times and in our various stations, make each allowable task of our earthly life to become also “Holiness to the lord;” and as the Christian’s body is made a temple of the Holy Grhost, so can he render the Christian himself, in all his social relations and enterprises, “A priest and A king unto god.”  And the great principle of conciliation amid earth’s jarring tribes and clashing interests, and of true and helpful communion among mankind, is not external but internal, not material but spiritual, not, terrene but celestial; and is found in the blending by this one divine Spirit, of all earth’s inhabitants, in a common contrition before a common redemption, tending as these inhabitants are, under a common sin and doom, to the same inevitable graves; but all of them invited, in the one name of one Christ, to aspire to the same heaven of endless and perfect blessedness.

William R. Williams.
New York, January, 1851.

THE RICHES OF BUNYAN.

I. GOD.

Glory of god.

God is the chief good—­good so as nothing is but himself.  He is in himself most happy; yea, all good and all true happiness are only to be found in God, as that which is essential to his nature; nor is there any good or any happiness in or with any creature or thing but what is communicated to it by God.  God is the only desirable good; nothing without him is worthy of our hearts.  Right thoughts of God are able to ravish the heart; how much more happy is the man that has interest in God.  God alone is able by himself to put the soul into a more blessed, comfortable, and happy condition than can the whole world; yea, and more than if all the created happiness of all the angels of heaven did dwell in one man’s bosom.  I cannot tell what to say.  I am drowned.  The life, the glory, the blessedness, the soul-satisfying goodness that is in God, are beyond all expression.

It was this glory of God, the sight and visions of this God of glory, that provoked Abraham to leave his country and kindred to come after God.  The reason why men are so careless of and so indifferent about their coming to God, is because they have their eyes blinded—­because they do not perceive his glory.

God is so blessed a one, that did he not hide himself and his glory, the whole world would be ravished with him; but he has, I will not say reasons of state, but reasons of glory, glorious reasons why he hideth himself from the world and appeareth but to particular ones.

What is heaven without God?  But many there be who cannot abide God; no, they like not to go to heaven, because God is there.  The nature of God lieth cross to the lusts of men.  A holy God, a glorious holy God, an infinitely holy God; this spoils all.  But to the soul that is awakened, and that is made to see things as they are, to him God is what he is in himself, the blessed, the highest, the only eternal good, and he without the enjoyment of whom all things would sound but empty in the ears of that soul.