shall be given unto it, the excellency of Carmel and Sharon, they shall
see the glory of the Lord, and the excellency of our God. We wonder that
'tis not always hot summer days, a flourishing and fruitful season, with
souls and with churches. But know we the thoughts of the Lord; see we to
the bottom of the deep contrivance of infinite wisdom? Know we the
usefulness, yea, necessity of long winter nights, stormy blasts, rain,
hail, snow, and frost? Consider we, that our state and condition, while
here, calleth for those vicissitudes, and requireth the blowing of the
north as well as of the south winds? If we considered, how grace had
ordered all things for our best, and most for the glory and exaltation
of grace, we would sit down and sing under the saddest of dispensations,
and living by faith and hope, we would rejoice in the confident
expectation of a gracious outgate; for as long as grace predomineth (and
that will be until glory take the empire) all will run in the channel of
grace; and though now sense (which is oft faith's unfaithful friend)
will be always suggesting false tales of God, and of his grace unto
unbelief, and raising thereby discontents, doubts, fears, jealousies,
and many distempers in the soul, to its prejudice and hurt, yet in end,
grace shall be seen to be grace; and the faithful shall get such a full
sight of this manifold grace, as ordering, tempering, timing,
shortening, or continuing, of all the sad and dismal days and seasons
that have passed over their own or their mother's head, that they shall
see, that grace did order all, yea, every circumstance of all the
various tossings, changes, ups and downs, that they did meet with. And O
what a satisfying sight will that be, when the general assembly and
church of the first-born, which are in-rolled in Heaven, and every
individual saint, shall come together, and take a view of all their
experience, the result of which shall be, grace began, grace carried on,
and grace hath perfected all, grace was at the bottom of all? What
shoutings, grace, grace unto it, will be there; when the head-stone