"Whereof one, upon the soul of thy servant, O my God! is, to produce my desires, that my sins, which have been like scarlet, may become white like snow, in thy free and full pardon of them. O wash me in the blood of my Saviour, and I shall be whiter than snow! But Lord, let a work of real sanctification, at the same time upon me, render me purer than snow!"

ESSAY XV. Of HAIL.

HAIL is very often a concomitant of thunder and lightning. It is well known, as Dr. Wallis observes, that in our artificial congelation, a mixture of snow and nitre, or even common salt, will cause a very sudden congelation of water. Now the same in the clouds may cause hail stones; and the rather, because not only in some that are prodigiously great, but also in common hail stones, there seems to be something like snow, rather than ice, in the midst of them. The large hail stones, that weigh half or three quarters of a. pound, by the violence of their fall manifest that they have descended from a considerable height. And though perhaps in their first concretion, their bulk might not exceed the moderate size of the common hail; yet in their long descent, if the medium through which they fell, were alike inclined to congelation, they might receive a great accession to their bulk, by perhaps many of them coalescing and incorporating into one.

Worse than Egyptians they, whom an hail storm will not cause to fear the word of the Lord. The irresistible judgments of God are sometimes compared to hail storms, and great hail stones, These things come down upon the world with

that voice, tremble to be in ill terms with a God, who with a tempest of hail, and a destroying storm, can immediately crush all that is opposed to him."

Of all the meteors both the fiery and the watery, the poet has well acknowledged;

Who sees bright meteors in the liquid skies,
Has the great works of God before his eyes.

ESSAY XVI. Of THUNDER & LIGHTNING.

His powerful thunder, who can understand? Yet our philosophy will a little try to see and say something of it.

The account of thunder, given by Dr. Hook, is this: The atmosphere of the earth abounds with nitrous particles of a spirituous nature, which are every where carried along with it. Besides which sort of particles, there are also others raised up into the air, which may be somewhat of the nature of sulphureous, unctious, and other combustible bodies. We see spirits of wine, turpentine, camphire, and almost all other combustible bodies, will by heat be rarefied into the form of air, or smoke, and be raised up into the air. All these, if they have a sufficient degree of heat, will catch fire, and be turned into flame, from the nitrous parts of the air mixing with them; as it has been proved by thousands of experiments. There are also other sorts of such steams, that arise from subterraneous and mineral bodies; which only by their coming to mix with the nitre of the air, though they have no sensible heat in them, will so ferment and act upon one another, as to produce an actual flame. Of this, the miners are too frequent witnesses and

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sufferers. The lightning seems to be very much of such an original.

Dr. Wallis observes, that thunder and lightning have so much resemblance to fired gunpowder in their effects, that we may very well suppose much of the same causes. The principal ingredients in gunpowder, are nitre and sulphur. Suppose in the air, a convenient mixture of nitrous and sulphureous vapours, and those to take fire by accident, such an explosion, and with such noise and light as that in the firing of gunpowder, may well follow upon it; and being once kindled, it will run from place to place, as the vapour leads it, like as in a train of gunpowder. This explosion, high in the air, and far from us, will do no considerable mischief. But if it be very near us, it has terrible consequences. The distance of its place may be estimated by the distance of the. time, which there is between seeing the flash, and hearing the clap: for though in their generation they be simultaneous, yet light moving faster than sound, they come successively to us. That there is a nitrous vapour in it, we may reasonably judge, because we know of no other body so liable to so sudden and furious explosion. That, there is a sulphureous one, is manifest from the smell that attends it, and the sultry heat, that is commonly a forerunner of it.

"The natural causes of the thunder do not at all release me from considering the interest and providence of the glorious God, concerned in it. It is a note prepared for the songs of the faithful, the God of glory. thundereth. And indeed, as the thunder is the voice of God, (Paganism itself owned as such) thus there are several points of

piety, wherein I am, as with a bath kol, instructed from it.

"There is this voice most sensibly to be heard in the thunder, power belongeth unto God. There is nothing able to stand before those lightnings, which are styled the arrows of God. We see cas. tles fall, metals melt, bricks themselves vitrify; all flies, when hot thunderbolts are scattered upon them. The very mountains are torn to pieces by their force. The thunder of his power who can understand? An haughty emperor shrinks, shakes, and hides his guilty head, before the pow erful thunder of God.

How can I hear the voice of the Almighty thunderer, without such thoughts as these? Glorious God, let me through the blood of a sacrificed Saviour, be in good terms with one so able to destroy me in a moment! and let me be afraid of offending Him, who is possessed of such an irresistible artillery!

"At the same time, do I not see the mercy and patience of a good God to a sinful world? The desolations of the world, how wonderfully would they be, if every transgression met with its just reward!

"It is no rare thing for the children of men to die by a thunderbolt: a king has been so slain in the midst of his army. There was a punishment of old used upon criminals, by pouring hot lead into their mouths, and used in imitation of God's destroying with lightning; whereby the inward parts are burnt without any visible touch upon the outward. This death by lightning, has been frequently inflicted. Their being asleep at the time has not preserved them, though there be a

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fancy in Plutarch that it would; nor would a tent of seal skin have done it, though some great ones have repaired to such an amulet for their protection. My God, I adore thy sovereign grace, that such a sinner as I, have not yet been by lightning turned into dust and ashes before thee!

"I take notice of one thing, that as guilt lying on the minds of men, makes them startle at a thunder clap; so the miscarriages about which our hearts do first and most of all misgive us in a thunder storm, are those which most of all call for a thorough repentance. There are some writings which I cannot read, except I hold them against the fire; by having my heart held up against the lightning, I may quickly read my own iniquity." Impious people are deaf to thunder !"

Herlicius, in his Tractatus de Fulmine, reckons up a considerable number of those, which might be called Fælicia Fulmina. Such will they be that made these impressions upon us.

ESSAY XVII. Of the AIR.

THE air of our atmosphere in which we breathe, is a diaphanous, compressible, dilatable fluid; a body covering the earth and the sea, to a great height above the highest mountains.

There seem to be three different sorts of corpuscles, whereof the air is composed. There are such as are carried up into the air from other bodies, as vapours exhaled by heat. There may be also a more subtile kind, mixed with our air, emitted from the heavenly bodies, and from the magnetic steams of the globe on which we sojourn. But there may be a third sort of particles, which may most properly merit the name of