MY God, my God, thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldst be understood literally and

according to the plain sense of all that thou sayest? but thou art also (Lord, I intend it to thy glory, and let no profane

misinterpreter abuse it to thy diminution), thou art a figurative, a metaphorical God too; a God in whose words there

is such a height of figures, such voyages, such peregrinations to fetch remote and precious metaphors, such

extensions, such spreadings, such curtains of allegories, such third heavens of hyperboles, so harmonious

elocutions, so retired and so reserved expressions, so commanding persuasions, so persuading commandments,

such sinews even in thy milk, and such things in thy words, as all profane authors seem of the seed of the serpent

that creeps, thou art the Dove that flies. O, what words but thine can express the inexpressible texture and

composition of thy word, in which to one man that argument that binds his faith to believe that to be the word of

God, is the reverent simplicity of the word, and to another the majesty of the word; and in which two men equally

pious may meet, and one wonder that all should not understand it, and the other as much that any man should.

Lord, thou givest us the same earth to labour on and to lie in, a house and a grave of the same earth; so, Lord, thou

givest us the same word for our satisfaction and for our inquisition, for our instruction and for our admiration too;

for there are places that thy servants Hierom and Augustine would scarce believe (when they grew warm by mutual

letters) of one another, that they understood them, and yet both Hierom and Augustine call upon persons whom they

knew to be far weaker than they thought one another (old women and young maids) to read the Scriptures, without

confining them to these or those places. Neither art thou thus a figurative, a metaphorical God in thy word only, but

in thy works too. The style of thy works, the phrase of thine actions, is metaphorical. The institution of thy whole

worship in the old law was a continual allegory; types and figures overspread all, and figures flowed into figures,

and poured themselves out into farther figures; circumcision carried a figure of baptism, and baptism carries a figure

of that purity which we shall have in perfection in the new Jerusalem. Neither didst thou speak and work in this

language only in the time of thy prophets; but since thou spokest in thy Son it is so too. How often, how much

more often, doth thy Son call himself a way, and a light, and a gate, and a vine, and bread, than the Son of God, or

of man? How much oftener doth he exhibit a metaphorical Christ, than a real, a literal? This hath occasioned thine

ancient servants, whose delight it was to write after thy copy, to proceed the same way in their expositions of the

Scriptures, and in their composing both of public liturgies and of private prayers to thee, to make their accesses to

thee in such a kind of language as thou wast pleased to speak to them, in a figurative, in a metaphorical language, in

which manner I am bold to call the comfort which I receive now in this sickness in the indication of the concoction

and maturity thereof, in certain clouds and recidences, which the physicians observe, a discovering of land from sea

after a long and tempestuous voyage. ...