Meditations on the holy sacrament of the Lords last Supper Written many years sinceMeditations on the holy sacrament of the Lords last Supper Written many yeares since

Secondly, as the Church is here but a travelling Church, therefore cannot possibly have any farther knowledge of that Country whither it goes but only by the Maps which describe it, the Word of God, and these^b few fruits which are sent unto them from it, the ^cfruits of the Spirit, whereby they have some taste and relish of the World to come: so moreover is it even in this estate, by being enclosed in a body of sin, (which hath a darkening property in it, and adds unto the natural limitedness of the understanding, an accidental defect and soreness) much disabled from this very imperfect assent unto Christ the Object of its Faith: for as sin when it wastes the Conscience and bears Rule in the Soul, hath a power like Delilah and the Philistines, to put out our eyes, (as^d Ulysses the eye of his Cyclops with his sweet wine) a power to e corrupt Principles, to^f pervert and make crooked the very Rule by which we work; conveying all moral truths to the Soul, as some concave glasses use to represent the species of things to the eye, not according to their natural rectitude or beauty, but with those wrestings, inversions, and deformities ⟨p. 85⟩which by the indisposition thereof they are framed unto; so even the least corruptions unto which the best are subject, (having a natural antipathy to the evidence and power of divine Truth) do necessarily in some manner distemper our understandings, and make such a degree of soreness in the faculty as that it cannot but so far forth be impatient and unable to bear that glorious lustre which shines immediately in the Lord Christ. So then we see what a great disproportion there is between us and Christ immediately presented; and from thence we may observe our necessity, and Gods mercy in affording us the refreshment of a Type and Shadow.

Secondly, as the Church is heere but a travelling Church, therfore cannot possibly have any farther knowledge of that Countrey whither it goes but onely by the Mappes which describe it, the Word of God, and these