l laid to heart, and pondered
as the one necessary thing. "One thing is needful," says Christ, Luke x.
42, and if any thing be in a superlative degree needful, this is it. O
that you would choose to consider it, as the necessity and weight of it
require!

We have read two scriptures, which speak to the ultimate and chief end of
man, which is the glorifying of God by all our actions and words and
thoughts. In which we have these things of importance: 1. That God's glory
is the end of our being. 2. That God's glory should be the end of our
doing. And, 3. The ground of both these; because both being and doing are
from him, therefore they ought to be both for him. He is the first cause
of both, and therefore he ought to be the last end of both. "Of him, and
through him, are all things;" and therefore all things are also for him,
and therefore all things should be done to him.

God is independent altogether, and self-sufficient. This is his royal
prerogative, wherein he infinitely transcends all created perfection. He
is of himself, and for himself; from no other, and for no other, "but of
him, and for him, are all things." He is the fountain-head; you ought to
follow the streams up to it, and then to rest, for you can go no farther.
But the creature, even the most perfect work, besides God, it hath these
two ingredients of limitation and imperfection in its bosom: it is from
another, and for another. It hath its rise out of the fountain of God's
immense power and goodness, and it must run towards that again, till it
empty all its faculties and excellencies into that same sea of goodness.
Dependence is the proper notion of a created being,--dependence upon that
infinite independent Being, as the first immediate cause, and the last
immediate end. You see then that this principle is engraven in the very
nature of man. It is as certain and evident that man is made for God's
glory, and for no other end, as that he is from God's power, and from no
other cause. Except men do violate their own conscience, and put out their
own eyes--as the Gentiles did, Rom. i. 19 &c.--"that which may be known" of
man's chief end, "is manifest in them," so that all men are "without
excuse." As God's being is independent, so that he cannot be expressed by
any name more suitable than such as he takes to himself, "I am that I
am,"--importing a boundless, ineffable, absolute, and transcendent being,
beside which, no creature deserves so much as to hav