In my solitary and retired imagination (_Neque enim cum porticus, aut me lectulus accepit, desum mihi_) I remember I am not alone, and therefore forget not to contemplate him and his Attributes who is ever with me, especially those two mighty ones, his Wisdom and Eternity; with the one I recreate, with the other I confound my understanding: for who can speak of Eternity without a solœcism, or think thereof without an Extasie? Time we may comprehend; 'tis but five days elder then our selves, and hath the same Horoscope with the World; but to retire so far back as to apprehend a beginning, to give such an infinite start forwards as to conceive an end in an essence that we affirm hath neither the one nor the other, it puts my Reason to _St. Paul's_ Sanctuary: my Philosophy dares not say the Angels can do it; God hath not made a Creature that can comprehend him; 'tis a privilege of His own nature. _I am that I am_, was his own definition unto _Moses_; and 'twas a short one, to confound mortality, that durst question God, or ask him what he was; indeed he onely is; all others have and shall be; but in Eternity there is no distinction of Tenses; and therefore that terrible term _Predestination_, which hath troubled so many weak heads to conceive, and the wisest to explain, is in respect to God no prescious determination of our Estates to come, but a definitive blast of his Will already fulfilled, and at the instant that he first decreed it; for to his Eternity which is indivisible and all together, the last Trump is already sounded, the reprobates in the flame, and the blessed in _Abraham's_ bosome. _St. Peter_ speaks modestly, when he saith, a thousand years to God are but as one day: for to speak like a Philosopher, those continued instances of time which flow into a thousand years, make not to Him one moment; what to us is to come, to his Eternity is present, his whole duration being but one permanent point, without Succession, Parts, Flux, or Division. SECT. 12