ion, distant fears, impatience--all
uneasiness, except that which necessarily arises from the calamities
themselves we may be under. How many of our cares should we by this
means be disburdened of! Cares not properly our own, how apt soever they
may be to intrude upon us, and we to admit them; the anxieties of
expectation, solicitude about success and disappointment, which in truth
are none of our concern. How open to every gratification would that mind
be which was clear of these encumbrances!

Our resignation to the will of God may be said to be perfect when our
will is lost and resolved up into His: when we rest in His will as our
end, as being itself most just and right and good. And where is the
impossibility of such an affection to what is just, and right, and good,
such a loyalty of heart to the Governor of the universe as shall prevail
over all sinister indirect desires of our own? Neither is this at bottom
anything more than faith and honesty and fairness of mind--in a more
enlarged sense indeed than those words are commonly used. And as, in
common cases, fear and hope and other passions are raised in us by their
respective objects, so this submission of heart and soul and mind, this
religious resignation, would be as naturally produced by our having just
conceptions of Almighty God, and a real sense of His presence with us. In
how low a degree soever this temper usually prevails amongst men, yet it
is a temper right in itself: it is what we owe to our Creator: it is
particularly suitable to our mortal condition, and what we should
endeavour after for our own sakes in our passage through such a world as
this, where is nothing upon which we can rest or depend, nothing but what
we are liable to be deceived and disappointed in. Thus we might
_acquaint ourselves with God_, _and be at peace_. This is piety an
religion in the strictest sense, considered as a habit of mind: an
habitual sense of God's presence with us; being affected towards Him, as
present, in the manner His superior nature requires from such a creature
as man: this is to _walk with God_.

Little more need be said of devotion or religious worship than that it is
this temper exerted into act. The nature of it consists in the actual
exercise of those affections towards God which are supposed habitual in
good men. He is always equally present with us: but we are so much taken
up with sensible things that, _Lo_, _He goeth by us_, _and we see Hi