As this holds out God’s absolute perfection, so we told you that it imports his eternity and unchangeableness. You know Pilate’s speech, “What I have written I have written;” wherein he meant that he would not change it; it should stand so. So this properly belongs to God’s eternity, “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God,” Psal. xc. 2. Now this is properly to be; and this only deserves the name of being, which never was nothing, and never shall be nothing; which may always say, “I am.” You know it is so with nothing else but God. The heavens and earth, with the things therein, could not say, six thousand years ago, “I am.” Adam could once have said, “I am,” but now he cannot say it; for that self-being and fountain-being hath said to him, return to dust. And so it is with all the generations past; where are they now? They were, but they are not. And we then were not, and now are; for we are come in their place, but within a little time, Who of us can say, “I am.” No, “we flee away; and are like a dream, as when one awaketh!” We “are like a tale that is told,” that makes a present noise, and it is past. Within few years this generation will pass, and none will make mention of us; our place will not know us, no more than we do now remember those who have been before. Christ said of John, “he was a burning and shining light;” “he was,” saith he, but now he is not. But Christ may always say, “I am the light and life of men.” Man is; but look a little backward, and he was not; you shall find his original. And step a little forward and he shall not be, you shall find his end. But God is “Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.” But oh! who can retire so far backward as to apprehend a beginning; or go such a start forward as to conceive an end in such a being as is the beginning and end of all things, but without all beginning and end? Whose understanding would it not confound? There is no way here but to flee to Paul’s sanctuary, “O the height and breadth, and length and depth!” We cannot imagine a being, but we must first conceive it nothing, and in some instant receiving its being; and, therefore, “Canst thou by searching find out God?” Therefore what his being is hath not entered into the heart of man to consider. If any man would live out the space but of two generations he would be a world’s wonder; but if any had their days prolonged as the patriarchs before the flood, they would be called ancient indeed, but then the heavens and earth are far more ancient. We may go backward the space of near six thousand years in our own minds, and yet be as far from his beginning as we were. When we are come to the beginning of all things, a man’s imagination may yet extend itself further, and suppose to itself as many thousands of years before the beginning of time, as all the angels and men of all nations and generations from the beginning, if