Song of Solomon 3:4

I found him; Christ met me, and manifested his love to me, according to his promise made to those that seek him constantly and diligently, Proverbs 8:17 Matthew 7:7, &c. I held him, and would not let him go, being taught by my late experience how doleful a thing it was to lose him, and how hard it was to find and recover him when he was lost. Until I had brought him into my mother's house, that there I might entertain and embrace him, and gain my mother's consent, and so proceed to the consummation of the marriage. She saith her mother s rather than her father s house, because the men and the women had several and separated apartments in the house. For the mystical meaning, which is the principal sense intended in this book, as the spouse here, and in many other places of this book, signifies particular believers, so her mother is the universal church, or the true Jerusalem, which hath its rise from above, which is the mother of us all, Galatians 4:26, in which Christ and believers are united, and have sweet communion together in holy ordinances, into which believers are said to bring Christ by faith and prayer, and the preparation of their hearts for him, whereby they invite and in some sort engage Christ to go with them into the public assemblies, and there to give them his loves, although otherwise it is Christ who properly brings believers into the church. But all particulars in allegorical scriptures are not to be strictly urged, as all learned interpreters agree, many being added only for the decency of the allegory. Her that conceived me; Christ is as it were the father that begets, and the church the mother that conceiveth and bringeth forth, believers.