people with equity. This earth, I say, shall be the theatre on which God will exhibit his King: who, when he shall have destroyed death and all his enemies in the lake of fire, shall then give up that kingdom with which the Father had endued him for its reduction unto order and blessedness: he shall give up his own single sovereignty; he shall cease to be the end of the Father's rule and government; and, having attained his eternally purposed place, as Head of the creatures, he shall stand there for ever, God's Vicegerent, God's Priest and King over the visible, to keep all creation, in its various orders, attuned unto the praise and attired unto the glory and begirt unto the service of the invisible and incomprehensible Godhead, standing unrevealed, uncommunicated, and incommunicable, under the person of the Father. Such is the great scheme of Divine providence unto the fulfilment of the Divine purpose in the bringing in of the Son.

Now Iaver, that from the Father being so much lost sight of, and the Son presented as if the only substance of Godhead, it hath come to pass, that all knowledge and discourse of Providence, in its great bearings upon nations and confederacies of nations, upon churches, hath been lost and hidden from the information of the people; whereby all history, all polities, all church government, and church experience, have gone astray into the same service of expediency, which is calculable and visible good in oppo

sition to that infinite and invisible good, which faith apprehendeth and hope rejoiceth over. Now this I regard as an evil of incalculable amount; to have lost the key to providence, and to be left in the dark labyrinths of our own foresight and calculation. But even this I know the men for whom I labour in patient argument will set at nought, as a dream of my own imagination. Wherefore, as one that will not be mistaken by his brethren, to whom he openeth a most concerning matter, I will take new positions to observe from; and haply, by God's blessing, I may succeed in shewing how this forgetfulness of his sovereignty doth work baneful effects in the midst of us.

Whether you regard the creatures in their unregenerate or in their regenerate state, the varieties of their condition, and of their experiences of good and ill, is a subject concerning which no discourse of any kind can be holden, without a full, implicit, and absolute acknowledgment of the sovereignty of God. You can resolve it into nothing else. It is the great standing monument, the ever-living, ever-acting, presence of God's sovereignty. The varieties of the kingdom of grace are just as great as the varieties of the kingdom of creation. Sovereignty is written in the one, no less remarkably than in the other. Murmurs cannot be kept down, envy blotted out, resignation introduced into the diversities of living men, otherwise than by the acknowledgment of God as a Sovereign or

dering the lot of every man according to his own pleasure. And I believe, for my own part, that the reason why this ungovernable spirit hath arisen in the bosom of the church, is, that the great governing principle of God's sovereignty hath been overshadowed, in the liberty of accepting or of rejecting certain terms of accommodation upon which a certain ancient quarrel between Him and the creatures is to be made up. Of this I am well assured, that till God's sovereignty be both preached out to the uttermost, and received in the love of it, we shall have no government brought back, either unto the state or unto the church. They discourse, and will hear discourse, concerning the wisdom of God's arrangements; but of his right to arrange so they neither skill to discourse nor care to hear discourses. Now, until the right is acknowledged, God will not furnish us with weapons against himself, and against ourselves, by giving us insight into the wisdom and ends he had in view. Who is the moralist, yea, who is the divine, that dare tell it out, That right is right, because God willed it so; good is good, because God willed it so; and being is being, only according to the same good pleasure of his will," according to the purpose of Him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will?" And therefore it is that men have no insight into morals, or politics, or laws; what be their principles, what be their ends, and what be the manners of their working. Not

acknowledging the sovereignty of God in his purpose, he involveth them in darkness that may be felt. Talk of the Divine right of the king or magistrate, talk of the Divine right of church government, and they regard you either as a fool or as a traitor against the welfare of mankind. But, forasmuch as God hath made me of another mood than to be scorned and laughed out of the sound convictions to which in the spirit of a sound mind I have been brought, I will not flinch from opening my mind a little upon this very subject of the ordinances both of human society and the state; into which, as I think, God hath given me some insight, because I reverence his sovereign right therein and this I do, to shew forth a little how right instruction concerning God's sovereignty would go far to remedy those evils in the spirit of society concerning which we have so largely discoursed.

II. This is the second head of our improvement-namely, to shew forth unto the state, or civil polity, some of those great cardinal truths upon which resteth all good government and well-ordered society; and to explain a little wherein the sacredness of civil institutions consisteth. And to this, as to a very great subject for which little room is left, I do entreat the good Spirit of God to lend me his gracious help, and to open the ear of some who are invested with power and authority and dignity,

that I may have a fit audience for such high discourse.

Well believing, then, that all things existent are from the beginning ordained in the purpose of God-both things evil and things good-for the end of bringing to pass the one great purpose, which is, the glorification of his Son in creature form as the Head of all the creatures; and believing, moreover, that man, of all other creatures of God's hand, is, through all his conditions, the most express manifester of God's purpose in the Son of man shut up; we go into the examination of things as they exist-and especially of human society--not as into a confused or accidental mass, but into a system ordained and upheld of God for this very purpose of testifying to his Son, and glorifying his Son. And therein consisteth the great sacredness of human nature and of human wellbeing, because it is the appointed fore-shewing and sustaining of the purpose of God in Christ. In the midst of all human wickedness, in the midst of all this world's turbulence, every where is it made apparent, that there is in it the working of deep wisdom unto a common end. The laws of human well-being work together to the demonstration of the truth as it is in Jesus Christ: shewing that man, in all his moods, is made in the likeness and after the image of God; and that the world is the outer court unto the church, and likewise, in some sort, the type of the kingdom. Let me point out some