The benefits of this Exercise.
The benefits of this consideration and exercise being universal upon all the parts of piety, I shall less need to specify any particulars; but yet, most properly, this exercise of considering the Divine presence is, 1. An excellent help to prayer, producing in us reverence and awfulness to the Divine Majesty of God, and actual devotion in our offices. 2. It produces a confidence in God and fearlessness of our enemies, patience in trouble and hope of remedy; since God is so nigh in all our sad accidents, he is a disposer of the hearts of men and the events of things, he proportions out our trials, and supplies us with remedy, and, where his rod strikes us, his staff supports us. To which we may add this, that God, who is always with us, is especially, by promise, with us in tribulation, to turn the misery into a mercy, and that our greatest trouble may become our advantage, by entitling us to a new manner of the Divine presence. 3. If is apt to produce joy and rejoicing in God, we being more apt to delight in the partners and witnesses of our conversation, every degree of mutual abiding and conversing being a relation and an endearment: we are of the same household with God; he is with us in our natural actions, to preserve us; in our recreations, to restrain us; in our public actions, to applaud or reprove us; in our private, to observe us; in our sleeps, to watch by us; in our watchings, to refresh us; and if we walk with God in all his ways, as he walks with us in all ours, we shall find perpetual reasons to enable us to keep that rule of God, ‘Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice.’ And this put me in mind of a saying of an old religious person,3636In vita S. Anthon. “There is one way of overcoming our ghostly enemies; spiritual mirth, and a perpetual bearing of God in our minds.” This effectively resists the devil, and suffers us to receive no hurt from him. 4. This exercise is apt also to enkindle holy desires of the enjoyment of God, because it produces joy when we do enjoy him; the same desires that a weak man hath for a defender; the sick man for a physician; the poor for a patron; the child for his father; the espoused lover for her betroths. 5. From the same fountain are apt to issue humility of spirit, apprehensions of our great distance and our great needs, our daily wants and hourly supplies, admiration of God’s unspeakable mercies: it is the cause of great modesty and decency in our actions; it helps to recollection of mind, and restrains the scatterings and looseness of wandering thoughts; it establishes the heart in good purposes, and leadeth on to perseverance; it gains purity and perfection, (according to the saying of God to Abraham, ‘walk before me and be perfect,’) holy fear, and holy love, and indeed everything that pertains to holy living: when we see ourselves placed in the eye of God, who sets us on work and will reward us plenteously, to serve him with an eye-service is very unpleasing, for he also sees the heart; and the want of this consideration was declared to be the cause why Israel sinned so grievously, ‘for they say, The Lord hath forsaken the earth, and the Lord seeth not:3737Psal. x. 11. Ezek. ix. 9. therefore the land is full of blood, and the city full of perverseness.’ What a child would do in the eye of his father, and a pupil before his tutor, and a wife in the presence of her husband, and a servant in the sight of his master, let us always do the same, for we are made a spectacle to God, to angels, and to men; we are always in the sight and presence of the all-seeing and almighty God, who also is to us a father and a guardian, a husband and a lord.