ry schism and heresy from which the Christian church
has ever suffered, has been the effort of men to earn, rather than to
receive, their salvation; and that the reason that preaching is so
commonly ineffectual is, that it calls on men oftener to work for God,
than to behold God working for them. If, for every rebuke that we utter
of men's vices, we put forth a claim upon their hearts; if for every
assertion of God's demands from them, we could substitute a display of
his kindness to them; if side by side with every warning of death, we
could exhibit proofs and promises of immortality; if, in fine, instead
of assuming the being of an awful Deity, which men, though they cannot
and dare not deny, are always unwilling, sometimes unable, to conceive,
we were to show them a near, visible, inevitable, but all beneficent
Deity, whose presence makes the earth itself a heaven, I think there
would be fewer deaf children sitting in the market-place. At all events,
whatever may be the inability in this present life to mingle the full
enjoyment of the Divine works with the full discharge of every practical
duty, and confessedly in many cases this must be, let us not attribute
the inconsistency to any indignity of the faculty of contemplation, but
to the sin and the suffering of the fallen state, and the change of
order from the keeping of the garden to the tilling of the ground. We
cannot say how far it is right or agreeable with God's will, while men
are perishing round about us, while grief, and pain, and wrath, and
impiety, and death, and all the powers of the air, are working wildly
and evermore, and the cry of blood going up to heaven, that any of us
should take hand from the plough; but this we know, that there will come
a time when the service of God shall be the beholding of him; and
though in these stormy seas, where we are now driven up and down, his
Spirit is dimly seen on the face of the waters, and we are left to cast
anchors out of the stern, and wish for the day, that day will come,
when, with the evangelists on the crystal and stable sea, all the
creatures of God shall be full of eyes within, and there shall be "no
more curse, but his servants shall serve him, and shall see his face."

SECTION II.

OF THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY.

CHAPTER I.

OF THE THREE FORMS OF IMAGINATION.

Sec. 1. A partial examinat