“1.  That religion is pleasure, will appear, if you consider what part of our nature it more particularly employs and gratifies.

“It is not the gratification of the senses, or of the animal part of our nature, but a provision for the immaterial and immortal mind.  The mind of man is an image not only of God’s spirituality, but of his infinity.  It is not like the senses, limited to this or that kind of object; as the sight intermeddles not with that which affects the smell; but with an universal superintendence, it arbitrates upon, and takes them all in.  It is, as I may say, an ocean, into which all the little rivulets of sensation, both external and internal, discharge themselves.  Now this is that part of man to which the exercises of religion properly belong.  The pleasures of the understanding, in the contemplation of truth, have been sometimes so great, so intense, so engrossing of all the powers of the soul, that there has been no room left for any other kind of pleasure.  How short of this are the delights of the epicure!  How vastly disproportionate are the pleasures of the eating, and of the thinking man!  Indeed, says Dr. South, as different as the silence of an Archimides in the study of a problem, and the stillness of a swine at her wash.  Nothing is comparable to the pleasures of mind; these are enjoyed by the spirits above, by Jesus Christ, and the great and blessed God.

“Think what objects religion brings before the mind, as the sources of its pleasure:  no less than the great God himself, and that both in his nature and in his works.  For the eye of religion, like that of the eagle, directs itself chiefly to the sun, to a glory that neither admits of a superior nor an equal.  The mind is conversant, in the exercises of piety, with all the most stupendous events that have ever occurred in the history of the universe, or that ever will transpire till the close of time.  The creation of the world; its government by a universal Providence; its redemption by the death of Christ; its conversion by the power of the Holy Ghost; the immortality of the soul; the resurrection of the body; the certainty of an eternal existence; the secrets of the unseen state; subjects, all of them of the loftiest and sublimest kind, which have engaged the inquiries of the profoundest intellects, are the matter of contemplation to real piety.  What topics are these for our reason, under the guidance of religion, to study:  what an ocean to swim in, what a heaven to soar in:  what heights to measure, what depths to fathom.  Here are subjects, which, from their infinite vastness, must be ever new, and ever-fresh; which can be never laid aside as dry or empty.  If novelty is the parent of pleasure, here it may be found; for although the subject itself is the same, some new view of it, some fresh discovery of its wonders, is ever bursting upon the mind of the devout and attentive inquirer after truth.