Chap. XIV Of Considering the Secret Judgments of God, Lest We Be Puffed Up by Our Good Works
1. Thou thunderest forth over my head thy judgments, O Lord, and thou shakest all my bones with fear and trembling, and my soul is terrified exceedingly.
I stand astonished, and consider that the heavens are not pure in thy sight.
If in the angels thou hast found sin, and hast not spared them, what will become of me?
Stars have fallen from heaven, and I that am but dust, how can I presume?
They, whose works seemed praiseworthy, have fallen to the very lowest; and such as before fed upon the bread of angels, I have seen delighted with the husks of swine.
2. There is then no sanctity, if thou O Lord, withdraw thy hand:
No wisdom avails, if thou cease to govern us:
No strength is of any help, if thou support us not:
No chastity is secure without thy protection:
No guard that we can keep upon ourselves profits us, if thy holy watchfulness be not with us:
For it we are left to ourselves, we sink and we perish; but if thou visit us, we are raised up and we live.
For we are unsettled, but by thee we are strengthened: we are tepid, but by thee we are inflamed.
3. O how humbly and lowly ought I to think of myself! how little ought I to esteem whatever good I may seem to have?
Oh! how low ought I to cast myself down under the bottomless depth of thy judgments, O Lord, where I find myself to be nothing else but nothing and nothing?
Oh! immense weight! Oh! sea, that cannot be passed over, where I find nothing of myself but just nothing at all.
Where then can there be any lurking hole for glorying in myself? where any confidence in any conceit of my own virtue?
All vain-glory is swallowed up in the depth of thy judgments over me.
4. What is all flesh in thy sight? shall the clay glory against him that formed it?
How can he be puffed up with the vain talk of man, whose heart in truth is subjected to God.
All the world will not lift him up, whom truth hath subjected to itself:
Neither will he be moved with the tongues of all that praise him, who hath settled his whole hope in God.
For behold, they also that speak are all nothing, for they shall pass away with the sound of their words; but the truth of the Lord remaineth for ever. Psalms cxiv.