st in his name? You know; nay, but you consider not what you know. This
is trusting, when the mind is stayed on what it knoweth, when all the
scattered thoughts and affections are called home, and united in one, to
be exercised about this comprehensive object, "the Lord our God." It is
not want of knowledge destroyeth you, but want of consideration of what
you know, and this is brutishness. Men's hearts do not carry the seal and
stamp of their knowledge, because thoughts of God and his word are but as
passengers that go through a land, as lightning going through the mind,
but warms it not; and so their practice carrieth no impression of it
either. How base is it for those who have God for their God, to be so
ignorant of him! Would not any man willingly travel about his own
possessions? Have you such a large portion, believers, and should ye be
taken up with other vanities? Should your hearts and minds be stayed on
them, more than the living God? There is a great vanity and levity in
men's minds; "The Lord knoweth the thoughts of man that they are vanity."
There is an unsettledness of spirit,--we cannot pitch on that upon which we
may be stayed; and so all the spirits of men are in a continual motion
from one thing to another, for nothing giveth complete satisfaction, and
therefore it must go and try one after another, to see if it can find in
it what it found not in the former. And such is the inconstancy of the
spirit, that it licketh up its vomit; and what thing it refused, it eateth
it up as its meat. The time is spent in choosing and refusing, rejecting
one thing and taking another, and again returning to what you have
rejected. Thus are men tossed up and down, and unstable in all their ways,
as a ship without ballasting. Now, faith and trusting in God is the
ballast and weight of this inconstant ship: it is the anchor to stay it
from being driven to and fro. If once men would pitch upon this one Lord,
who hath in himself eminently all the scattered perfections of creatures,
and infinitely more,--if you would consider him, and meditate on him, till
your souls loved him, would you not be ravished with him? Would you not
build your house beside him, and dwell in the meditation of his name? This
would fix and establish you in duties--"when I awake, I am still with
thee." A little searching and experience discovereth emptiness in all
beside; and therefore is it, that the soul removeth sooner from such a
particular creature