The saints treasury being sundry sermons preached in London /

For the use: If faith be the substance of things hoped for, and gives being to things so high and glorious as the things of God are: First, then certainly faith it self must needs be a very substantial thing; faith is not a conceit and notion, for it gives reality and substantial being to those things the world counts conceits: faith is the most substantialest glorious thing in the world: It is that, in the working of which, the power of God appears more then in any thing in the world: therefore in Ephes. 1. 19, 20. there are some six or seven gradations of the wonderful power of God that appears in the working of faith: Now that must needs be an exceeding substantial thing, that hath such a mighty power of God in working of it: God doth not use to put forth extraordinary power for the doing of ordinary things. Now when he speaks of faith, he sets out his power in a glorious manner, and in an extraordinary way; and thereby tells us, that faith hath some great matter in it. And indeed faith hath much in it; though it be a grace that empties us of our selves, yet it is that whereby the believer is enabled to do one of the most glorious works that ever creature was enabled to do: as now for a poor soul to see its self in its own filth, under sin and guilt, and to see the wrath of an infinite deity incensed against it; to see the infinite justice of God requiring satisfaction, and the infinite holiness of God hating of sin; to have the accusations ⟨p. 75⟩of conscience, of Satan, of the world, and being sensible of all this, yet to lay hold upon a mediator between God and man, and to trust in a righteousness beyond it self, and to tender it up to God the Father for a full atonement and satisfaction, and to venture its self, and eternal estate upon it; and being unholy and filthy in it self, yet to unite it self to God in as near a union (for the kind of it) as possibly a creature can have with the Creator, next the hypostatical union of the humane nature of Christ with the divine: I say; for faith to be able to do this, it is a high and most glorious work, and there is an abundance of the power of God appears in it.

For the use: If faith be the substance of things hoped for, and gives being to things so high and glorious as the things of God are: First, then certainly faith it self must needs be a very substantiall thing; faith is not a conceit and notion, for it gives reality and substantial being to those things the world counts conceits: faith is the most substantialest glorious thing in the world: It is that, in the working of which, the power of God appeares more then in any thing in the world: therefore in