on. The greatest sum that is
imaginable hath a certain proportion to the least number, that it
containeth it so oft and no oftener; so that the least number being
multiplied will amount unto the greatest that you can conceive. But O!
where shall a soul find itself here? It is enclosed between infiniteness
before and infiniteness behind,--between two everlastings; which way soever
it turns, there is no outgoing; which way soever it looks, it must lose
itself in an infiniteness round about it. It can find no beginning and no
end, when it hath wearied itself in searching, which, if it find not, it
knows not what it is, and cannot tell what it is. Now what are we then? O
what are we, who so magnify ourselves! "We are but of yesterday, and know
nothing," Job viii. 9. Suppose that we had endured the space of a thousand
years, yet saith Moses, Psal. xc. 4, "A thousand years are but as
yesterday in thy sight." Time hath no succession to thee. Thou beholdest
at once what is not at once, but in several times; all that may thus
happen hath not the proportion of one day to thy days. We change in our
days, and are not that to-day we were yesterday; but "he is the same
yesterday, and to-day, and for ever," Heb. xiii. 8. Every day we are
dying, some part of our life is taken away; we leave still one day more
behind us, and what is behind us is gone and cannot be recovered. Though
we vainly please ourselves in the number of our years, and the extent of
our life, and the vicissitudes of time, yet the truth is, we are but still
losing to much of our being and time as passeth. First, we lose our
childhood, then we lose our manhood; and then we leave our old age behind
us also; and there is no more before us. Even the very present day we
divide it with death. But when he moves all things, he remains immoveable.
Though days and years be in a continual flux and motion about him, and
they carry us down with their force, yet he abides, the same for ever.
Even the earth that is established so sure, and the heavens that are
supposed to be incorruptible, yet they "wax old as doth a garment;" but he
is the same, and "his years have no end," Psal. cii. 26, 27. _Sine
principio principium; absque fine finis; cui praeteritum non abit, haud
adit futurum; ante omnia post omnia totus unus ipse_,--He is the beginning
without any beginning; the end without an end: there is nothing bypast to
him, and nothing to come. _Sed uno mentis cernit in ictu, quae sunt,