To the Reader
TO THE READER
This Excellent Discourse, breathing the Excellence of its (now deceased) authors spirit, craves your serious perusal; and it will plentifully reward the hours which shall be spent thereon. It greatly savors of deep thoughts, strict observations, and long and great experience of God, of things, and persons. Creatures look best when at a distance, and in prospect; but when nearer to us, they are then easily looked through, and seldom found to correspond with their appearances to us, and with our expectations from them. But God is such a deep and boundless abyss of perfection, as most delightfully will endure and recompense all the severity and closeness of our eternal thoughts about him. Perfected spirits are all thought concerning God, and find their hearts enflamed, and all their powers invigorated thereby eternally, to inexpressible satisfaction: And what varieties of pleasant thoughts the innumerable instances and mirrors of divine excellencies in the heavens will endlessly minister unto, I do not know, nor dare I guess too boldly at them. But how those souls can look for heaven, or truly be accounted gracious, who never retire solemnly to converse with God, I know not. Surely, where God is not more than all to us, he can be comfortably nothing: And our religious exercises and pretenses must needs be mean and dull, whilst God is triflingly and seldom thought on, and conversed with by us. Can holy walking be preserved and promoted without love? Can love to God and Christ, and to the invisible state, be kindled, cherished, and continually advanced without faith? Can faith be anything but Fancy and presumption, without thought and Knowledge? And can the life of faith, hope, love, and holy walking, be fixed and vigorous, and proficient, without our serious and frequent representations of God unto ourselves by solemn contemplations of his excellent perfections,
free communications, plentiful provisions, and glorious designs, whereto he hath entitled us, seeing our religion and devotions in all the parts thereof can have no life and soul but this? What is it to converse with God in solitude, but to actuate our thoughts of what we know concerning God in Christ, and to accommodate them to all the needful and useful purposes of religion and devotion; and to make thoughts solemnly serviceable to the great ends thereof, viz. our due and seasonable representations of our God to us, and of ourselves to him in Christ, pursuant to the stated and occasional ends and interests of Christian godliness, as the matter may require? Conversing thus with God, wants not its great advantages in life and death. And if these thoughts contained in this book, (which did so greatly reconcile the author to the thoughts of his then approaching, but now experienced death,) were more in exercise at funeral solemnities, and this book then put into the hands of mourners, it would be no matter of repentance that I know of. These are the hasty thoughts and sentiments of thine in and for the Lord, whilst
Matthew Sylvester.
London, Sept. 12. 1692.