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whole mass in which it is wrapped up; it will enter into us like the refiner's fire, and the fuller's soap; like the Angel of God's presence that He promised to send along with the Israelites in their journey to Canaan, it will not pardon our iniquities, nor indulge any darling lust whatsoever: it will narrowly pry into all our actions, and be spying out all those back ways and doors whereby sin and vice may enter.

That religion that runs out only in particularities, and is overswayed by the prevailing power of any lust, is only a dead carcase, and not, indeed, that true, living, religion which comes from heaven, and which will not suffer itself to be confined; that will not indent with us, or article upon our terms and conditions, but, Samsonlike, will break all those bonds, with which our fleshly and harlot-like wills would tie it, and become every way absolute within us. And so I pass to the second thing wherein men are apt to delude themselves in taking an estimate of their own religion.

CHAPTER III.

The second mistake about religion, viz. A mere compliance of the outward man with the law of God. True religion seats itself in the centre of men's souls, and first brings the inward man into obedience to the law of God: the superficial religion intermeddles chiefly with the circumference and outside of men; or rests in an outward abstaining from some sins. Of speculative, and the most close and spiritual, wickedness within. How apt men are to sink all religion into opinions and external forms.

2.

A

mere compliance of the outward man with the law of God. There is an ò ew, and an ỏ čow av@pwTos, that philosophy hath acknowledged, as well as our Christian divinity: and when religion seats itself in the

centre of men's souls, it acts there most strongly upon the vital powers of it, and first brings the inward man into a true and cheerful obedience to the law of God, before all the seditious and rebellious motives of the external or animal man be quite subdued. But a superficial religion many times intermeddles only with the circumference and outside of men: it lodges only in the suburbs, and storms the outworks, but enters not the main fort of men's souls, which is strongly defended by inward pride, self-will, particular and mundane loves, fretting and self-consuming envy, popularity and vain-glory, and such other mental vices as, when they are beaten out of the visible behaviours and conversations of men by Divine threats or promises, which may be too potent to be controlled, retreat and secure themselves here, as in a strong castle. There may be many who dare not pursue revenge, and yet are not willing to forgive injuries; who dare not murder their enemy, and yet cannot love him; who dare not seek for preferment by bribery, and yet are not mortified to these and many other mundane and base-born affections: they are not willing that the Divine prerogative should extend itself beyond the outward man, and that religion should be too busy with their inward thoughts and passions: if they may not, by proud boasting, set off their own sorry commodities upon the public stage, and there read out their own panegyrics, yet they will inwardly applaud themselves, and commit wanton dalliance with their own parts and perfections; and, not feeling the mighty power of any higher good, they will endeavour to preserve an unhallowed autæsthesy and feeling sense of themselves; and, by a sullen melancholy stoicism, when religion would deprive and bereave them of the sinful glory and pleasures of this outward world, they then retire, and shrink themselves up, into a centre of their own: they collect and contract themselves into them

selves. Thus, when this low life of men's souls is chased out of the external vices and vanities of this world, by the chastisements of their own consciences, or many times by bodily oppressions, it presently retires into itself, and by a self-feeling begins more to grasp and dearly embrace itself. When these external loves begin to be starved and cooled, yet men may then fall into love with, and courting of, themselves by arrogancy, self-confidence and dependence, self-applause and gratulations, admiration of their own perfections; and so feed that dying life of theirs with this speculative wantonness, that it may as strongly express itself within them, as before it did without themselves. Men may, by inward braving of themselves, sacrilegiously steal God's glory from Him, and erect a selfsupremacy within, exerting itself in self-will and particular loves, and so become co-rivals with God for the crown of blessedness and self-sufficiency, as I doubt many of the Stoics endeavoured, with a giant-like ambition, to do.

But, alas! I doubt we generally arrive not to this pitch of religion, to deny the world, and all the pomp and glory of this largely extended train of vanity; but we easily content ourselves with some external forms of religion. We are too apt to look at a garish dress and attire of religion, or to be enamoured rather with some more specious and seemingly spiritual forms, than with the true spirit and power of godliness and religion itself. We are more taken commonly with the several new fashions that the luxuriant fancies of men are apt to contrive for it, than with the real power and simplicity thereof: and, while we think ourselves to be growing in our knowledge, and moving on towards a state of perfection, we do but turn up and down from one kind of form to another: we are as apt still to draw it down into as low, worldly, and mundane rites and ordinances, as ever it was before our Saviour made that glorious reformation therein, which

took away these material crutches made up of carnal observances, upon which earthly minds so much lean, and are fain to underprop their religion with, which else would tumble down and fall to nothing: except we can cast it into such a certain set of duties and system of opinions, that we may see it altogether from one end to another, we are afraid lest it should become too abstruse a thing, and vanish away from us.

I would not be misunderstood to speak against those duties and ordinances which are necessary means, appointed by God, to promote us in the ways of piety: but I fear we are too apt to sink all our religion into these, and so to embody it, that we may, as it were, touch and feel it, because we are so little acquainted with the high and spiritual nature of it, which is too subtile for gross and carnal minds to converse with. I fear our vulgar sort of Christians are wont so to look upon such kinds of models of divinity and religious performances, as were intended to help our dull minds to a more lively sense of God and true goodness, as those things that claim the whole of their religion: and, therefore, are too apt to think themselves absolved from it, except at some solemn times of more especial addresses to God; and that this weddinggarment of holy thoughts and divine affections is not for every day's wearing, but only then to be put on when we come to the marriage-feast and festivals of heaven: as if religion were fast locked and bound up in some sacred solemnities, and so incarcerated and incorporated into some divine mysteries, as the superstitious heathen of old thought, that it might not stir abroad, and wander too far out of these hallowed cloisters, and grow too busy with us in our secular employments. We have learned to distinguish too subtilely, I doubt, in our lives and conversations inter sacrum et profanum—our religious approaches to God and our worldly affairs. I know our conversation

and demeanour in this world neither is, nor can well be, all of a piece, and that there will be several degrees of sanctity in the lives of the best men, as there were once in the land of Canaan: but yet I think a good man should always find himself upon holy ground, and never depart so far into the affairs of this life, as to be without either the call or compass of religion: he should always think wheresoever he is, etiam ibi Dii sunt-that God and the blessed angels are there, with whom he should converse in a way of purity. We must not think that religion serves to paint our faces, to reform our looks, or only to inform our heads, or instruct and tune our tongues; no, nor only to tie our hands, and make our outward man more demure, and bring our bodies and bodily actions into a better decorum: but its main business is to purge and reform our hearts, and all the illicit actions and motions thereof. And so I come to a third particular wherein we are apt to misjudge ourselves in matters of religion.

CHAPTER IV.

The third mistake about religion, viz. A constrained and forced obedience to God's commandments. The religion of many (some of whom would seem most abhorrent from superstition) is nothing else but superstition properly so called. False religionists, having no inward sense of the Divine goodness, cannot truly love God; yet their sour and dreadful apprehensions of God compel them to serve Him. A slavish spirit in religion may be very prodigal in such kind of serving God as doth not pinch their corruptions; but in the great and weightier matters of religion, in such things as prejudice their beloved lusts, it is very needy and sparing. This servile spirit has low and mean thoughts of God, but a high opinion of its outward services, as conceiving that by such cheap things God is gratified and becomes indebted to it. The different effects of love, and slavish fear, in the truly, and in the falsely, religious.

3.

ANOTHER particular wherein men mistake religion,

constrained and forced obedience to God's

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