your character indispensably require you to be, and what you must be ere you can be happy. But consider how easily this argument may be retorted. You are better than some, you say, who have greater opportunities and advantages of being good than you have; and therefore your state is safe. But you yourself have greater opportunities and advantages of being good than some others have, who are nevertheless better than you; and therefore, by the same rule, your state cannot be safe. Again, others judge of themselves by the common maxims of the vulgar world concerning honour and honesty, virtue and interest; which maxims, though generally very corrupt and very contrary to those of reason, conscience, and scripture, men will follow, as a rule, for the sake of the latitude it allows them: and fondly think, that if they stand right in the opinion of the lowest kind of men, they have no reason to be severe upon themselves. Others, whose sentiments are more delicate and refined, they imagine, may be mistaken, or may overstrain the matter. In which persuasion they are confirmed, by observing how seldom the consciences of the gen. erality of men smite them for those things which these nice judges condemn as heinous crimes. I need not say how false and pernicious a rule this is. Again, others may judge of themselves and their state by sudden impressions they have had, or strong impulses upon their spirits, which they attribute to the finger of GoD; and by which they have been so ex

ceedingly affected as to make no doubt but that it was the instant of their conversion. But whether it was or not, can never be known but by the conduct of their after lives. In like manner, others judge of their good state by their good frames; though very rare, it may be, and very transient; soon passing off like a morning cloud, or as the early dew. "But we should not judge of ourselves by that which is unusual or extraordinary with us; but by the ordinary tenor and drift of our lives. A bad man may seem good in some good mood; and a good man may seem bad in some extraordinary falls; to judge of a bad man by his best hours, and a good man by his worst, is the way to be deceived in them both."* And the same way may you be deceived in yourself. Pharaoh, Ahab, Herod, and Felix, had all of them their softenings, their transitory fits of goodness; but yet they remain upon record under the blackest characters.

These then are all wrong rules of judgment; and to trust to them, or to try ourselves by them, leads to fatal self deception. Again,

6. In the business of self examination you must not only take care you do not judge by wrong rules, but that you do not judge wrong by right rules. You must endeavour then to be well acquainted with them. The office of a judge is not only to collect the evidence and the circumstances of facts, but to be well skilled

* Baxter's Director, p. 876.

in the laws by which those facts are to be examined.

Now the only right rules by which we are to examine, in order to know ourselves, are reason and scripture. Some are for setting aside these rules, as too severe for them; too stiff to bend to their perverseness; too straight to measure their crooked ways; are against reason, when reason is against them; decrying it as carnal reason and against scripture, when scripture is against them, despising it as a dead letter. And thus, rather than be convinced they are wrong, they reject the only means that can set them right.

And as some are for setting aside these rules, so others are for setting them one against the other. Reason against scripture, and scripture against reason; when they are both given us by the God of our natures, not only as perfectly consistent, but as proper to explain and illustrate each other, and prevent our mistaking ei ther; and to be, when taken together, as they always should, the most complete and only rule by which to judge both of ourselves, and every thing belonging to our salvation, as reasonable and fallen creatures.

1. Then one part of that rule which God hath given us, to judge of ourselves by, is right reason. By which I do not mean the reasoning of any particular man which may be very different from the reasoning of another particular man; and both, it may be, very different from right reason; because both may be influenced, not so much

by the reason and nature of things, as by partial prepossessions and the power of passions. But by right reason I mean those common principles which are readily allowed by all who are capable of understanding them, and not notoriously perverted by the force of prejudice; and which are confirmed by the common consent of all the sober and thinking part of mankind; and may be easily learned by the light of nature. There-fore if any doctrine or practice, though supposed to be founded in, or countenanced by revelation, be nevertheless apparently repugnant to these doctrines of right reason, or evidently contradict our natural notions of the divine attributes, or weaken our obligations to universal virtue, that we may be sure is no part of revelation; because then one part of our rule would clash with, and be opposite to the other. And thus reason was designed to be our guard against a wild and extravagant construction of scripture.

2. The other part of our rule is the sacred scriptures, which we are to use as our guard against the licentious excursions of fancy, which is often imposing itself upon us for right reason. Let any religious scheme or notion then appear ever so pleasing or plausible, if it be not estabJished on the plain principles of scripture, it is forthwith to be discarded: and that sense of scripture that is violently forced to bend towards it, is very much to be suspected.

It must be very surprising to one who reads and studies the sacred scriptures with a free, unbiass

ed mind, to see what elaborate, fine spun, flimsy glosses men will invent to put upou some texts as the true and genuine sense of them; for no other reason, but because it is most agreeable to the opinion of their party, from which, as the standard of their orthodoxy, they durst never depart; who, if they were to write a critique in the same manner on any Greek or Latin author, would make themselves extremely ridiculous in the eyes of the learned world. But if we would not pervert our rule, we must learn to think as scripture speaks, and not compel that to speak as we think.

Would we know ourselves then, we must often view ourselves in the glass of God's word. And when we have taken a full survey of ourselves from thence, let us not soon forget what manner of persons we are. * If our own image do not please us, let us not quarrel with our mirror, but set about mending ourselves.

The eye of the mind, indeed, is not like that of the body, which can see every thing else but itself; for the eye of the mind can turn itself inward, and survey itself. However, it must be owned, it can see itself much better when its own image is reflected upon it from this mirror. And it is by this only that we can come at the bottom of our hearts, and discover those secret prejudices and carnal prepossessions, which self love would hide from us.

This then is the first thing we must do in or. der to self knowledge, we must examine, scru * James i. 23, 24.

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