You may feel in yourself how conducive this is to your highest happiness. For that you should be exalted to the fruition of worlds, and in the midst of innumerable most glorious creatures, be vile and ingrateful, injurious and dishonourable, hateful and evil, is the greatest misery and dissatisfaction imaginable. But to be the joy and delight of innumerable thousands, to be admired as the similitude of God, to be amiable and honourable, to be an illustrious and beautiful creature, to be a blessing, O the good we perceive in this! O the suavity! O the contentation! O the infinite and unspeakable pleasure! Then indeed we reign and triumph when we are delighted in. Then are we blessed when we are a blessing. When all the world is at peace with us and takes pleasure in us, when our actions are delightful, and our persons lovely, when our spirits amiable, and our affections inestimable, then are we exalted to the Throne of Glory. For things when they are useful are most glorious, and it is impossible for you or me to be useful but as we are delightful to God and His attendants. And that the Head of the World, or the End for which all worlds were made should be useless, as it is improportioned to the glory of the means, and methods of His exaltation, so is it the reproach of His nature and the utter undoing of all His glory. It is improportionable to the beauty of His ways, Who made the world, and to the expectation of His creatures. |