A guide to godliness or a Treatise of a Christian life showing the dutiesA guide to godlynesse or a Treatise of a Christian life shewing the duties

§. Sect. 2 What ordinary meditation is, and the subject of it.

§. Sect. 2 What ordinary meditation is, and the subiect of it.

The other kind of meditation which is ordinary, set, solemn and deliberate, is, when as purposely setting apart all other business, and sequestring our selves from all company, we do bend our mind, with all studious intention, to discourse deliberately upon some spiritual subject or part of Gods Word, which we know in some measure, that by diligent insisting, serious debating, and deep musing upon it, till we have brought it to some spiritual use and good issue, we may apply it to our particular use for the further enlightening of our understandings, and the confirming of our judgments, and also for the purging and sanctifying of our hearts and affections, the stirring up of our zeal and devotion, and the bettering and amending of our lives and conversation; making choice of such place, time, gesture, and other circumstances, as may best fit and further us in this holy exercise. And this is that kind of meditation which is chiefly intended and commended unto us in the holy Scriptures, both by the precepts before quoted, and also by the examples of Gods Saints and servants, as of Isaac, who is said, towards evening, to have gone out into ¹the fields to meditate, of which that Scripture speaketh in such a manner, as though it had been his daily exercise. So David professeth, that Gods Law and Word was his daily meditation, as we may see in the hundred ⟨p. 542⟩and nineteenth Psalm, wherein he not only testifieth his doing of it, but also, as by an example, proveth it, seeing that Psalm is nothing else but an heavenly meditation, the subject matter whereof is the holy Law of God. Even as in many other Psalms he meditateth upon divers other subjects. As who are to be esteemed truly happy, and heirs of eternal