remain in the plantation of God, nor be able to stand when the storm of judgment arises. Christians who do not persevere, but fall away into a sinful and unprofitable life, are compared to trees whose fruit withereth, twice dead, plucked up by the roots: dead once by nature, and dead again unto grace, after they had been revived by the reception of the gospel; of such there is no hope.

The transitory nature of man in this mortal life is shewn by the herbs of the field; and the scripture draws this picture with such beauty as far surpasses the most laboured poetical elegies on mortality—In the morning it is green and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, dried up and withered *.—All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field :—the grass withereth, the flower fadeth ; but the word of our God shall stand for ever †. In their decay, the herbs of the field are patterns of man's mortality; but in the order of their growth, from seeds dead and buried, they give a natural testimony to the doctrine of the resurrection; and the apostle therefore speaks of bodies rising from the dead as of so many seeds. springing from the ground. The prophet Isaiah speaks as expressly upon the same subject: thy

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thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise: awake and sing ye that dwell in the dust: for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out her dead *.

Much instruction is to be gathered from the treasures which men take (with other views) from beneath the earth for perishable riches are figures of the true riches, which give in substance what the other give in shadow: these are the riches of the mind; and though of little esteem with the generality of the world, they are yet of infinite value to those that possess them. The apostles of Jesus Christ were poor in appearance, but could boast of being able to make many rich in faith and knowledge. The gifts of God to the mind are represented in one of the parables as so many talents of money, entrusted to men by the Lord of all things, with which they are to traffick in this state of probation, and improve them to the best of their power. He who makes no improvement will lose what he has got, and then he is poor indeed.

In the prophecy of Daniel, the four monarchies of the world were signified by the chief metals which are taken from the earth, all united in that visionary image which appeared

* Isaiah xxvi. 19.

ta

to Nebuchadnezzar. The head of gold meant the Assyrian monarchy; the breast of silver was the Persian; the brazen part was the Grecian; and the legs and feet of iron and clay were the Roman. The last was inferior to all the rest in quality, but exceeded them in strength, as iron breaks all other things in pieces. The kingdom of Christ, arising in the time of the fourth monarchy, is meant by the stone cut out of the mountain (that is, out of the church) without hands, to smite this mighty image of worldly power upon the feet, and overthrow it. Accordingly, as christianity grew stronger, the Roman empire declined, and was soon reduced nearly to the state in which we now see it *.

We have taken a review of the natural creation, so far as the compass of these Lectures will permit, and have seen how the scripture has applied the several parts of it for the increase of our faith and the improvement of our understandings. Thus we are taught how to make the best and the wisest use to which this world can be applied. The Creator himself hath made this use of it, in revealing his will by it, and referring

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* The reader may see the three kingdoms of plants, animals, and minerals, considered more at large in Three Discourses preached at Fairchild's Lecture, by the author of this work. Printed for Messrs. Robinson, Pater noster-row.

ring man to it for instruction from the beginning. For this use he intended it when it was made; and without such an intention, there never could have been such an universal agreement between nature and revelation.

In this use of the world men differ from brutes, who can see it only with the eyes of the body, and can apply it to nothing but the gratification of the appetites. The ambitious and the covetous are wasting their time to gain as much as they can of it, without knowing what it is; as children covet new books for the pictures and the gilding, without having sense to improve by what is within them. To those who consider only how the creation can furnish matter to their lusts and passions, it is no better than a vain shadow: but to those who take it rightly, it is a shadow of heavenly things; a school in which God is a teacher; and all the objects of sense in heaven and earth, and under the earth, are as the letters of an universal language, in which all nations have a common in

terest.

There was an opinion, (I should rather call it a tradition) amongst some heathen philosophers, that the world is a parable, the literal or bodily part of which is manifest to all men, while

the inward meaning is hidden, as the soul in

the

the body, the moral in the fable, or the interpretation in the parable *. They had heard

* Εξεςι γας και τον Κόσμον ΜΥΘΟΝ ειπειν χρημαίων εν αυτων φαινομενων, ψυχων δε και Sallust. Tag Dewv. cap.3.

there

σωμάτων μεν και

νεων κρυπτομένων.

Κοσμον δε αυθις τον μεν ναυλον οι δεν η βαρβαρος φιλοσοφία, τον δε αισθήτου. Τον μεν αρχείυπον, Τον δε εικοναία καλεμένε παραδειγματος. Και τον μεν ανατίθησι Μοναδι, ως αν νοῆλον• Τον δε αισθῆλον Εξαλι Clem. Alex. Strom. Lib. 5. p. 412.

"We may call the world a fable, or parable; in which "there is an outward appearance of visible things, with an "inward sense which is hidden as the soul under the "body.

"There is a barbarous philosophy, (i. e. a foreign philo"sophy) which hath a knowledge of the sensible and the "intellectual worlds; the one being the archetype or ori"ginal, the other an image or copy of it. It compares the "intellectual to unity, and the sensible to the number six.”

This barbarous philosophy, so called by Plato, whose doctrine is here repeated by Clemens Alexandrinus, was no where to be found but in the bible; which in its week of days, has a single day, the sabbath, answering to the divine rest of the invisible world, and six days allotted to the works of this present world. Nothing but the Mosaic cosmogony, which describes the creation of the natural world in six days, and makes one heavenly day of the sabbath, could be the original of this philosophy mentioned by Plato.

That certain characteristics of divine truth are legible in the works and ways of Nature, is no new doctrine. It hath been supposed by some, and lightly touched upon by others; but never pursued (as I have found) to any