th; and this makes our religion
to shine before men, and glorify our heavenly Father.

Wherein then do ye think this mystery of wisdom which the gospel reveals
consists? Not in the profound and abstracted speculations of God, or the
secrets of nature,--a work about which learned men have racked their
inventions, and beaten their brains to no other purpose, than the
discovery of the greatness of man's ignorance. It doth not consist in the
sounding of the depths of divinity, and loosing all these perplexing knots
of questions, and doubts, which are moved upon the scripture, in all which
men really bewray their own ignorance and misery. "The world by wisdom
knew not God." Living right is the first point of true wisdom. It costs
many men great expenses to learn to know their own folly, to become fools,
that they may become wise, 1 Cor. iii. 18. Man became a fool by seeking to
become wiser than God made him; and that is all the result of our
endeavours after wisdom since, Rom. i. 22. But here is the great
instruction of Christianity, to bring man down low from the height of
presumption and self-estimation, and make him see himself just as he is by
nature, a fool, and a wild ass's colt. Nebuchadnezzar had much ado to
learn this lesson. It cost him some years brutality to learn to know his
brutishness, and when that was known his understanding returned to him.

Now this is the first and hardest point of wisdom. When it is once learned
and imprinted on the heart, O what a docility is in the mind to more! What
readiness to receive what follows! It makes a man a weaned child, a little
simple child, tractable and flexible as Christ would have all his
disciples. A man thus emptied and vacuated of self-conceit, these lines of
natural pride being blotted out, the soul is as a _tabula rasa_, "an
unwritten table," to receive any impression of the law of God that he
pleases to put on it; and then his words are all "plain to him that
understandeth, and right to them that find knowledge," Prov. viii. 9.
Then I say it is not difficult to understand and to prove what is the good
and acceptable will of God, Rom. xii. 2; Eph. v. 10-17. It is not up unto
heaven, that thou shouldest say, who shall ascend to bring it down?
Neither is it far down in the depth, that thou shouldest say, who shall
descend and bring it up from hence? But it is near thee, "in thy mouth,
and in thy heart," &c. Rom. x. 6, 7, 8. "He hath showed thee, O man, what
is good