his glory,
rather than to contemplate him in his cenotaph or sepulchre. Nor is this
much to believe; as we have reason, we owe this faith unto history: they
only had the advantage of a bold and noble faith who lived before his
coming, who upon obscure prophecies and mystical types could raise a
belief and expect apparent impossibilities.

In my solitary and retired imagination,

"Neque enim cum lectulus aut me
Porticus excepit, desum mihi"--

I remember I am not alone, and therefore forget not to contemplate Him
and his attributes who is ever with me, especially those two mighty
ones, His wisdom and eternity: with the one I recreate, with the other I
confound my understanding; for who can speak of eternity without a
solecism, or think thereof without an ecstasy? Time we may comprehend:
it is but five days older than ourselves, and hath the same horoscope
with the world; but to retire so far back as to apprehend a beginning,
to give such an infinite start forward as to conceive an end in an
essence that we affirm hath neither the one nor the other, it puts my
reason to St. Paul's sanctuary: my philosophy dares not say the angels
can do it; God hath not made a creature that can comprehend him; it is a
privilege of his own nature: _I am that I am_, was his own definition
unto Moses; and it was a short one, to confound mortality, that durst
question God or ask him what he was. Indeed he only is; all others have
and shall be; but in eternity there is no distinction of tenses; and
therefore that terrible term _predestination_, which hath troubled so
many weak heads to conceive, and the wisest to explain, is in respect to
God no prescious determination of our states to come, but a definitive
blast of his will already fulfilled, and at the instant that he first
decreed it; for to his eternity, which is indivisible and all together,
the last trump, is already sounded, the reprobates in the flame and the
blessed in Abraham's bosom. St. Peter speaks modestly when he saith, a
thousand years to God are but as one day; for to speak like a
philosopher, those continued instances of time which flow into a
thousand years make not to him one moment: what to us is to come, to his
eternity is present, his whole duration being but one permanent point,
without succession, parts, flux, or division.

The world was made to be inhabited by beasts, but studied and
contemplated by man; 'tis the debt of our reason we owe unto God, and