The divine life in three treatises

3. Our Walking with God, doth include our esteeming and intending Him as the Ultimate End and felicity of our souls. He is not to be sought, or loved, or conversed with, as a means to any greater good (for there is no greater) nor as inferior, or merely equal unto any: His Goodness must be the most powerful attractive of our Love: His favour must be valued as our happiness; and the Pleasing of him must be our most industrious employment. To walk with him, is to live in the warming reviving sunshine of his Goodness, ⟨p. 163⟩and to feel a delighting satisfying virtue in his Love and gracious presence. To live as those that are not their own, and that have their lives, and faculties, and provisions, and helps for their Masters service: As a Horse or Dog is of so much worth, as he is of Use to him that owneth him; and that is the best that is the most serviceable to his Master: Yet with this very great difference, that man being a more noble and capacious creature, is admitted not only into a state of Service, but of Sonship, and Friendship, and Communion with God; and is allowed and appointed to share more in the pleasure and fruits of his services, and to put in his own felicity and delight into his End; not only because Self-love is natural and necessary to the Creature, but also because he is under the Promise of a Reward; and (more than either) because he is a Lover, and not only a Servant, and his work is principally a work of Love, and therefore his End is finis amantis, the end of a Lover, which •a Mutual Complacency in the exercises of Love.

3. Our Walking with God, doth include our esteeming and intending Him as the Ultimate End and felicity of our souls. He is not to be sought, or loved, or conversed with, as a means to any greater good (for there is no greater) nor as inferiour, or meerly equal unto any: His Goodness must be the most powerful attractive of our Love: His favour must be valued as our happiness; and the Pleasing of him must be our most industrious imployment. To walk with him, is to live in the warming reviving sunshine of his Goodness, ⟨p. 163⟩and to feel a delighting satisfying virtue in his Love and gracious presence. To live as those that are not their own, and that have their lives, and faculties, and provisions, and helps for their Masters service: As a Horse or Dog is of so much worth, as he is of Use to him that owneth him; and that is the best that is the most serviceable to his Master: Yet with this very great difference, that man being a more noble and capacious creature, is admitted not only into a state of Service, but of Sonship, and Friendship, and Communion with God; and is allowed and appointed to share more in the pleasure and fruits of his services, and to put in his own felicity and delight into his End; not only because Self-love is natural and necessary to the Creature, but also because he is under the Promise of a Reward; and (more than either) because he is a Lover, and not only a Servant, and his work is principally a work of Love, and therefore his End is finis amantis, the end of a Lover, which a Mutual Complacency in the exercises of Love.