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the tender care of our heavenly Father; and be filled with joy, in returning ardent thanks for the lovingkindness of God towards themselves and all men ; whilst this grand business should fill their souls, a total inattention is visible in many countenances. Their entertainment seems only to begin when the preacher has taken his text. Gross ignorance! impious indecency! Professed believers, can you imagine you shall ever receive profit in one means of grace, while you pour contempt on another? or that, after passing through the time of divine worship without any exercise of repentance, love, and devotion, you can be in a fit disposition to attend to the things which shall be delivered from the pulpit? Be undeceived! It is novelty and curiosity by which you are pleased, in all the discourses you extol. On the contrary, I would have you, dear sir, raise your expectations very high, of the good you are to receive from first praying with the congregation, as a child of God by faith in Christ Jesus, before you hear the pastors of his church. There is a necessity for this. It is intended to prepare and soften the ground for receiving the good seed; and to open the heart for believing and obeying the truth. Remember, though preaching Christ is ordained to gather in the outcasts; when gathered, they are to offer up prayers and praises, intercessions and thanksgiving, a pure offering in righteousness. Remember, that hearing will very soon cease for ever: spiritual worship is immortal. Had we therefore our choice, whether Paul should preach to us, or call us to fall low with him on our knees in prayer, we must prefer the latter; because every one had much rather come into the presence of his beloved Sovereign, to ask what he has promised to bestow, than hear another extol him ever so highly. An itching ear is a disease dangerous and epidemical: and if hearing has not made us love the house of prayer, it is hard to conceive it can have done us any good at all.

4. You will not misconstrue these remarks, as if they insinuated that preaching Christ is not of the ut

most importance, and what all Christians must value and attend to. This preaching conquered the bloodyminded persecutors in Judea, and brought thousands to adore Christ crucified. This subdued the heathen world; and every church of Christ owes its existence, preservation, and increase, to the word of life preached. Our Lord emphatically warns us against false prophets, by comparing all who expect advantage from their preaching to the foolish hope of gathering grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles. Our litany deprecates, almost in one breath, as three of the greatest curses to mankind, pestilence, rebellion, and false doctrine.

Much indeed are we to prize the faithful preaching of the everlasting Gospel! It is the good seed; which falling upon good ground, the believing heart brings forth fruit abundantly. Only honour equally, in its turn, every ordinance of God. Esteem spiritual worship of him in his house no less profitable than the dispensing of his holy word.

5. To secret prayer, study of the Bible, public worship, and hearing the word, you will add the society of Christians engaged in the same warfare as yourself. This is commanded by our God: and is of great advantage. We are social by nature; and our companions must be infectious, if destitute of faith; or greatly improving, if we make a right choice. Love unfeigned to our Saviour must give us invincible aversion to the discourse and company which pour contempt upon all his excellency and precepts; nor is it possible, where the duty of men, in their business or office, does not oblige them to be in company with profane and dissolute men, to consort with them, and be guiltless. The command is plain: "Go from the presence of a man, as soon as thou perceivest the words of wisdom are not in him." The warning is merciful, and very alarming: "A companion of fools shall be destroyed.' And, lest worldly interests, or a remaining love for the witty, enlivened conversation of profane people should bribe us to believe we may sometimes associate with them, and yet receive no harm, the salutary advice s,

"Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners." Your society, therefore, must be with real, not nominal, Christians; "for he that walketh with wise men shall be wise."

But do not expect to find real Christians such as you may figure them in your own mind, nor scan their life with a severe eye. Judge of your fellow-soldiers by what you know of yourself, in earnest as you certainly are. Innate corruptions are very stubborn, and, though besieged, and doomed to death, make frequent sallies. Hard is the conflict to get the mastery over a besetting sin, which is seldom obtained at once, or without many falls. Be jealous of the hypocrisy, natural to us all, of passing a favourable judgment on our own condition, faulty as we are; yet condemning others as dissemblers, for the same things we find in ourselves.

