The Excellence of Meditation
What is the reason the angels in heaven have not one vain thought?
They have a sight of God, their eye is never off him. If the eye of the soul were fixed on God by meditation, how would vain impure thoughts vanish! As when that woman was in the tower, and Abimelech came near to the tower to have entered, but she threw a mill-stone out of the tower upon him, and killed him, Judg, 9:52.
Just so, when we have gotten into the high tower of meditation, and sinful thoughts would come near to enter, we may from this tower throw a millstone upon them, and destroy them. And thus you have seen the benefit of meditation.
XVI. The EXCELLENCY of Meditation.
Aristotle places felicity, in the contemplation of the mind. Meditation is highly commended by Augustine, Chrysostom, and Cyprian—as the nursery of piety. Hierom calls it his Paradise. With what words shall I set it forth? Other duties have done excellently—but "you excel them all." Meditation is a friend to all the graces, it helps to water the plantation. I may call it in Basil's expression, the treasury where all the graces are locked up; and with Theophylact, the very gate and portal by which we enter into glory. By meditation the spirits are raised and heightened to a kind of angelic frame. Meditation sweetly puts us in heaven, before we arrive there. Meditation brings God and the soul together, 1 John 3:2.
Meditation is the saints' looking glass, by which they see things invisible. Meditation is the golden ladder by which they ascend to paradise. Meditation is the spy they send abroad to search the land of promise, and it brings a cluster of the grapes of Eshcol with it.
Meditation is the dove they send out, and it brings an olive branch of peace in its mouth. But who can tell how sweet honey is, save they that taste it? The excellency of meditation I leave to experienced
Christians, who will say the comfort of it may be better felt than expressed.