esent controversy with Scotland, but, alas! the bellows
are like to burn, and we not to be purged. Our scum goes not out from us.
We satisfy ourselves with some outward exercises of religion. Custom
undoes us all, and it was never more undoing than when indignation and
wrath are pursuing it. O! that you would ponder what you lose by it,--both
the sweetness and advantage of godliness, beside the dishonour of God. You
take a formal, negligent, and secure way as the most easy way, and the
most pleasing to your flesh, and I am persuaded you find it the most
difficult way, because you want all the pleasant and sweet refreshment and
soul delights you might have in God, by a serious and diligent minding of
religion. The pleasure and sweetness of God tasted and found, will make
diligence and pains more easy than slothfulness can be to the slothful.
This oils the wheels, and makes them run swiftly, formality makes them
drive heavily. Thus you live always in a complaining humour,--sighing, and
going backward,--because you have some stirring principle of conscience
within which bears witness against you, and your formal sluggish
disposition on the other hand refuses to awake and work. You are perplexed
and tormented between these two. When thy spirit and affections go one
way, and thy body another, when thy conscience drives on the spirit, and
thy affections draw back, it must needs be an unpleasant business.

Lecture XII.

The Unity Of The Divine Essence, And The Trinity Of Persons.

Deut. vi. 4.--"Hear O Israel the Lord our God is one Lord."--1 John
v. 7. "There are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the
Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one."

"Great is the mystery of godliness," 1 Tim. iii. 16. Religion and true
godliness is a bundle of excellent mysteries--of things hid from the world,
yea, from the wise men of the world, (1 Cor. ii. 6.) and not only so, but
secrets in their own nature, the distinct knowledge whereof is not given
to saints in this estate of distance and absence from the Lord. There is
almost nothing in divinity, but it is a mystery in itself, how common
soever it be in the apprehensions of men. For it is men's overly,(139) and
common and slender apprehensions of them, which make them look so commonly
upon them. There is a depth in them, but you will not know it, till you
search it, and sound it, and the more you sound, you shall fi