to the soul. In other words, that it made
the soul like a field or garden of God, with all manner of pleasant
flowers; enjoying a sweet calm and the gently vivifying beams of the
sun. The soul of a true Christian, as I then wrote my meditations,
appeared like such a little white flower as we see in the spring of the
year; low and humble on the ground, opening its bosom to receive the
pleasant beams of the sun's glory; rejoicing, as it were, in a calm
rapture; diffusing around a sweet fragrancy; standing peacefully and
lovingly in the midst of other flowers round about; all in like manner
opening their bosoms to drink in the light of the sun. There was no
part of creature-holiness that I had so great a sense of its loveliness
as humility, brokenness of heart, and poverty of spirit; and there was
nothing that I so earnestly longed for. My heart panted after this--to
lie low before God, as in the dust; that I might be nothing, and that
God might be all; that I might become as a little child.

THE WRATH OF GOD.

[From _Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God_.]

Unconverted men walk over the pit of hell on a rotten covering, and
there are innumerable places in this covering so weak that they will
not bear their weight, and these places are not seen. The arrows of
death fly unseen at noonday; the sharpest sight cannot discern them.
God has so many different, unsearchable ways of taking wicked men out
of the world and sending them to hell that there is nothing to make it
appear that God had need to be at the expense of a miracle, or go out
of the ordinary course of his providence, to destroy any wicked man at
any moment. . . . Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead
and to tend downward with great weight and pressure toward hell; and,
if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly
descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy
constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and
all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and
keep you out of hell than a spider's web would have to stop a falling
rock. . . . There are the black clouds of God's wrath now hanging
directly over your heads, full of the dreadful storm and big with
thunder; and were it not for the restraining hand of God it would
immediately burst forth upon you. The sovereign pleasure of God, for
the present, stays his rough wind; otherwise it would come with fury,
an