Deuteronomy 2

REFLECTIONS UPON CHAP. II.—What regard God bears to his noted favourites; and what temporal favours he bestows, even on their wicked posterity, for their sake! But he hath appointed times for exercising his people’s faith, and permitting his enemies’ prosperity. He plants and plucks up nations; keeps them in, or turns them down from, their property as he pleases; and the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. Thus the cursed offspring of Ham, after many ages, perish under the patriarch’s curse. But the people of God ought to be always generous, forgiving, and disinterested; neither injuring their enemies, nor laying unnecessary burdens on their friends. And the more vain and changeable the possessions of this world are, the more solicitous we ought to be to secure a kingdom which cannot be moved. When nations are ripe for ruin, God permits their proud lusts to plunge them headlong into it: and their barbarous refusals of common kindness issue in their own and their neighbour’s destruction. Let me be always content with such things as I have; always tender of dispossessing others of what the Lord has given them. Let my portion be the Lord himself, from which neither hell nor earth can turn me out, or mar my enjoyment, while I live in the hopes of exchanging all my wanderings, fightings, and fears, for that city of God, that house eternal in the heavens. 7.2