hey went not abroad without
themselves. But to think how absolutely God is well-pleased with himself,
and how all imaginable perfections can add nothing to his eternal
self-complacency and delight in his own being, it would certainly ravish a
soul to delight in God also. And as his self-sufficiency doth herein
appear, so his liberty and freedom is likewise manifested in it. If the
world had been eternal, who would have thought that it was free for his
majesty to make it or not, but that it had flowed from his glorious being
with as natural and necessary a resistance as light from the body of the
sun? But now it appears to all men, that for his pleasure they are made,
and we are created; that it was simply the free and absolute motion of his
will that gave a being to all things, which he could withhold at his
pleasure or so long as he pleased.

Thirdly, We have it to consider in what condition he made all these
things, "very good;" and that to declare his goodness and wisdom. The
creature may well be called a large volume, extended and spread out before
the eyes of all men, to be seen and read of all. It is certain, if these
things,--all of them in their orders and harmonies, or any of them in their
beings and qualities,--were considered in relation to God's majesty, they
would teach and instruct both the fool and the wise man in the knowledge
of God. How many impressions hath he made in the creatures, which reflect
upon any seeing eye the very image of God! To consider of what a vast and
huge frame the heavens and the earth are, and yet but one throne to his
majesty, the footstool whereof is this earth, wherein vain men erect many
palaces; to consider what a multitude of creatures, what variety of fowls
in the heaven, and what multiplicity of beasts upon the earth, what hosts,
as Moses speaks (Gen. ii. 1,) and yet that none of them all are useless,
but all of them have some special ends and purposes they serve for, so
that there is no discord nor disorder, nor superfluity nor want in all
this monarchy of the world: all of them conspire together in such a
discord, or disagreeing harmony, to one great purpose,--to declare the
wisdom of him who "made every thing beautiful in its time," and every
thing most fit and apposite for the use it was created for; so that the
whole earth is full of his goodness. He makes every creature good one to
another, to supply one another's necessities; and then, notwithstanding of
so many diff