June 23

Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee.— Psalms 119:11.

THE placing and fixing those Divine considerations in our understandings, and hiding them there, are designs of high Christian prudence, that they, with advantage, may come forth in the expresses of a holy life. For what in the world is more apt and natural to produce humility, than to meditate upon the low stoopings and descents of the holy Jesus, to the nature of a man, to the weakness of a child, to the poverties of a stable, to the ignobleness of a servant, to the shame of the cross, to the pains of cruelty, and to the wrath of God? By this instance, poverty is made honorable, and humility is sanctified and made noble, and the contradictions of nature are amiable, and fitted for a wise election. Thus hatred of sin, shame of ourselves, confusion at the sense of human misery, the love of God, confidence in his promises, desires of heaven, holy resolutions, resignation of our own appetites, conformity to the Divine will, oblations of ourselves, repentance and mortification, are the proper emanations from meditation of the sordidness of sin, our proneness to it, our daily miseries as issues of Divine vengeance, the glories of God, his infinite unalterable veracity, the satisfaction in the vision of God, the rewards of piety, the rectitude of the laws of God and perfection of his sanctions, God's supreme and paternal dominion, and his certain malediction of sinners: and when any one of these considerations is taken to pieces, and so placed in the rooms of application, that a piece of duty is conjoined to a piece of mystery, and the whole office to the purchase of a grace, or the extermination of a vice, it is like opening our windows to let in the sun and the wind; and holiness is as proportioned an effect to this practice, as glory is to a persevering holiness, by way of reward and moral causality.

For all the affections that are in man are either natural or by chance, or by the incitation of reason and discourse. Our natural affections are not worthy the entertainments of a Christian; they must be supernatural and divine that put us into the hopes of perfection and felicities. And these other, that are good, unless they come by meditation, they are but accidental, and set with the evening sun. But if they be produced upon the strength of pious meditation, they are as perpetual as they are reasonable, and excellent in proportion to the piety of the principle. A garden that is watered with short and sudden showers is more uncertain in its fruits and beauties, than if a rivulet waters it with a perpetual distilling and constant moistening: and just such are the short emissions and unpremeditated resolutions of piety, begotten by a dash of holy rain from heaven, whereby God sometimes uses to call the careless but to taste what excellencies of piety they neglect; but if they be not produced by the reason of religion, and the philosophy of meditation, they have but the life of a fly or a tall gourd; they come into the world only to say that they had a being; you could scarce know their length, but by measuring the ground they cover in their fall.

"All my heart hath sought thy face: Do not suffer me to rove From thy own appointed ways, From the precepts of thy love. I have stood in constant awe, Treasured up thy word within, Lest I should transgress thy law, Grieve thee by the smallest sin."