love of God moves an embassage to send after him
and to recall him. Many messengers are sent beforehand to prepare the way
and to depose men's hearts to peace. Many prophecies were and fore
intimations of that great embassage of love, which at length appeared. For
God sent His Son, his own Son, to take away the difference, and make up
the distance. And this is the thing that is declared unto us by these eye
and ear witnesses, to this end, that we may know how to return to that
blessed society which we had forsaken to our own eternal prejudice. Is man
banished out of the paradise of God into the accursed earth? Then the Son
is sent out from his own palace and the paradise above, to come into this
world, and to save the world. Is there such a gulf between us and heaven?
Christ hath put his own body between to fill it up. Do the cherubim watch
with flaming fire to keep us from life? Then the Son hath shed his own
blood in abundance to quench that fire, and so to pacify and compose all
in heaven and earth. Is there such odds and enmity between the families of
heaven and earth? He sent his Son the chief heir, and married him with our
nature, and in that eternal marriage of our nature with him, he hath
buried in everlasting oblivion all the difference, and opened a way for a
nearer and dearer friendship with God than was before. And whence was it,
I pray you, that God dwelt among men, first, in a tabernacle, then in a
fixed temple, even among the rebellious sons of men, and that so many were
admitted and advanced again to communion with God? Abraham had the honour
to be the friend of God,--O incomparable title, comprehending more than
king or emperor! Was it not all from this, the anticipating virtue of that
uniting and peace-making sacrifice? It was for his sake who was to come
and in his flesh to lay a sure foundation for eternal peace and friendship
between God and man.

Now you see the ground of our restitution to that primitive fellowship
with God, my earnest desire is that ye would lay hold on this opportunity.
Is such an high thing in your offer? Yea, are you earnestly invited to it,
by the Father and the Son? Then sure it might at the first hearing beget
some inward desire, and kindle up some holy ambition after such a
happiness. Before we know further what is in it, (for the very first sound
of it imports some special and incomparable privilege,) might not our
hearts be inflamed, and ought not we to inquire at our own