mate, and a spirit to inspire and give us Holy Ghost what is very LECT. LECT. remarkable, he communicated the Holy Ghost to his disciples under the outward fign of breathing upon them. In the invisible kingdom of God, there is a fun of righteoufness which rises upon a world that lieth in darkness; raising up the dead to a new life, and restoring all that fin and death had deftroyed. So doth the vifible world prefent to us the great luminary of the day, whofe operations are in all respects like to those of the fun of righteousness. In the morning it prevails over darkness, and in the spring it restores the face of Nature. When the scriptures fay that the powers of the word and spirit of God are necessary to the fouls of men; they fay no more than what the most scrupulous philofophy must admit in regard to their bodies: for certainly mankind cannot fubfift without the fun and the air. to live by as well They must have light, as to fee by; and they must have breath, without which they can neither live, nor fpeak, nor hear. We We are to argue farther; that as we LECT. must suppose a sun to shine before we can suppose a man to exift upon earth: fo, by and LECT. and Jefus Chrift who is the true Light must be the true God. Wherefoever we go in divinity, thither will philofophy ftill follow us as a faithful witnefs. For if we are affured by revelation, that there is a power of divine justice to execute vengeance on the enemies of God, and which fhall deftroy with a fearful destruction the ungodly and impenitent whenever it fhall reach them: we find in nature the irresistible power of fire, which diffipates and deftroys what it acts upon, and which in many inftances hath been applied as the inftrument of vengeance upon wicked men. Sacrifices were confumed by fire, to fignify that wrath from heaven is due to fin, and would fall upon the finful offerer himself, if the victim did not receive it for him by fubftitution. When the law was given on Mount Sinai, the heavens flamed with fire, and the mountain burned below, to give the people a fense of the terrors of divine judgment. With allufion to which exhibition, and other examples of the actual effects of his wrath, wrath, God is faid to be a confuming fire: LECT. and happy are they who regard the power of it, and flee from it, as Lot and his family fled from the flames of Sodom. IV. Another doctrine, peculiar to the fcripture, is, the danger to which we are exposed in our religious capacity from the malignity and power of the Devil; whose works are manifeft, though he himself is invifible. But the natural creation bears witness to his existence, and to all his evil properties; where the wifdom of God hath fet before us that creature the Serpent, a fingular phænomenon of the fame kind; whose bite diffufes death fo fuddenly and miraculously through the body, that he may be faid, in comparison of all other creatures, to have the power of death. He is double tongued and infidious; often undiscovered till he has given the fatal wound. In a word, he is such a pattern of the invisible adversary of mankind, who was a liar and a murderer from the beginning, that the hieroglyphical language of the Bible fpeaks of him in the history of the |