September 11

I have set the Lord always before me : because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.—Psalms 16:8.

A CONSIDERATION of the presence of God is so great an instrument of fear and religion that whoever does actually consider God to be present, and considers what the first consideration signifies, either must be restrained from the present temptation or must have thrown off all the possibilities and aptnesses of virtue ; such as are modesty, and reverence, and holy fear. For if the face of a man scatters all base machinations, and we dare not act our crimes in the public gaze, unless we be imprudent as well as criminal ; much more does the sense of a present Deity fill the places of our heart with veneration and the awe of religion, when it is thoroughly apprehended and actually considered.

There are men who are "servants of the eyes," as the apostle's phrase is ; who, when they are looked on, act virtue with much pompousness and theatrical bravery : but these men, when the theatre is empty, put off their upper garment, and retire into their primitive baseness. Diogenes endured the extremity of winter's cold, that the people might wonder at his austerity and philosophical patience ; but Plato, seeing the people admiring the man and pitying the sufferance, told them, that the way to make him warm himself, was for them to be gone, and to take no notice of him. For they that walk as in the sight of men, serve that design well enough, when they fill the public voice with noises and opinions, and are not, by their purposes, engaged to act in private; but they who are servants of the eyes of God, and walk as in the Divine presence, perceive the same restraints in darkness, and closets, and grots, as in the light and midst of the public; and that consideration imposes upon us a happy necessity of doing virtuously, which presents us placed in the eyes of our judge. And, therefore, it was not unhandsomely said of a Jewish doctor, "If every man would consider God to be the great eye of the world, watching perpetually over all our actions, and that his hand is indefatigable and his ear ever open, possibly sin might be extirpated from off the face of the earth." And this is the condition of beatitude; and the blessed souls within the regions of light and felicity can not sin, because of the vision beatifical, they always behold the face of God: and those who partake of this state by way of consideration, which is essential to the condition of the blessed, and derive it into practice and discourse, in proportion to this shall retain an innocence and a part of glory.

For it is a great declension of human reason, and a disreputation to our spirits, that we are so wholly led by sense, that we will not walk in the regions of the Spirit, and behold God by our eyes of faith and discourse, suffering our course of life to be guided by such principles, which distinguish our natures from beasts, and our conditions from vicious, and our spirits from the world, and our hopes from the common satisfactions of sense and corruption. The better half of our nature is of the same constitution with that of the angels: and therefore, although we are drenched in matter and the communications of earth, yet our better part was designed to converse with God: and we had, besides the eye of reason, another eye of faith put into our souls, and both clarified with revelations and demonstrations of the Spirit, expressing to us so visible and clear characters of God's presence, that the expression of the same Spirit is, "We may feel him, for he is within us," and about us, and we are in him, and in the comprehensions of his embracings, as birds in the air, or infants in the wombs of their mothers. And that

God is pleased not to communicate himself to the eyes of our body, but still to remain invisible, besides that it is his own glory and perfection, it is also no more to us but like a retreat behind a curtain, where, when we know our Judge stands, as an espial and a watch over our actions, we shall be sottish, if we dare to provoke his jealousy, because we see him not, when we know that he is close by, though behind the cloud.