ny satiety in it.
There is fulness of joy without surfeit, without satiety, that which they
have they shall always desire, and that which they desire they shall
always have, everlasting desire and everlasting delight being married
together in their fulness. But yet so much is attainable here as may
truly be called fulness in regard of the world. The fulness of joy that
all the pleasures of this earth can afford is but scarcity and want to the
inward fulness of joy and contentation the poorest believers may have in
God, reconciled in Christ. That which the wise man gives as the character
of all earthly joy suits well, "I said of laughter, It is mad, and of
mirth, what doeth it?" Eccl. ii. 2. Truly it cannot be supposed to be
more real than that which is the ground and spring of it. It must be a
perfunctorious,(237) superficial, and empty joy that is derived and
distilled from such vanities. Nay, there is a madness in it besides, for
men's apprehensions to swell so excessively towards poor, narrow, and
limited things. It is a monster in reason to put such a value upon
nothing, and make ourselves glad upon our own dreams and fancies. There
is such a manifest abuse and violation of reason in it, that it can be
supposed to proceed from nothing but a distemper in men's hearts. But,
besides this, there are two other characters of it given (Prov. xiv. 13.),
"Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is
heaviness." There is no pure earthly joy, for it hath always a mixture of
grief and sadness in the inward retired closet of the heart. It is of
such deadness and inefficacy that it drives not out of the heart all
discontentments and anxieties, but if the most jovial man, that seems to
be transported with his delights would but retire within and examine his
own conscience, he would find those delights have but little power to
affect his heart. He would find terrible and dreadful representations
there, that his joys may well for a time darken them, but cannot drive
them away. And then it is the very natural law and fatal necessity that
grief follows those joys at the heels, yea, is perpetually attending
them, to come in their place. God hath so conjoined them together, and so
disposed them, that men's joy shall be mingled with grief, but their grief
is pure and unmixed, and that he who draws up joy to him from the
creatures, must draw grief and vexation in that same chain, inseparably
annexed t