I remember I am not alone, and therefore forget not to contemplate Him and his attributes who is ever with me, especially those two mighty ones, His wisdom and eternity:  with the one I recreate, with the other I confound my understanding; for who can speak of eternity without a solecism, or think thereof without an ecstasy?  Time we may comprehend:  it is but five days older than ourselves, and hath the same horoscope with the world; but to retire so far back as to apprehend a beginning, to give such an infinite start forward as to conceive an end in an essence that we affirm hath neither the one nor the other, it puts my reason to St. Paul’s sanctuary:  my philosophy dares not say the angels can do it; God hath not made a creature that can comprehend him; it is a privilege of his own nature:  I am that I am, was his own definition unto Moses; and it was a short one, to confound mortality, that durst question God or ask him what he was.  Indeed he only is; all others have and shall be; but in eternity there is no distinction of tenses; and therefore that terrible term predestination, which hath troubled so many weak heads to conceive, and the wisest to explain, is in respect to God no prescious determination of our states to come, but a definitive blast of his will already fulfilled, and at the instant that he first decreed it; for to his eternity, which is indivisible and all together, the last trump, is already sounded, the reprobates in the flame and the blessed in Abraham’s bosom.  St. Peter speaks modestly when he saith, a thousand years to God are but as one day; for to speak like a philosopher, those continued instances of time which flow into a thousand years make not to him one moment:  what to us is to come, to his eternity is present, his whole duration being but one permanent point, without succession, parts, flux, or division.

The world was made to be inhabited by beasts, but studied and contemplated by man; ’tis the debt of our reason we owe unto God, and the homage we pay for not being beasts; without this, the world is still as though it had not been, or as it was before the sixth day, when as yet there was not a creature that could conceive or say there was a world.  The wisdom of God receives small honor from those vulgar heads that rudely stare about, and with a gross rusticity admire his works:  those highly magnify him whose judicious inquiry into his acts, and deliberate research into his creatures, return the duty of a devout and learned admiration.

“Natura nihil agit frustra,” is the only indisputable axiom in philosophy; there are no grotesques in nature; not anything framed to fill up empty cantons and unnecessary spaces:  in the most imperfect creatures, and such as were not preserved in the ark, but, having their seeds and principles in the womb of nature, are everywhere where the power of the sun is—­in these is the wisdom of His hand discovered; out of this rank Solomon chose the object of his admiration;