If it be a folly to deny the being of God, it will be our wisdom, then, since we acknowledge his being, often to think of him. Thoughts are the first issue of a creature as reasonable:[139] He that hath given us the faculty whereby we are able to think, should be the principal object about which the power of it should be exercised. It is a justice to God, the author of our understandings, a justice to {a88} the nature of our understandings, that the noblest faculty should be employed about the most excellent object. Our minds are a beam from God; and, therefore, as the beams of the sun, when they touch the earth, should reflect back upon God. As we seem to deny the being of God not to think of him; we seem also to unsoul our souls in misemploying the activity of them any other way, like flies, to be oftener on dunghills than flowers. It is made the black mark of an ungodly man, or an atheist, that “God is not in all his thoughts” (Psalm x. 4). What comfort can be had in the being of God without thinking of him with reverence and delight? A God forgotten is as good as no God to us. {a89} DISCOURSE II. ON PRACTICAL ATHEISM. PSALM xiv. 1.――The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good. PRACTICAL atheism is natural to man in his depraved state, and very frequent in the hearts and lives of men. _The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God._ He regards him as little as if he had no being. He said in his _heart_, not with his tongue, nor in his head: he never firmly thought it, nor openly asserted it. Shame put a bar to the first, and natural reason to the second; yet, perhaps, he had sometimes some doubts whether there were a God or no. He wished there were not any, and sometimes hoped there were none at all. He could not raze out the notion of a Deity in his mind, but he neglected the fixing the sense of God in his heart, and made it too much his business to deface and blot out those characters of God in his soul, which had been left under the ruins of original nature. Men may have atheistical hearts without atheistical heads. Their reasons may defend the notion of a Deity, while their hearts are empty of affection to the Deity. Job’s children may curse God _in their hearts_, though not with their lips.[140]