The life of faith in three parts, the first is a sermon on Heb.…

The Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God, are the essentialities which we call the Nature of God: These in their proper form, and transcendent perfection, are incommunicable: But when they produce an effect on the creature, which for the resemblance may analogically be called by the same names; the names are logically communicable, though the thing it self (which is the Divine Essence or Perfections) be still incommunicable: But when they only produce effects more heterogeneal or equivocal, then we call those effects only the footsteps or demonstrations of their cause. So GOD, whose Power, Wisdom and Goodness in it self is incommunicable, hath produced intellectual natures, which are so like him, that their likeness is called his Image; and analogically (yet equivocally) the created faculties of their Power, Intellect and Will; are called ⟨p. 98⟩by such names, as we are fain (for want of other words) to apply to God (the things signified being transcendently and unexpressibly in God, but the words first used of, and applied to the creature.) But the same God hath so demonstrated his Power, and Wisdom, and Goodness in the Creation of the material or corporeal parts of the world, that they are the •estigia and infallible proofs of his causation and perfections, (being such as no other cause without him can produce) but, yet not so properly called his Image, as to his Wisdom and Goodness, but only of his Power. But no wise man who seeth this world, can doubt whether a God of perfect Power, Wisdom and Goodness, was the maker of it. Even so the person and doctrine of Christ, or the Christian Religion objectively considered, hath so much of the Image, and so much of the demonstrative impressions of the Nature of God, as may fully assure us that he himself is the approving cause.

And as the Sun hath a double Light, Lux & Lumen, its essential Light in it self, and its emitted beams, or communicated Light; so the Spirit and Image of God, by which Christ and Christianity are demonstrated, are partly that which is essential, constitutive, and inherent, and partly that which is sent and communicated from him to others.