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 Him not: He passeth on also, but we
perceive Him not. {31} Devotion is retirement from the world He has
made to Him alone: it is to withdraw from the avocations of sense,