self for a price for us, but both gave the Holy Spirit to assist
us in mighty graces, for the verifications of faith, and the
entertainments of hope, and the increase and perseverance of charity.
God gave to us a new nature, He put another principle into us, a third
part of a perfective constitution; we have the spirit put into us, to
be a part of us, as properly to produce actions of a holy life, as the
soul of man in the body does produce the natural. God hath exalted
human nature, and made it in the person of Jesus Christ, to sit above
the highest seat of angels, and the angels are made ministering
spirits, ever since their Lord became our brother. Christ hath by a
miraculous sacrament given us His body to eat and His blood to drink;
He made ways that we may become all one with Him. He hath given us an
easy religion, and hath established our future felicity upon natural
and pleasant conditions, and we are to be happy hereafter if we suffer
God to make us happy here; and things are so ordered that a man must
take more pains to perish than to be happy. God hath found out rare
ways to make our prayers acceptable, our weak petitions, the desires
of our imperfect souls, to prevail mightily with God, and to lay a
holy violence and an undeniable necessity upon Himself; and God will
deny us nothing but when we ask of Him to do us ill offices, to give
us poisons and dangers, and evil nourishment, and temptations; and He
that hath given such mighty power to the prayers of His servants, yet
will not be moved by those potent and mighty prayers to do any good
man an evil turn, or to grant him one mischief--in that only God can
deny us. But in all things else God hath made all the excellent things
in heaven and earth to join toward the holy and fortunate effects;
for He that appointed an angel to present the prayers of saints,
and Christ makes intercession for us, and the Holy Spirit makes
intercession for us with groans unutterable, and all the holy men in
the world pray for all and for every one, and God hath instructed us
with scriptures, and precedents, and collateral and direct assistances
to pray, and He encouraged us with divers excellent promises, and
parables, and examples, and teaches us what to pray, and how, and
gives one promise to public prayer, and another to private prayer, and
to both the blessing of being heard.

Add to this account that God did heap blessings upon us without order,
infinitely, perpetually, and i