Alas! the very best have abundant cause to think themselves vile: for it is notorious (whatever some may boast) that believers in Christ, one and all, are polluted, imperfect, inconstant, impatient of each others infirmities, and scarcely able to be at peace among them selves; though they all experience, as they confess, from day to day, the tender compassions of their heavenly Father, under all their failures.

Be not stumbled, if you meet with many hollow professors, talkative, and full of confidence on account of their supposed conversion, and the knowledge they have attained in spiritual things. So it has been from the beginning. Upright followers of the Lamb are few in every age: you may know them by their disclaiming, with equal care, all trust in their own spiritual attainments, and the baneful abuse of imputed righteousness; by their tender fear of offending God; by their humility and meekness, their generosity and compassion; and the great benefit to be derived from their discourse, full of a divine savour. With per

sons of this excellent sort, cultivate an intimacy: they will build you up in your holy faith; they will establish you in every good purpose. You will burn with desire to be like them; and, upon leaving

their company, you will find a spirit of prayer spring up in your mind.

6. But company, beyond a certain measure, is of bad consequence. Keeping much retired, and by ourselves, is most profitable for us all. Indeed, when our worldly business is attended to as it ought to be, and secret duties are punctually observed, there cannot remain a great deal of time for persons, in any station, to spend in company: and they who imagine that praying at certain seasons, hearing the Gospel, and then entering into a sort of general conversation about religion and religious people, will be sufficient, are grievously mistaken. Unless we love (and contrive, as we are able) to be much alone, how can we often and solemnly call to remembrance the evil of our past life, so as to loathe ourselves? how feel contrition for the follies of our innate depravity?-how, with the blessed Mary, ponder in our hearts the sayings of our Lord?-how enter deeply into his agony and death, the price of our peace and eternal life ?-how weigh the value of our spiritual privileges, and the weight of the crown of glory laid up for the faithful?how feel the strength and multitude of our obligations to live in exemplary obedience, constrained by love passing knowledge? Though the pastors of Christ's Church speak on these subjects, and they make part of every conversation, we must ruminate in private upon them, or they will never duly impress and fill our mind.

Hence the most distinguished saints, before they entered on any arduous work for the glory of God or the good of men, did not think their purity of intention, or the promise of God's Spirit, sufficient, without preparing by much retirement. Moses, Elijah, Daniel, the Baptist, and our Lord himself, teach us, by their practice, the benefit and necessity of being often and much alone. Great and many evils grow in the church, from its pastors and people neglecting to copy these infallible examples.

For want of being much alone, popular teachers are puffed up; thence become contentious, jealous of those

they fear as their rivals, disputers, and abusers of their fellow-servants. For want of meditation in private upon the truths of God, professors of faith in Christ are arrant Pharisees, whilst they violently condemn pharisaism; formalists, though they know it not, in the midst of perpetual exclamations against formality; for they can talk, without humiliation, of man's total corruption, and the sinfulness of sin; they can talk, without gratitude, of redemption by the blood of God manifest in the flesh; and, without grief, on the hypocrisy and unbecoming lives of many who make profession of faith in Christ. Nothing, in their discourse on these deeply-affecting topics, strikes the hearer's mind as coming from a broken heart. This profanation of sacred truths, by talking of them with a careless, dissipated spirit, does much hurt; and we incur guilt, like those who take the name of the Lord in vain. Yet this must be the case with us, unless there be a due mixture of solitude with society, to gird up the loins of our minds, and effectually impress them, by much intercourse with God alone.

With respect to the multitude of ignorant and licentious men, you must expect their ridicule and censure; which by no means should gall or irritate your mind. You could not be a servant of Christ, were you approved by them. "If ye were of the world, the world would love its own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you." The light in your mind is a distinguishing favour, which you are ever to remember. No one can believe there are such "things prepared for them that love God," as you know, till the eyes of their understanding are opened, as yours have been; and their incomparable excellence felt, as it has been in your soul. Yet, in this case, love hopeth all things, and endureth all things; hopeth the time will come, when they, who think you mad, will worship with you in spirit and in truth. Meanwhile, love will enable you meekly to receive contemptuous treatment, and hard speeches against your faith, your conduct,

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