"This day is a day purposely set apart for feasting, and it is like one of the Lord's feasts, where you have a feast and an holy convocation, and you are first met here to feast your souls with the fat things of God's house, with a feast of fat things, full of marrow; and wine on the lees well refined; and afterwards to feast your bodies with the fat things of the land and sea, both plenty and dainty. But if you please you may first feast your eyes. Do but behold the face of the assembly. I dare say it is one of the excellentest feasts that ever your eyes were feasted with. Here in this assembly you may first see the two Houses of Parliament--the honourable Lords and Commons, who after thus many years wrestling with extreme difficulties, in their endeavouring to preserve an undone kingdom, and to purge and reform a backsliding and a polluted Church, you may behold them still not only preserved from so many treacherous designs, and open violences, but as resolved as ever to go on with this great work which God hath put into their hands. Here you may also see his excellency my most honoured lord, and near him that other noble lord the commander of our forces by sea, as the other is by land; and with them abundance of lords and resolute commanders; all of them with their faces like lions, who after so many terrible battles, and abundance of difficulties, and charging in the faces of so many deaths, are yet all of them preserved, and not a hair of their head fallen to the ground. Here also you may behold the representative body of the City of London, the Lord Mayor, the Court of Aldermen, the Common Council, the militia, and in them the face and affection of this glorious city; this city which, under God, hath had the honour of being the greatest means of the salvation of the whole kingdom, and after the expense of millions of treasure, and thousands of their lives, still as courageous and resolute to live and die in the cause of God as ever heretofore. Here you may likewise see a reverend assembly of grave and learned divines, who daily wait upon the angel in the mount, to receive from him the lively oracles and the pattern of God's house to present unto you. All these of our own nation, and with them you may see the honourable, reverend, and learned commissioners of the Church of Scotland, and in them behold the wisdom and the affection of their whole nation, willing to live and die with us; all these may you behold in one view. And not only so, but you may behold them all of one mind, after so many plots and conspiracies to divide them one from another. And, which is yet more, you may see them all met together this day on purpose both to praise God for this union, and to hold it out to the whole world, and thereby to testify that as one man they will live and die together in this cause of God. Oh, beloved, how beautiful is the face of this assembly! Verily, I may say of it, as it was said