Then I heard a voice saying, Shall mortal man be more just than God?' &c. Job. iv. When he describes the safety of the righteous, he hides him 'from the scourge of the tongue, he makes him laugh at destruction and famine, he brings the stones of the field into league with him, and makes the brute animals enter into a covenant of peace.' Job, v. 21. When Job speaks of the grave, how melancholy is the gloom that he spreads over it! It is a region to which I must shortly go, and 'whence I shall not return; it is a land of darkness, it is darkness itself, the land of the shadow of death; all confusion and disorder, and where the light is as darkness. This is my house, there have I made my bed: I have said to corruption, thou art my father; and to the worm, thou art my mother and my sister: as for my hope, who shall see it? I and my hope go down together to the bars of the pit.' Job, x. 21, and xvii. 13. When he humbles himself in complainings before the almightiness of God, what contemptible and feeble images doth he use! Wilt thou break a leaf driven to and fro? Wilt thou pursue the dry stubble? I consume away like a rotten thing, a garment eaten by the moth.' Job, xiii. 25, &c. 'Thou liftest me up to the wind, thou causest me to ride upon it, and dissolvest my substance.' Job, Xxx. 22. Can any man invent more despicable ideas to represent the scoundrel herd and refuse of mankind, than those which Job uses, chap

xxx.? and thereby he aggravates his own sorrows and reproaches, to amazement: They that are younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock. For want and famine they were solitary; fleeing into the wilderness, desolate and waste. They cut up mallows by the bushes, and juniper-roots for their meat. They were driven forth from among men (they cried after them as after a thief), to dwell in the cliffs of the valleys, in the caves of the earth, and in rocks. Among the bushes they brayed, under the nettles they were gathered together. They were children of fools, yea, children of base men; they were viler than the earth. And now am I their song, yea, I am their by-word,' &c. How mournful and dejected is the language of his own sorrows! Terrors are turned upon him, they pursue his soul as the wind, and his welfare passes away as a cloud; his bones are pierced within him, and his soul is poured out; he goes mourning without the sun, a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls; while his harp and organ are turned into the voice of them that weep.' I must transcribe one half of this holy book, if I would show the grandeur, the variety, and the justness of his ideas, or the pomp and beauty of his expression. I must copy out a good part of the writings of David and Isaiah, if I would represent the poetical excellences of their thoughts and style: nor is the lan

guage of the lesser prophets, especially in some paragraphs, much inferior to these.

Now, while they paint human nature in its various forms and circumstances, if their designing be so just and noble, their disposition so artful, and their colouring so bright, beyond the most famed human writers, how much more must their descriptions of God and heaven exceed all that is possible to be said by a meaner tongue! When they speak of the dwelling-place of God, He inhabits eternity, and sits upon the throne of his holiness, in the midst of light inaccessible.' When his holiness is mentioned, 'The heavens are not clean in his sight, he charges his angels with folly. He looks to the moon, and it shineth not, and the stars are not pure before his eyes. He is a jealous God, and a consuming fire.' If we speak of strength, 'Behold he is strong: he removes the mountains, and they know it not: he overturns them in his anger: he shakes the earth from her place, and her pillars tremble. He makes a path through the mighty waters, he discovers the foundations of the world. The pillars of heaven are astonished at his reproof. And, after all, These are but a portion of his ways: the thunder of his power who can understand?' His sovereignty, his knowledge, and his wisdom, are revealed to us in language vastly superior to all the poetical accounts of heathen divinity: Let the potsherds strive with the potsherds of the earth; but shall

the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou? He bids the heavens drop down from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness. He commands the sun, and it riseth not, and he sealeth up the stars. It is he that saith to the deep, Be dry, and he drieth up the rivers. Woe to them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the Lord; his eyes are upon all their ways, he understands their thoughts afar off. Hell is naked before him, and destruction hath no covering. He calls out all the stars by their names, he frustrateth the tokens of the liars, and makes the diviners mad. He turns wise men backward, and their knowledge becomes foolish.' His transcendent eminence above all things is most nobly repre

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sented, when he sits upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers. All nations before him are as the drop of a bucket, and as the small dust of the balance. He takes up the isles as a very little thing. Lebanon, with all her beasts, is not sufficient for a sacrifice to this God, nor are all her trees sufficient for the burning - this God, before whom the whole creation is as nothing, yea, less than nothing, and vanity. To which of all the heathen gods, then, will ye compare me, saith the Lord, and what shall I be likened to?' And to which of all the heathen poets shall we liken or compare this glorious orator, the sacred describer of the Godhead? The orators of all nations are as nothing before him, and their

words are vanity and emptiness. Let us turn our eyes now to some of the holy writings, where God is creating the world. How meanly do the best of the Gentiles talk and trifle upon this subject, when brought into comparison with Moses, whom Longinus himself, a Gentile critic, cites as a master of the sublime style, when he chose to use it: 'And the Lord said, Let there be light, and there was light; let there be clouds and seas, sun and stars, plants and animals, and behold they are.' He commanded, and they appear and obey: 'By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.' This is working like a God, with infinite ease and omnipotence. His wonders of providence for the terror and ruin of his adversaries, and for the succour of his saints, is set before our eyes in the Scripture with equal magnificence, and as becomes divinity. When 'he arises out of his place, the earth trembles, the foundations of the hills are shaken, because he is wroth: there goes a smoke up out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth devoureth; coals are kindled by it. He bows the heavens, and comes down, and darkness is under his feet. The mountains melt like wax, and flow down at his presence.' If Virgil, Homer, or Pindar, were to prepare an equipage for a descending god, they might use thunder and lightnings too, and clouds and fire, to form a chariot and horses for the battle or the triumph; but there is none