asure of God's
fulness, and makes a vent of divine bounty towards man, and it opens the
heart of man, and makes it large as the sand of the sea to receive of God.
Our receiving of his fulness is all the entertainment we can give him. O
what blessedness is this, for a soul to live in him! And it lives in him
when it loves him. _Anima est ubi amat, non ubi animat_. And to taste of
his sweetness and be satisfied with him, this makes perfect oneness, and
perfect oneness with God, who is "the fountain of life, and in whose
favour is life," is perfect blessedness.

But we must stand a little here and consider our misery, that have fallen
from such an excellency. How are we come down from heaven wonderfully? Sin
has interposed between God and man and this dissolves the union, and
hinders the communion. An enemy has come between two friends, and puts
them at odds, and oh! an eternal odds. Sin hath sown this discord, and
alienated our hearts from God. Man's glory consisted in the irradiation of
the soul from God's shining countenance, this made him light, God's face
shined on him. But sin interposing has eclipsed that light and brought on
an eternal night of darkness over the soul. And thus we are spoiled of the
image of God, as when the earth comes between the sun and the moon. Now
then, there can no beams of divine favour and love break through directly
towards us, because of the cloud of our sins, that separates between God
and us, and because of "the partition wall," and "the hand writing of
ordinances that was against us,"--God's holy law, and severe justice, Eph.
ii. 14, Col. ii. 14.

Then, what shall we do? How shall we see his face in joy? Certainly it had
been altogether impossible, if our Lord Jesus Christ had not come, who is
"the light and life of men." The Father shines on him, and the beams of
his love reflect upon us, from the Son. The love of God, and his
favourable countenance, that cannot meet with us in a direct and immediate
beam, they fall on us in this blessed compass, by the intervention of a
mediator. We are rebels standing at a distance from God, Christ comes
between, a mediator and a peace maker, to reconcile us to God. "God is in
Christ reconciling the world." God first makes an union of natures with
Christ, and so he comes near to us, down to us who could not come up to
him, and then he sends out the word of reconciliation,--the gospel, the
tenor whereof is this, "That which we have seen and heard dec