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

saith to Zadok▪ carry back the Ark of God into the City ▪ (better I want my comfort, then the Ark be ⟨p. 264⟩taken) if I shall find favour in the eyes of the Lord, he will bring me again and show me both it and his habitation. 26. But if he say, I have no delight in thee, here am I, let him do to me as seemeth good unto him. O how sweet, when for God, Moses can lay down his personal satisfaction in a share of life eternal. What if he tramp upon my eternal Crown, I should lay it down at his feet; and is not this mortification? Should he hide his face, for eternity, from me, and I never see him in his manifestations, so his glory shine in my everlasting sad desertion; there is required an indifferency to all created things without; no peremptory and absolute fixedness of the affection to any good, God excepted, is good: the contrary of this is an engaging of the heart more then is right to any thing, give me children, or then I die, there should be a contented living without children, if God so will: love the creature, as if ye loved not, the Lord would have us hungering for the creature, and yet not eagerly desiring, and thirsting, and yet have a lent and well ordered appetite to drink: love the child, but let the heart cleave leisurely to the child. Ploughing, and no heart-labouring, buying and selling, and no heart-engaging to the bargain is best here. 1 Cor. 7. They that have wives should be as if they had none. 30. And they that weep, as though they wept not; and they that rejoice, as though they rejoiced not; and they that buy, as though they possessed not. In the acting of affections toward the things of this life, as father, mother, husband, wife, children, houses, gain, beauty, honour, and new bought farm, there would be a godly distance of the heart from the thing ye do: Loving, and no loving; rejoicing, and no rejoicing; weeping, and no weeping; speaks most mortification. We cannot do here, except sinfully we over-do, and the out-goings of the heart to the creature must be fiery, which is childish, whereas mortification is a gracious well composed grave temper of the aged in Christ. There is a fire-edge and a fervour or fever of affections even to spiritual objects that are created at the first conversion,¹ for mortification does not so soon begin as the new heart.