than ever were read in any profane writer. When Deborah sings her praises to the God of Israel, while he marched from the field of Edom, she sets the earth a trembling, the heavens drop, and the mountains dissolve from before the Lord. They fought from Heaven; the stars in their courses fought against Sisera: when the river of Kishon swept them away; that ancient river, the river Kishon. O my soul, thou hast trodden down strength,' Judges v. &c. When Eliphaz, in the book of Job, speaks his sense of the holiness of God, be introduces a machine in a vision: ' Fear came upon me, trembling on all my bones, the hair of my flesh stood up; a spirit passed by and stood still, but its form was undiscernible; an image before mine eyes; and silence: then I heard a voice, saying, "Shall mortal man be more just than God?" &c. Job iv. When he describes the safety of the righteous, he hides him from the scourge of the tongue, he makes him laugh at destruction and famine, he brings the stones of the field into league with him, and makes the brute animals enter into a covenant of peace,' Job v. 21, &c. When Job speaks of the grave, how melancholy is the gloom that he spreads over it! It is a region to which I must shortly go, and whence I shall not return: it is a land of darkness, it is darkness itself, the land of the shadow of death; all confusion and disorder, and where the light is as darkness. This is my house, there have I made my bed: I have said to corruption, thou art my father; and to the worm, thou art my mother and my sister: and for my hope, who shall see it? I and my hope go down together to

the bars of the pit,' Job x. 21. and xvii. 13. When he humbles himself in complainings before the almightiness of God, what contemptible and feeble images doth he use! Wilt thou break a leaf driven to and fro? Wilt thou pursue the dry stub. ble? I consume away like a rotten thing, a gar ment eaten by the moth,' Job xiii. 25, &c. Thou liftest me up to the wind, thou causest me to ride upon it, and dissolvest my substance,' Job xxiii. 22. Can any man invent more despicable ideas to re present the scoundrel herd, and refuse of mankind, than those which Job uses? Chap. xxx. and thereby he aggravates his own sorrows and reproaches to amazement: They that are younger than I, have me in derision: whose fathers I would have disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock; for want and famine they were solitary; fleeing into the wilderness desolate and waste. They cut up mallows by the bushes, and juniper-roots for their meat. They were driven forth from among men, (they cried after them as after a thief) to dwell in the cliffs of the vallies, in the caves of the earth, and in rocks. Among the bushes they brayed; under the nettles they were gathered together; they were children of fools, yea, children of base men; they were viler than the earth. And now am I their song, yea, I am their by-word," &c. How mournful and dejected is the language of his own sorrows! Terrors are turned upon him, they pursue his soul as the wind, and his welfare passes away as a cloud; his bones are pierced within him, and his soul is poured out; he goes mourning without the sun, a brother to dragons, a companion to owls; while his harp and organ are

turned into the voice of them that weep.' I must transcribe one half of this holy book, if I would show the grandeur, the variety, and the justness of his ideas, or the pomp and beauty of his expression. I must copy out a good part of the writings of David and Isaiah, if I would represent the poetical excellencies of their thoughts and style. Nor is the language of the lesser prophets, especially in some paragraphs, much inferior to these.

Now while they paint human nature in its various forms and circumstances, if their designing be so just and noble, their disposition so artful, and their colouring so bright, beyond the most famed human writers; how much more must their descriptions of God and Heaven exceed all that is possible to be said by a meaner tongue? When they speak of the dwelling-place of God, He inhabits eternity, and sits upon the throne of his holiness, in the midst of light inaccessible.' When his holiness is mentioned, 'the heavens are not clean in his sight; he charges his angels with folly: he looks to the moon, and it shineth not, and the stars are not pure before his eyes: he is a jealous God, and a consuming fire.' It we speak of strength, Behold he is strong: he removes the mountains, and they know it not: he overturns them in his anger: he shakes the earth from her place, and her pillars tremble: he makes a path through the mighty waters, he discovers the foundations of the world; the pillars of Heaven are astonished at his reproof. And after all, these are but a portion of his ways: the thunder of his power who can understand? His sovereignty, his knowledge, and his wisdom, are revealed to us in language vastly superior to all the poetical accounts

of heathen divinity. Let the potsherds strive with the potsherds of the earth; but shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, what makest thou? he bids the heavens drop down from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness. He commands the sun, and it riseth not, and he sealeth up the stars. It is he that saith to the deep, be dry, and he drieth up the rivers. Woe to them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the Lord; his eyes are upon all their ways, he understands their thoughts afar off. Hell is naked before him, aud destruction hath no covering. He calls out all the stars by their names, he frustrateth the tokens of the liars, and makes the diviners mad: he turns wise men backward, and their knowledge becomes foolish.' His transcendent eminence above all things is most nobly represented, when he 'sits upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers: all nations before him are as the drop of a bucket, and as the small dust of the balance: he takes up the isles as a very little thing; Lebanon, with all her beasts, is not sufficient for a sacrifice to this God,' nor are all the trees sufficient for the burning.' This God before whom the whole creation is as nothing, yea, less than nothing, and vanity.' To which of all the heathen gods then will ye compare me, saith the Lord, and what shall I be likened to? And to which of all the heathen poets shall we liken or compare this glorious orator, the sacred describer of the godhead? The orators of all nations are as nothing before him, and their words are vanity and emptiness. Let us turn our eyes now to some of the holy writings, where God is creating the world:

how meanly do the best of the Gentiles talk and trifle upon this subject, when brought into comparision with Moses, whom Longinus himself, a Gentile critic, cites as a master of the sublime style, when he chose to use it; and the Lord said, let there be light, and there was light; let there be clouds and seas, sun and stars, plants and animals, and hehold they are :' he commanded, and they appear and obey: By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth: this is working like a God, with infinite ease and omnipotence. His wonders of Providence for the terror and ruin of his adversaries, and for the succour of his saints, is set before our eyes in the scripture with equal magnificence, and as becomes divinity. When he arises out of his place, the earth trembles, the foundations of the hills are shaken because he is wroth: there goes a smoke up out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth devoureth; coals are kindled by it. He bows the heavens, and comes down, and darkness is under his feet. The mountains melt like wax, and flow down at his presence.' If Virgil, Homer, or Pindar, were to prepare an equipage for a descending God, they might use thunder and lightning too, and clouds and fire, to form a chariot and horses for the battle, or the triumph; but there is none of them provides him a flight of cherubs instead of horses, or seats him in chariots of salvation. David beholds him riding upon the Heaven of heavens, by his name JAH: he was mounted upon a cherub, and did fly, he flew on the wings of the wind;' and Habbakuk 'sends the pestilence