“I cannot deny myself, in this place, the pleasure of publishing to the world a very beautiful resemblance, the first hints and notices whereof I received formerly in conversation from my reverend and worthy friend Mr. Robert Bragge, whereby the person of Christ as God-man in His exalted state may be happily represented. The sun in the heavens is the most glorious of all visible beings: his sovereign influence has a most astonishing extent through all the planetary globes, and bestows light and heat upon all of them. It is the sun that gives life and motion to all the infinite varieties of the animal world in the earth, air, and water. It draws out the vegetable juices from the earth, and covers the surface of it with trees, herbs, and flowers. It is the sun that gives beauty and colour to all the millions of bodies round the globe; by its pervading power perhaps it forms minerals and metals under the earth. Its happy effects are innumerable; they reach certainly to everything that has life and motion, or that gives life, support, or pleasure to mankind. Now suppose God should create a most illustrious spirit, and unite it to the body of the sun, as a human soul is united to a human body: suppose this spirit had a perceptive power capacious enough to become conscious of every sunbeam, and all the influences and effects of this vast shining globe, both in its light, heat, and motion, even to the remotest region; and suppose at the same time it was able, by an act of its will, to send out or withhold every sunbeam as it pleased, and thereby to give light and darkness, life and death, in a sovereign manner, to all the animal inhabitants of this our earth, or even of all the planetary worlds. Such may be the ‘glorified human soul of our blessed Redeemer united to His glorified body;’ and perhaps His knowledge and His power may be as extensive as this similitude represents, especially when we consider this soul and body as personally united to the Divine nature, and as one with God. Now this noble thought may be supported by such considerations as these. As our souls are conscious of the light, shape, motions, etc., of such distant bodies as the planet Saturn or the fixed stars, because our eyes receive rays from thence; so may not a human soul united to a body as easily be supposed to have a consciousness of anything, wheresoever it can send out rays or emit either fluids or atoms from its own body? May not the sun, for instance, if a soul were united to it, become thereby so glorious a complex being, as to send out every ray with knowledge, and have a consciousness of everything wheresoever it sends its direct or reflected rays? And may not the human soul of our Lord Jesus Christ have a consciousness of everything wheresoever it can send direct or reflected rays from His own shining and glorified body? To add yet to the wonder, we may suppose that these rays may be subtle as magnetic beams, which penetrate brass and stone as easily as light doth glass; and at the same time they may be as swift as light, which reaches the most amazing distance of several millions of miles in a minute. By this means, since the light of the sun pervades all secret chambers in our hemisphere at once, and fills all places with direct and reflected beams, if consciousness belonged to all those beams, what a sort of omniscient being would the sun be! I mean omniscient in its own sphere. And why may not the human soul and body of our glorified Saviour be thus furnished with such an amazing extent of knowledge and power, and yet not be truly infinite? Let us dwell a little longer upon these delightful contemplations. If a soul had but a full knowledge and command of all the atoms of one solid foot of matter, which according to modern philosophy is infinitely divisible, what strange and astonishing influences would it have over this world of ours? What confusions might it raise in distant nations, sending pestilential streams into a thousand bodies, and destroying armies at once? And it might scatter benign or healing and vital influences to as large a circumference. If our blessed Lord, in the days of His humiliation, could send virtue out of Him to heal a poor diseased woman, who touched the hem of His garment with a finger, who knows what healing atoms, or what killing influences, He may send from His dwelling in glory to the remotest distances of our world, to execute His Father’s counsels of judgment or mercy? It is not impossible, so far as I can judge, that the soul of Christ in its glorified state may have as much command over our heavens and our earth, and all things contained in them, as our souls in the present state have over our own limbs and muscles to move them at pleasure. Let us remember that it is now found out, and agreed in the new philosophy of Sir Isaac Newton, that the distances are prodigious to which the powerful influence of the sun reaches in the centre of our planetary system. It is the sun who holds and restrains all the planets in their several orbits, and keeps in those vast bodies of Jupiter and Saturn in their constant revolutions—one at the distance of 424 millions, and the other at the distance of 777 millions of miles—besides all the other influences it has upon everything that may live and grow in those planetary worlds. It is the sun who reduces the long wanderings of the comets back again near to himself from distances more immensely great than those of Saturn and Jupiter. And why may not the human nature of our Lord Jesus Christ, both in soul and body, have a dominion given Him by the Father larger than the sun in the firmament? Why may not the Son of God be endued with an immediate consciousness and agency to a far greater distance? Thus if we conceive of the human soul of Christ, either in the amazing extent of its own native powers or in the additional acquirements of a glorified state, we see reason to believe that its capacities are far above our old usual conceptions, and may be raised and exalted to a degree of knowledge, power, and glory suitable and equal to His operations and offices, so far as they are attributed to His human nature in the word of God.”
APPARENT FOLLY REAL WISDOM.
