A44697:591
A treatise of delighting in God from Psal. xxxvij. 4. Delight thy self also…
A treatise of delighting in God from Psal. xxxvij. 4. Delight thy self also in the Lord, and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart. In two parts. By John Howe, M.A. sometime fellow of Magdalen College, Oxon.
London: printed by A. Maxwell for Sa. Gellibrand, 1674
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
Now therefore if you did delight much in God, 1would you not be pressing hard after him? would you not be following on to know him? 2And then would his goings forth be prepared before you as the morning, and he would be still visiting you with fresh and increasing light; whereupon your pleasure would be renewed and increased by every fresh view, and consequently your progress would be from sight to sight, and from pleasure to pleasure; whereas now this wheel stands still, or you are going back into darkness and desolation. Have you not much the more to answer for upon this account?
The like may be said as to the rest. The irrectitude and great faultiness of your thoughts of God, though that contribute not a little to your not-delighting in him, yet also, if you did delight in him more, would not your thoughts of him be more deeply serious, more highly raised? Would you not be very unapt ⟨p. 285⟩to take up injurious hard thoughts of him? Would not his thoughts (once become precious to you) be also numerous, or innumerable rather,1 as the sands of the Sea-shore? Would not your earthly temper, your strangeness and averseness to him, vanish and wear off, if you were more exercised in actual delightful converses with him? Therefore the permanency and increase of those mentioned evils, and that they have got such settled rooting in you, is all to be charged upon your not-applying your selves to more frequent actual delight in God.