above, yet he is as present and observant below. V. If he be a Spirit, then as he is incomprehensible and immense in being, so also there is no comprehension of his knowledge. The nearer any creature comes to the nature of a spirit, the more knowing and understanding it is. Life is the most excellent being, and understanding is the most excellent life. _Materia est iners et mortua._ The nearer any thing is to the earthly matter, as it hath less action, so less life and feeling. Man is nearer an angel than beasts, and therefore he hath a knowing understanding spirit in him. There is a spirit in man, and the more or less this spirit of man is abstracted from sensual and material things, it lives the more excellent and pure life, and is, as it were, more or less delivered from the chains of the body. These souls that have never risen above, and retired from sensible things, O, how narrow are they,—how captivated within the prison of the flesh! But when the Lord Jesus comes to set free he delivers a soul from this bondage, he makes these chains fall off and leads the soul apart to converse with God himself, and to meditate on things not seen—sin, wrath, hell, and heaven. And the farther it goes from itself, and the more abstracted it is from the consideration of present things, the more it lives a life like angels. And therefore, when the soul is separated from the body, it is then perfectly free, and hath the largest extent of knowledge. A man’s soul must be almost like Paul’s “whether out of the body, or in the body, I know not,”—if he would understand aright spiritual things. Now then, this infinite Spirit is an all knowing Spirit, all seeing Spirit, as well as all-present, “there is no searching of his understanding,” Isa. xl. 28, Psalm. cxlvii. 5. “Who hath directed the Spirit of the Lord, or being his counsellor, hath taught him?” Isa. xl. 13, Rom. xi. 34. He calls the generations from the beginning, and known to him are all his works from the beginning. O that you would always set this God before you, or rather set yourselves always in his presence, in whose sight you are always! How would it compose our hearts to reverence and fear in all our actions, if we did indeed believe that the Judge of all the world is an eye witness to our most retired and secret thoughts and doings! If any man were as privy to thy thoughts, as thy own spirit and conscience, thou wouldst blush and be ashamed before him. If every one of us could open a window into one another’s spirits, I think this assembly should dismiss as quickly as that of Christ’s, when he bade them that were without sin cast a stone at the woman. We could not look one upon another. O then, why are we so little apprehensive of the all-searching eye of God, who can even declare to us our thought, before it be? How much atheism is rooted in the heart of the most holy! We do not always meditate, with David, Psal. cxxxix., on that all searching and all knowing Spirit who knows our down sitting and