d none will make mention of us; our
place will not know us, no more than we do now remember those who have
been before. Christ said of John, "he was a burning and shining light;"
"he was," saith he, but now he is not. But Christ may always say, "I am
the light and life of men." Man is; but look a little backward, and he was
not; you shall find his original. And step a little forward and he shall
not be, you shall find his end. But God is "Alpha and Omega, the beginning
and the end." But oh! who can retire so far backward as to apprehend a
beginning; or go such a start forward as to conceive an end in such a
being as is the beginning and end of all things, but without all beginning
and end? Whose understanding would it not confound? There is no way here
but to flee to Paul's sanctuary, "O the height and breadth, and length and
depth!" We cannot imagine a being, but we must first conceive it nothing,
and in some instant receiving its being; and, therefore, "Canst thou by
searching find out God?" Therefore what his being is hath not entered into
the heart of man to consider. If any man would live out the space but of
two generations he would be a world's wonder; but if any had their days
prolonged as the patriarchs before the flood, they would be called ancient
indeed, but then the heavens and earth are far more ancient. We may go
backward the space of near six thousand years in our own minds, and yet be
as far from his beginning as we were. When we are come to the beginning of
all things, a man's imagination may yet extend itself further, and suppose
to itself as many thousands of years before the beginning of time, as all
the angels and men of all nations and generations from the beginning, if
they had been employed in no other thing but this, could have summed up;
and then suppose a product to be made of all the several sums of years, it
would be vast and unspeakable; but yet your imagination could reach
further, and multiply that great sum into itself as often as there are
units in it. Now when you have done all this, you are never a whit nearer
the days of "the Ancient of days." Suppose then this should be the only
exercise of men and angels throughout all eternity; all this marvellous
arithmetic would not amount unto the least shadow of the continuance of
him who is "from everlasting." All that huge product of all the
multiplications of men and angels, hath no proportion unto that
never-beginning and never-ending durati