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convinced of this, if you attend to the four following considerations of the grandeurs of God.

1. The sublimity of his essence. 2. The im mensity of his works. 3. The efficiency of his will. 4. The magnificence of some of his mighty acts, at certain periods, in favor of his church.

First, The sublimity of his essence. The prophet's mind was filled with this object. It is owing to this that he repeats the grand title Jehovah, THE LORD, which signifies I am by excellence, and which distinguisheth, by four grand characters, the essence of God, from the essence of creatures. 1. The essence of God is independent in its cause. God is a self-existent being. We exist, but ours is only a borrowed existence, for existence is foreign from us. There was time when we were not, and our origin is nothing: and as we should cease to be if God were only to give the word, so his word was necessary to give us existence at first: But God exists of himself: existence is his own: and he owes it only to himself, and to the eminence of his own perfections. An idea, in which it is difficult not to lose one's self, and which is incomprehensible to us, because it relates to an infinite attribute, and because all that is infinite absorbs a finite mind: but an idea, however, as true as it is incomprehensible. The existence of a mite, or of a grain of dust, or even of the most diminutive being in nature, is sufficient necessarily to conduct us to the independent, self-existent God.

Even the atheist is obliged by his own principles to agree with us in this article: I mean the atheist of some knowledge: the modern atheist. Let us thankfully own, my brethren, that the improvements, which a sound philosophy hath produced in the sciences, have been communicated even to atheism. Formerly, atheists could digest such pro

positions as these: the world hath not always subsisted; it was made of nothing. Now, these propositions are too gross for any to hazard his reputation on the advancing of them. Indeed, to affirm, that nothing hath made the world, is not only to advance an absurdity, it is to advance a contradiction. To say that nothing hath created the world, is to say that nothing hath not created the world; and to say that nothing hath not created a world, which actually exists, is to deny the existence of the world. No rules of reasoning require us to answer people, who contradict themselves in so glaring a manner; and, on this article, we rank them with ideots. Modern atheists admit, as we do, a self-existent being. All the difference between them and us is this; they attribute this eminent perfection to matter; but we attribute it to God. The atheist derives his existence from a collection of atoms, which a blind chance had assembled: we ascribe our existence to a Being possessed of all possible perfections. The atheist discovers his God and Creator in a confused conjunction of bodies destitute of reason: we find our God and Creator in the Supreme Being, the fountain of all existence. But both we and the atheist are obliged to own an increated, self-existent Being. And as it is easy for a reasonable person to decide the question, whether this perfection agree to God or to matter, it is easy for him also to comprehend that God is a self-existent Being.

2. The essence of God is universal in its extent. God possesseth the reality of every thing. that exists. A celebrated infidel, educated in your provinces,* (would to God none were educated here still!) This infidel, I say, invented a new way

Benedict de Spinoza, was born at Amsterdam, and was educated in the same city ander Francis Vander Ende. Jim Mons. Saurin means.

of publishing atheism, by disguising it. I mistake in saying new; for it would be easy to prove, that the miserable Spinoza had not the glory of inventing it; he only revived a pagan notion*. He He says that there is a God, but that this God is only the universality and assemblage of creatures: that every being is a modification of God; and that the sun is God as giving light, that aliments are God, as affording nourishment; and so of the rest. What a system! What an abominable system! But this system, all abominable as it is, hath, however, some truth, or some foundation. God is not diffused through all these different beings: God is not divided: but he possesseth all the perfections of the universe, and it is by this notion of God, that the true religion is distinguished from superstition. The superstitious, struck with the beauty of some particular being, made that being the object of their adoration. One, struck with the beauty of the stars, said, the stars were gods. Another, astonished at the splendor of the sun, said, the sun was God. Democritus, surprised at the beauty of fire, said, God was material fire. Chrysippus, amazed at the beauty of that necessity, which causeth every thing to answer its destination, said, God was fate. Parmenides, affected with the beautiful extent of heaven and earth, said, God was that extent.

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But God is all this, because he eminently possesseth all this. An ancient heathen said of Camillus, that he was the whole Roman republic to him and Toxaris, when he had procured Anacharsis the acquaintance of Solon, said to him: This is Athens, this is Greece; thou art no longer a stranger, thou hast seen the whole. Let us sanctify this thought by applying it to God. God is all the Roman republic, all Greece, the whole world

* See Dr. Clarke on the attributes. Vol. 1. prop. 3.

and all its inhabitants. Yes, he is the beauty of the stars, the brightness of the sun, the purity of fire, the subtility of ethereal matter, the expanse of heaven and the law of fate; he is the sagacity of the politician, the penetration of the philosopher, the bravery of the soldier, the undaunted courage, and the cautious coolness of the general. If, among these qualities, there be any incompatible with the purity of his essence, and therefore inapplicable to him, yet in this sense they belong to him, all are subject to his empire, and act only by his will. He is, as an ancient writer expresseth it, a boundless ocean of existence. From this ocean of ex istence all created beings, like so many rivulets, flow. From this ocean of light proceeded the sun with its brightness, the stars with their glitter, along with all the brilliancies of other beings that approach their nature. From this ocean of wisdom come those profound politicians, who penetrate the deepest recesses of the human heart; hence those sublime philosophers, who explore the heavens by the marvels of dioptrics, and descend into the bowels of the earth by their knowledge of nature; and hence all those superior genuisses, who cultivate the sciences, and the liberal arts, and who constitute the beauty of the intelligent world. In him we live, and move, and have our being, Acts xvii.. 28. We breathe his air, and we are animated by his spirit; it is his power that upholds, his knowledge that informs, and his wisdom that conducts us.

3. The Essence of God is unchangeable in its exercise. Creatures only pass from nothing to existence, and from existence to nothing. Their existence is rather a continued variation than a permanent state; and they are all carried away with the same vicissitudes. Hardly are we children before we become men: hardly are we arrived at

manhood before we become old; and as soon as we become old we die. We love to-day what we hated yesterday, and to-morrow we shall hate what to-day we love. David hath given us a just definition of man. He defines him a phantom, who only appears, and who appears only in a vain show, Psalm xxxix. 6. But I the Lord change not: Mal. iii. 6. the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, Heb. xiii. 8. He is, as it were, the fixed point, on which revolve all the creatures in the universe, without partaking himself of their revolutions.

4. Finally, the divine Essence is eternal in its duration: Hast thou known, saith our prophet, that he is the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth? When we attempt to measure the duration of God, by tracing it beyond the first periods of this universe, we lose ourselves in the unfathomable depths of eternity: we heap ages upon ages, millions of years upon millions of years but no beginning of his existence can we find. And when we endeavor to stretch our thoughts, and to penetrate the most remote futurity, again we heap ages upon ages, millions of years upon millions of years, and lose ourselves again in the abyss, perceiving, that he can have no end, as he had no beginning. He is the Ancient of Days, Dan. vii. 9. The Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last; he is, he was, he is to come, Rev. i. 8. Before the mountains were brought forth, before the earth and the world were formed, even from everlasting to everlasting he is God, Psal. xc. 2. And when the mountains shall be dissolved, when the foundations of the earth shall be destroyed, when all sensible objects shall be folded up like a vesture, Heb. i. 12,

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