The covenant of life opened, or, A treatise of the covenant of grace

All my bones shall say, Lord, Who is like unto thee? Nor can any man write his debts of this kind. But we are little affected with the negatives of mercies, except we read them upon others, and little then also; Self-pain Preacheth little to us, far more▪ the borrowed experience of fallen Angels, of Sodom, of the old world, &c. leaves small impression upon stony spirits. 2. Complain not, that you have not that share of grace, another hath, if ye (you think) had it, you would be as useful to glorify God, as they, but ye know not your self; swell not against him, that thou hast no grace, O vessel of wrath, thou owes that bit clay, and all thy wants to glorify his Justice. 3. My sickness, my pain, my bands owe themselves to God, and are debtors to his glory, I, and every one of men should say, O that my pain might praise him, and my hell, and flamings of everlasting fire,¹ might be an everlasting Psalm of the Glory of his Justice; That my sorrow could sing the Glory of so High a Lord; But we love rather that he wanted his praise, so we wanted our pain. 3. God hath made a sort of natural Covenant with night and day, Jer. 31.35. For all are his servants, Psal. 119.91. that they should be faithful to their own natural ends to act for him,² Jer. 5.22. Jer. 31.37. Psal. 104.1, 2, 3.4. and they are more faithful to their ends then men. Isa. 1.3. Jer. 8.7. The ox and the ass being more knowing to their owner, and the swallow and the crane being more discerning of their times, then men are. 2. They so keep their line, that there is more self-denial in their actings, then in mans way: as if fire were not fire, and nature in it denied, the fire devours not the three Children,