“This very man, this Gelotes, a few days ago, was carried by his neighbour Typiger, to see a gentleman of his acquaintance; they found him standing at the window of his chamber, moving and turning round a glass prism, near a round hole which he had made in the window-shutter, and casting all the colours of the rainbow upon the wall of the room. They were unwilling to disturb him, though he amused himself at this rate for half an hour together, merely to please and entertain his eyesight, as Gelotes imagined, with the brightness and the strength of the reds and the blues, the greens and the purples, in many shifting forms of situation, while several little implements lay about him, of white paper and shreds of coloured silk, pieces of tin with holes in them, spectacles and burning-glasses. When the gentleman at last spied his company, he came down and entertained them agreeably enough upon other subjects, and dismissed them. At another time, Gelotes beheld the same gentleman blowing up large bubbles with a tobacco-pipe out of a bowl of water well impregnated with soap, which is a common diversion of boys. As the bubbles rose, he marked the little changeable colours on the surface of them with great attention, till they broke and vanished into air and water. He seemed to be very grave and solemn in this sort of recreation, and now and then smiled to see the little appearances and disappearances of colours, as the bubbles grew thinner towards the top, while the watery particles of it ran down along the side to the bottom, and the surface grew too thin and feeble to include the air, then it burst to pieces and was lost. ‘Well,’ says Gelotes to his friend, ‘I did not think you would have carried me into the acquaintance of a madman; surely he can never be right in his senses who wastes his hours in such fooleries as these. Whatsoever good opinion I had conceived of a gentleman of your intimacy, I am amazed now that you should keep up any degree of acquaintance with him, when his reason is gone and he is become a mere child. What are all these little scenes of sport and amusement, but proofs of the absence of his understanding? Poor gentleman! I pity him in his unhappy circumstances; but I hope he has friends to take care of him under this degree of distraction.’ Typiger was not a little pleased to see that his project, with regard to his neighbour Gelotes, had succeeded so well; and when he had suffered him to run on at this rate for some minutes, he interrupted him with a surprising word: ‘This very gentleman,’ says he, ‘is the great Sir Isaac Newton, the first of philosophers, the glory of Great Britain, and renowned among the nations. You have beheld him now making these experiments over again by which he first found out the nature of light and colours, and penetrated deeper into the mysteries of them than all mankind ever knew before him. This is the man, and these his contrivances, upon which you so freely cast your contempt, and pronounce him distracted. You know not the depth of his designs, and therefore you censured them all as fooleries, whereas the learned world has esteemed them the utmost reach of human sagacity.’
“Gelotes was all confusion and silence; whereupon Typiger proceeded thus: ‘Go now and ridicule the law-giver of Israel, and the ceremonies of the Jewish Church, which Moses taught them; go, repeat your folly and your slanders, and laugh at these Divine ceremonies, merely because you know not the meaning of them, go, and affront the God of Israel, and reproach Him for sending Moses to teach such forms of worship to the Jews. There is not the least of them but was appointed by the Greatest of Beings, and has some special design and purpose in the eye of Divine Wisdom. Many of them were explained by the Apostle Paul, in his letter to the Hebrews, as types and emblems of the glories and blessings of the New Testament; and the rest of them, whose reason has not been discovered to us, remain, perhaps, to be made known at the conversion of the Jews, when Divine light shall be spread over all the ancient dispensations, and a brighter glory diffused over all the rites and forms of religion which God ever instituted among the race of Adam.’”
A PLEA FOR CHRISTIANIZING HORACE.
“It is a piece of ancient and sacred history which Moses informs us of, that when the tribes of Israel departed from the land of Egypt, they borrowed of their neighbours gold and jewels by the appointment of God, for the decoration of their sacrifices and solemn worship when they should arrive at the appointed place in the wilderness. God Himself taught His people how the richest of metals which had ever been abused to the worship of idols might be purified by the fire, and being melted up into a new form, might be consecrated to the service of the living God, and add to the magnificence and grandeur of His tabernacle and temple. Such are some of the poetical writings of the ancient heathens; they have a great deal of native beauty and lustre in them, and through some happy turn given them by the pen of a Christian poet may be transformed into Divine meditations, and may assist the devout and pious soul in several parts of the Christian life and worship. Amongst all the rest of the Pagan writers, I know none so fit for this service as the odes of Horace, as vile a sinner as he was. Their manner of composure comes nearer the spirit and force of the Psalms of David than any other; and as we take the devotions of the Jewish king, and bring them into our Christian churches, by changing the scene and the chronology, and superadding some of the glories of the Gospel so may the representation of some of the heathen virtues, by a little more labour, be changed into Christian graces, or, at least, into the image of them, so far as human power can reach. One day, musing on this subject, I made an experiment on the two last stanzas of Ode xxix, Book iii.
‘Non est meum, si mugiat Africis
Malus procellis, ad miseras preces
Decurrere, et votis pacisci,