Let us consider how well Providence hath performed the first work that ever it did for us, in our formation and protection in the womb. Certainly this is a very glorious and admirable performance; it is what the psalmist admires: My substance was not hid from thee when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.” Psal. cxxxix. 15. The womb is so called upon this account, because as curious artists, when they have some choice piece in hand, perfect it in private, and then bring it into the light for all to gaze at, so it was here. And there are two things admirable in this performance of Providence for us.
1. The rare structure and excellent composition of the body: I am wonderfully made.” The word in the Hebrew is very full. The vulgate renders it, painted as with a needle, that is, richly embroidered with nerves and veins. Oh! the curious workmanship that is in that one part, the eye! How has it forced some to acknowledge a God, upon the examination of it! Providence, when it went about this work, had its model or pattern before it, according to which it moulded every part, as it is in ver. 16. In thy book were all my members written.” Hast thou an integral perfection and fulness of members? It is because God wrote them all in his book, or limned out thy body, according to that exact model, which he drew of thee in his own gracious purpose, before thou hadst a being. Had an eye, an ear, a hand,. or a foot, been wanting in the platform, thou hadst now been sadly sensible of the defect; this world had been but a dungeon to thee without those windows; thou hadst lived, as many do, an object of pity to others. If thou hast low thoughts of this mercy, ask the blind, the deaf, the lame, and the dumb, the value and worth of those mercies, and they will tell thee. There is a world of cost bestowed upon thy very body. Thou mightest have been cast into another mould, and created a worm or a toad. I remember Luther tells us of two cardinals, riding in great pomp to the council of Constance, and, by the way, they heard a man in the fields bitterly weeping and wailing. When they came to him, they found him intently viewing an ugly toad! and asking why he wept so bitterly, he told them, his heart was melted with this consideration: that God had not made him such a loathsome and deformed creature. This is what I love to weep at, said he: whereupon, one of them cries out, Well! said the father, The unlearned will rise and take heaven, and we, with all our learning, shall be cast into hell. No part of the common lump was so figured and polished as man is. Galen gave Epicurus a hundred years’ time to imagine a more commodious situation, configuration, or composition, of any one member of a human body; and if all the angels had studied to this day, they could not have cast the body of man into a more curious mould.
2. And yet all this is but the enamelling of the case, or polishing the casket wherein the rare jewel lies. Providence hath not only built the house, but brought the inhabitant (I mean the soul) into the possession of it. A glorious piece it is, that bears the very image of God upon it, being all in all, and all in every part. How noble are its faculties and affections! How nimble, various, and indefatigable are its motions! How comprehensive is its capacity! It is a companion for angels, nay, capable of espousals to Christ, and eternal communion with God. It is the wonder of earth, and the envy of hell.
Suppose now (and why should you not suppose what you so frequently behold in the world?) that Providence had so permitted and ordered it, that thy soul had entered into thy bedy with one or two of its faculties wounded and defective? Suppose its understanding had been cracked; what a miserable life hadst thou lived in this world! neither capable of service nor comfort. And truly, when I have considered those works of Providence, in bringing into the world, in all countries and ages, some such spectacles of pity; some deprived of the use of reason, and differing from beasts in little more than shape and figure; and others, though sound in their understandings, yet deformed or defective in their bodies, monstrous, misshapen, and loathsome creatures; I can resolve the design of this providence into nothing beside a demonstration of his sovereign power, except they be designed as foils to set off the beauty of other rare and exquisite pieces, and intended to stand before your eyes as monitors of God’s mercy to you, that your hearts, as often as you beheld them, might be melted into thankfulness for so distinguishing favour to you.
Look then, but not proudly, upon thine outside and inside; see and admire what Providence hath done for thee, and how well it hath performed the first service that ever it did for thee in this world! And yet this was not all it did for thee before thou sawest this world: it preserved thee as well as formed thee in the womb, else thou hadst been as those embryos Job speaks of, that never saw the light, Job iii. 16. Abortives go for nothing in the world, and there are multitudes of them; some that never had a reasonable soul breathed into them, but only the rudiments and rough draught of the body; these come not into the account of men, but perish as the beast doth. Others that die in, or shortly after they come out of the womb, and though their life was but for a moment, yet that moment entails an eternity upon them. And had this been your case, as it is the case of millions, then, supposing your salvation, yet had you been utterly unserviceable to God in the world; none had been the better for you, nor you the better for any in the world; you had been utterly incapable for all that good which, throughout your life, you have either done to others, or received from others. ey ra -
And if we consider the nature of that obscure life we lived in the womb, how small an accident, had it been permitted by Providence, had extinguished our life, like a bird in the shell! We cannot therefore but admire the tender care of Providence over us, and say with the psalmist, Thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb,” Psal. cxxxix. 13, and not only so, but, Thou art he that took me out of my mother’s womb,” Psal. xxii, 9. « He preserved thee there to the fulness of time, and, when that time was come, brought thee safely through manifold hazards into that place in the world which he from eternity espied for thee; which leads us to the second performance.