If ye ask what he is, we may glance at some notions and expressions to hold him out. In relation to the creatures, we may call him Creator, Redeemer, Light, Life, Omnipotent, Good, Merciful, Just, and such like; but if you ask, what is his proper name in relation to himself, _ipse novit_, himself knows that, we must be silent, and silence in such a subject is the rarest eloquence. But let us hear what the Lord himself speaks, in answer to this question. If any can tell, sure he himself knows his own name best. “I am (saith he) what I am.” _Sum qui sum._ “Go tell them that I AM hath sent thee.” A strange answer, but an answer only pertinent for such a question. What should Moses make of this? What is he the wiser of his asking? Indeed he might be the wiser, it might teach him more by silence than all human eloquence could instruct him by speaking. His question was curious, and behold an answer short and dark, to confound vain and presumptuous mortality,—“I am what I am,” an answer that does not satisfy curiosity, for it leaves room for the first question, and What art thou? But abundant to silence faith and sobriety, that it shall ask no more, but sit down and wonder. There are three things I conceive imported in this name: God’s unsearchableness, God’s unchangeableness, and God’s absoluteness. His ineffability, his eternity, and his sovereignty and independent subsistence, upon whom all other things depend. I say, 1. His unsearchableness. You know it is our manner of speech when we would cover any thing from any, and not answer any thing distinctly to them, we say, “It is what it is, I have said what I have said, I will not make you wiser of it.” Here then is the fittest notion you can take up God into, to find him unsearchable beyond all understanding, beyond all speaking. The more ye speak or think, to find him always beyond what ye speak or think, whatever you discover of him, to conceive that infiniteness is beyond that, _ad finem cujus pertransire non potest_, the end of which you cannot reach, that he is an unmeasurable depth, a boundless ocean of perfection, that you can neither sound the bottom of it, nor find the breadth of it! Can a child wade the sea, or take it up in the hollow of its hand? Whenever any thing of God is seen, he is seen a wonder, “Wonderful is the name he is known by”. All our knowledge reacheth no further than admiration. “Who is like unto thee?” Exod. xv. 11, Psalm lxxxix. 6, 7, and admiration speaks ignorance. The greatest attainment of knowledge reacheth but to such a question as this, Who is like to thee? to know only that he is not like any other thing that we know, but not to know what he is. And the different degrees of knowledge are but in more admiration or less at his unconceivableness, and in more or less affection expressed in such pathetic interrogations, O who is like the Lord? How excellent is his name? Here is the greatest degree of saints knowledge here away, to ask