y, "I do well to be angry,
why is it thus with me?" But, "who hath hardened himself against him and
prospered?" His counsel must stand; and you may vex yourself, and disquiet
your soul in the mean time, by impatience, but you cannot by your thought
add one cubit to your stature. You may make your case worse than
providence hath made it, but you cannot make it better by so doing, so
that at length you must bow to him or be broken. Oh then that this were
engraven on our hearts with the point of a diamond! "All his ways are
judgment;" that ye might be overcome with the equity of his command and
dispensation, and your heart and tongue might not move against them. It
was enough of old with the saints, "It is the Lord, let him do what seems
good in his eyes." God's sovereignty alone pondered, may stop our mouth;
but, if ye withal consider, it is perfect equity that rules all, it is
divine wisdom that is the square of his works; then how ought we to stoop
cheerfully unto them! One thing, ye would remember, his ways and paths are
judgment, and if you judge aright of him, ye must judge his way and not
his single footsteps. Ye will not discern equity and judgment in one step
or two; but consider his way, join adversity with prosperity, humbling
with exalting; take along the thread of his providence, and one part shall
help you to understand another. There is reason in all, but the reason is
not visible to us in so small parts of his way and work.

"A God of truth." Strange it is that his majesty is pleased to clothe
himself with so many titles and names for us. He considers what our
necessity is, and accordingly expresses his own name. I think nothing doth
more hold forth the unbelief of men, and atheism of our hearts, than the
many several titles that God takes in scripture. There is a necessity of a
multitude of them, to make us take up God; because we staying upon a
general notion of God, rather frame in our imaginations an idol than the
true God. As there is nothing doth more lively represent the unbelief of
our hearts, than the multitude of promises; men that consider such
frequent repetitions of one thing in scripture, so many divers expressions
of one God, may retire into their own hearts, and find the cause of it,
even the necessity of it. But while we look so slightly on these, we must
judge it superfluous and vain. Needed there any more to be said, but, "I
am your God, I am God," if our spirits were not so far degenerated