is a million times bigger than the earth: that the naked eye discovers more than a thousand fixed stars, which are so many suns to enlighten unknown systems: that with the help of glasses we may discover an almost infinite number: that two thousand have been reckoned in one constellation; and that without exaggerating, they may be numbered at more than two millions: that what are called nebulous stars, of which there is an innumerable multitude, that appear to us as if they were involved in little misty clouds, are all assemblages of stars.

A novice is frightened, when he is told, that there is such a prodigious distance between the earth and the sun, that a body, moving with the greatest rapidity that art could produce, would take up twenty-five years in passing from the one to the other: that it would take up seven hundred and fifty thousand to pass from the earth to the nearest of the

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fixed stars and to the most distant more than a hundred millions of years.

A novice is frightened: (do not accuse me, my brethren, of wandering from the subject of this discourse, for the saints, who are proposed in scripture as patterns to us, cherished their devotions with meditations of this kind: at the sight of these grand objects they exclaimed, O Lord, when we consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained; what is man that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man that thou visitest him? Psal. viii. 3, 4. And my text engageth me to fix your attention upon these objects: lift up your eyes on high and behold.) A novice is frightened, when he is assured, that, although the stars, which form a constellation, seem to touch one another, yet the distance of those that are nearest together cannot be ascertained, and that even words are wanting to express the spaces which separate those that are at the greatest distances from each other: that if two men were observing two fixed stars, from two parts of the earth, the most distant from each other, the lines that went from their eyes, and terminated on that star, would be confounded together; that it would be the same with two men, were one of them on the earth, and the other in the sun, though the sun and the earth are at such a prodigious distance from each other; so inconsiderable is that distance in comparison of the space which separates both from the star. All this startles a novice: and yet, what are these bodies, countless in their number, and enormous in their size? What are these unmeasurable spaces, which absord our senses and imaginations? What are these in comparison of what reason discovers? Shall we be puerile enough to persuade ourselves that there is nothing beyond

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