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If you were in silence, if it were no more but to know how barren your hearts were in any good purpose, your silence might thus be profitable to you. You might think, if I should never hear anything that is good, how wretched, ill, and barren then should my heart be; and when the word is spoken to you in season, it would make you to receive it with appetite and desire. Indeed, God’s people might think that the Lord who had appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, and the rest of the patriarchs, and had ordained them to live as pilgrims in tents, that then he had not ordained fixed habitations for the wicked, and so they might hope that that city should be demolished. For Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob lived all thus, being heirs with him of the same promise, and the reason of it is given, “Because he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.”1 This is the only thing that will make us to go on without longing, and be content with the fare and entertainment of pilgrims: nothing will move us so much to the doing of this as faith—to remember that there is a Jerusalem above. If we could think upon this, (and ofttimes he sends us hard fare for this end), it would be well. Great spirits in the world will achieve many things; but there is nothing that will breed such contentment in greatest straits as this, that there is a city prepared for us that cannot be shaken, a city that will stand against all the storms that can blow, because it is builded upon the rock. Jericho was builded with men’s hands, and so might fall, but the Lord, he is master builder of Jerusalem above. But because we cannot cast the anchor of our hope within the veil, therefore is it that many times we are miscontent in the world, when we are even, as we would think, at the very top of our ambition, yet even there we will find wants. For there is no contentment in anything here, for they have not a sure foundation, but are builded upon the sand, and so they are nothing but vanity; and if you have trusted in anything of that kind, you will find it to be the greatest grief of anything to you.