The vanity of this mortal life, or, Of man, considered only in his present…

That God himself meant it not so, experience and the event of things hath shown; and that these predictions cannot otherwise have had their accomplishment, than in the succession of the spiritual and everlasting Kingdom of the Messiah (whom God raised up out of his loins to sit on his throne) unto his temporal Kingdom.¹ Wherein 'tis therefore ended by perfection, rather than corruption. These Prophesies being then made good, not formally, in the kind which they literally imported; but with an (highly redundant) equivalency in another (far more noble) kind. In which sense God's Covenant with him must be understood,² which he insists on so much in this Psalm, even unto that degree, as to challenge God upon it, as if in the gloomy dispensation of this juncture (so far did it darken his present apprehension of things) he did actually vacate and make it void:³ Though he sufficiently express his ⟨p. 7⟩confidence, both before and after, that this could never be. But 'tis plain it hath been vacated long enough ago, in the subversion of David's Kingdom; and in that we see his Throne and Family have not been established for ever; have not endured as the days of Heaven; if those words had no other than their obvious and literal meaning. And if any would imagine a salvo to the truth of God, from the wickedness of his posterity, first making a breach, and disobliging him; it is expressly precluded by what we find inserted in reference to this very case: If his children forsake my law, ⁴and walk not in my judgments, ⁵&c. Then will I visit their iniquity with the rod, &c.⁶ Nevertheless my loving-kindness will I not utterly take from him, ⁷nor suffer my faithfulness to fail. ⁸