2. Our love to God is not ordinarily so passionate as our love to creatures; because the nearness and sensibleness of the creature promoteth such sensible operations. But God is not seen, or felt, or heard, but believed in by faith, and known by reason. And the narrowness of the creature making resistances, stops, and difficulties, occasioneth a turbulent passionateness of love; when the infiniteness of God hath no such occasion. Our love to creatures is like the running of a stream in a channel that is too narrow for it, where stops and banks do make it go on with a roaring violence; but our love to God is like the brook that slideth into the ocean, where it is insensibly devoured. Therefore our love to God must principally be perceived, not in violent passions, but in, 1. A high estimation of him. 2. In the will's adhering to him. 3. And in the effects (to be mentioned anon). Yet when a passionate love is added to these, it may be the most excellent significatively and effectively. Some philosophers think that God cannot at all be loved with a passionate love, because he is a pure, immaterial Being, and therefore cannot be the object of a material act or motion, such as our passions are; and, therefore, that it is some idol of the imagination that is so loved. But, 1. If they mean that his pure essence, in itself, is not the immediate object of a passion, they may say the same of the will itself; for man (at least in flesh) can have no other volition of God, but as he is apprehended by the intellect. And if by an idol they mean the image of God in the mind, gathered from the appearances of God in creatures, man in flesh hath no other knowledge of him; for here we know him but darkly, enigmatically, and as in a glass, and have no formal, proper conception of him in his essence. So that the rational powers themselves do no otherwise know and will God's essence, but as represented to us in a glass. 2. And thus we may also love him passionately; it being God in his objective being as apprehended by the intellect that we both will and passionately love. The motion of the soul in flesh may raise passions, by the instrumentality of the corporeal spirits, towards an immaterial object; which is called the object of those passions, not merely as passions, but as the passions of a rational agent; it being more nearly or primarily the object of the intellect and will, and then of the passions, as first apprehended by these superior powers. A man may delight in God; or else, how is he our felicity? and yet, we know of no delight which is not passion. A man may love his own soul with a passionate love; and yet it is immaterial. When I passionately love my friend, it is his immaterial soul, and his wisdom, and holiness, which I chiefly love.
[Sidenote: What of God is the object of our love.]
3. It is not only for his excellencies and perfections in himself, nor only for his love and benefit to us, that grace doth cause a sinner to love God; but it is for both conjunctly; as he is good, and doth good, especially to us, in the greatest things.
[Sidenote: What is the motive of our first love to God.]