a happy lot has God cast for you! How few children are partakers of your mercies! See that you honour such parents: the tie is double upon you so to do. Be you the joy of their hearts, and comfort of their lives, if living: if not, yet still remember the mercy while you live, and tread in their pious paths; that you and they may both rejoice together in the great day, and bless God for each other to all eternity.

IV. The next remarkable performance of Providence for the people of God, which I will instance, shall be with respect to its ordering the occasions, instruments, and means of their conversion.

In nothing does Providence shine forth more gloriously than it does in this performance for the people of God. How curiously soever its hand had moulded your bodies, how tenderly soever it had preserved them, and how bountifully soever it had provided for them, if it had not also ordered some means or other for your conversion, all the former favours and benefits it had done for you, had signified little. This, O this is the most excellent benefit you ever received

from its hand. You are more beholden to it for this, than for all your other mercies. And in opening this performance of Providence, I cannot but think your hearts must be deeply affected. This is a subject which every gracious heart loves to steep its thoughts in. It is certainly the sweetest history that ever they repeated. They love to think and talk of

it.

The places where and instruments by whom this work was wrought, are exceedingly endeared to them for the word's sake: yea, endeared to that degree, that, for many years after, their hearts have melted when they have but passed occasionally by those places, or but seen the faces of those persons who were used as instruments in the hand of Providence for their good. As no doubt, but that Jacob's Bethel was ever after the night he slept there sweet to his thoughts, so other saints have had their Bethels as well as he. O blessed places, times, and instruments! O the deep, the sweet impressions, never to be razed out of the memory or heart.

But lest any poor soul should be discouraged under the display of this pro

vidence, because he cannot remember the time, place, instruments, and manner, wherein and by which his conversion was wrought; I will therefore premise this necessary distinction, to prevent injury to some, whilst I design benefit to others. Conversion, as to the subjects of it, may be considered two ways; either as it is more sensibly wrought in persons of riper years, who in their youthful days were more profane and vile; or in persons in their tender years, into whose hearts grace was more insensibly and indiscernibly instilled, by God's blessing upon pious education. In the former sort, the distinct acts of the Spirit, as illuminating, convincing, humbling, drawing them to Christ, and sealing them, are more evident and discernible; in the latter, more obscure and confused. They can remember, that God gave them an esteem and liking of godly persons, care of duty, and conscience of sin; but as to the time, place, instruments, and manner of the work, they can give but a slender account of them. However, if the work is savingly wrought in them, there is no reason that they should be troubled, because the

circumstances of it are not so evident to them, as they are to others. Let the substance and reality of the work appear, and there is no reason to afflict yourselves because of the inevidence of such circumstances.

But yet where the circumstances as well as substance are clear to a man, when we can call to remembrance the time when, the place where, the instrument by whom the work was wrought, the recollection must needs be exceedingly sweet, and cannot but yield a fresh delight to the soul every time it is reflected on.

Now there are many things in the providences connected with this work, the memory of which is pleasant.

1. Consider the wonderful strangeness and unaccountableness of this work of Providence, in casting us into the way, and ordering the occasions, yea, the minutest circumstances of conversion. This you may find in Acts viii. 26. The eunuch, at that very instant when he was reading the prophet Isaiah, has an interpreter join his chariot, just as his mind was prepared to receive the first light of

the knowledge of Christ. And how strange was that change wrought on Naaman the Syrian! that the Syrians in their incursions should bring away a little girl, and she must be presented to Naaman's wife, and relate to her the power of God that accompanied the prophet! Doubtless the whole of this affair was guided by the signal direction of Providence.

A scrap of paper, accidentally coming to view, has been used as a means of conversion. The reading of a good book has been the means of bringing others to Christ. Thus we find many of the German divines converted by reading Luther's books: yea, and what is more strange, Vergerius, though he had been present an eye and ear-witness to the doleful case of Spira, which one would think should move a stone, yet still continued so firm to the Pope's interest, that when he fell into some suspicion among the cardinals, he resolved to clear himself by writing a book against the German apostates; but whilst he read the protestant books, with no other design than to confute them; whilst he is weighing the arguments, is himself convinced