ter use of mercies, than to please your senses, and accommodate your flesh, and forget the one thing needful, which is the end of all, you turn them all into sin, and fight against God by them, and strengthen his enemy and your own, and block up your way to heaven by them, and treasure up wrath for the dreadful day, when your wealth shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire; Jas. v.1-3. Rom. ii. 5. You contemptuously cast that bread to dogs, which he giveth you to supply your own necessities. You treacherously carry over his provision to the enemy. Consider this, you that say you hope to be saved, because God is merciful. You have found indeed that God is merciful, by large experience. But if you do not learn, and quickly learn to make a better use of his mercies, abused mercy will prove your everlasting misery. O what a reckoning will you have! What a load to press you down to hell! Unless you would have used them better, it had been easier for you, if these temporal mercies had been denied you. Can that man look to be saved by mercy, that would not be entreated to consent that mercy should save him in the day of salvation; in the accepted time; but served the devil with those very mercies that would have saved him? God sendeth you his mercies to kill your sins, and sanctify you, and engage you to himself; and if you will feed your sins with them, and make them your idols, and forsake God for them, and be false to him, to your covenant, and your duty, and neglect that one thing for which he gave them to you, you do not only lose them but turn them to a curse. And alas, poor sinners, what will you have to fly to, to trust in, or to comfort you, when mercy abused hath not only forsaken you, but falls upon you as a mountain, and feedeth your aggravated, endless misery?

6. Moreover, whilst you neglect the one thing necessary you neglect Christ himself, and reject the saving benefit of his bloodshed, and refuse the healing work of his Spirit, and the precious benefits which he hath offered you in the Gospel. And how can you escape if you neglect so great salvation? Heb. ii. 3. How will you be saved when you refuse There is indeed enough in Christ to heal and save the humbled soul, that thirsteth for his righteousness and salvation, and valueth and seeketh him as a Sa

the only Saviour?

viour; and if you would thus come to him, you might have life: John v. 40. But while you give yourselves to please the flesh, and follow the world, and look so little after Christ, or after the ends and benefits of his sufferings and grace, Christ is as no Christ to you; and grace is as no grace to you; and the Gospel is as no Gospel to you; and you will be never the more saved, than if there had no Saviour ever come into the world, or there had never grace been given to the world, or there had never been promise made, or Gospel preached to the world. For Christ will not save them that continue to neglect him, and set light by all the mercy that he offereth, and the salvation which he hath purchased, and do not esteem and use him as a Saviour, and cannot find enough in God and glory, to take off their hearts from the pleasures and idols of the flesh. If Christ "would have gathered you as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings and you would not" (Matt. xxiii. 37.), you will be as far from being saved by him, as if you had never heard of his name.

And yet that is not all: if you prevent it not by true conversion, you will wish a thousand and a thousand times that this were all. But there is worse than this; for Christ will not leave a man of you as he finds you. If you are so far in love with worldly wealth and fleshly pleasure, that you can taste no sweetness in his grace, and see no desirable glory in his kingdom, he will make you taste the bitterness of his wrath, and feel the weight of his severest justice. The most compassionate Saviour is the most dreadful Judge to those that will not be saved by his grace. It will be easier for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for those that were the obstinate refusers of his Gospel; Matt. vi. 11, 12. "He that despised Moses' law, died without mercy, under two or three witnesses; of how much sorer punishment shall he be thought worthy, that hath trodden. under foot the Son of God?" Heb. x. 28, 29. "See therefore that ye refuse not him that speaketh: for if they escaped not that refused him that spake on earth, how much more shall not we escape, if we turn away from him that speaketh from heaven?" Heb. xii. 23.

7. As long as you neglect the one thing needful, whatever good conceits of yourselves you have entertained, and whatever hopes, or peace, or comfort you have built upon those conceits, they are all but mere delusions, and irrational,

like the laughter of a madman, that is no comfort to the standers by, who know that it is but the fruit of his distemper, and maketh him an object of more compassion. What wisdom is it to look high and carry it gallantly in the world, when you know not but vengeance may overtake you the next hour? Alas man, thou hast to do with God! Though thou see him not, it is he that upholds thee, and observeth thee, and looketh for love and duty from thee, and will be glorified by thee, or thou shalt dearly answer it. God will not be neglected and abused at so cheap a rate as sottish infidels imagine; "He despiseth thee, if thou despise him ;" (1 Sam. ii. 20.) and thou despisest him if thou despise his messengers, and word, and ways; Luke x. 16. 1 Thess. iv. 8. And if God despise thee, what honour is it to thee to be stout-hearted and high in thy own conceit, and to live applauded by thyself and others? Think of yourselves as well as you will, God counteth you worse than the basest brutes, as long as you make yourselves so by neglecting the one thing for which you have your reason. When you swagger it out in the world, you do but gingle your fetters, and glory in your shame; Phil. iii. 18, 19. While fools admire you, God abhorreth you; he "laugheth you to scorn, and hath you in derision," as he expresseth himself after the manner of men; Prov. i. 26-28. Psalm ii. 4. When you are proud of your riches, or honour, with such as yourselves, you are but proud of the bonds of your captivity; 2 Tim. ii. 26. Though you live as carelessly and merrily, and laugh as heartily, and sport yourselves as fearlessly as if all were safe, and nothing ailed you, yet your mirth is but your madness; (Eccles. vii. 4. 6. ii. 2.) and God seeth that your day (a woful day) is coming, (Psal. xxxvii. 13.); and you know not but you may the next hour be tormented in hell, that this hour are so pleasant and confident on earth. And is this a desirable or rational kind of mirth? Did you but now foresee the end, did you see what you must see, or feel a little of what you must feel, you would presently be far from mirth or laughter; it would spoil your sport, and turn your tune to doleful lamentations. O short, unsatisfactory pleasure! O endless, easeless woe, how quickly wilt thou surprise them that little dream of such a change! You say religion is a melancholy thing; but verily your condition is so much worse than melancholy, that it may make a man me

lancholy to think of men in so sad a case. If any thing in the world will make a man melancholy, methinks it should be to stand in your unhappy state, and thence to look into eternity, and to think of your enmity to heaven, and that you have no part in Christ, no title to his kingdom; and to think what haste you are making to your infernal home, and how fast the wheels of night and day do hurry your unprepared souls to judgment, and that your "judgment lingereth not, and your damnation slumbereth not," as the Holy Ghost speaketh; 2 Pet. ii. 3. Whether you sleep or wake, be sure it sleepeth not. In a word, to neglect the one thing needful, is to neglect heaven itself and your salvation; to neglect heaven is to lose it; and lose heaven and lose all. And what comfort can the forethoughts of life everlasting afford a soul in a state of sin, that is passing to everlasting misery? And what comfort can any thing in this transitory life afford that man, that hath no matter of comfort in the life to come, yea, that must there live in endless sorrows ? O let me not taste of that frantic and unreasonable mirth, that tendeth to such heaviness, and driveth away those wise, recovering thoughts that are necessary to prevent it! For the Lord's sake, and for your soul's sake, all you that neglect the one thing needful, will you but search the Scriptures, and soberly consider whether all this be not certain truth; and if it be, how it should affect you, and what a change in reason it should make upon you! I have done with this Use. If you have taken a survey of your own hearts and lives, will you next, for the exercising of your compassion, look a little further.

Use 2. If one thing be needful, and the neglect of this be so unreasonable, so unmanly, and so dangerous as we have seen it proved, then what an object of compassion and lamentation is the distracted world! Look upon this text of Scripture, and look also upon the course of the earth, and consider of the disagreement, and whether it be not still as before the flood, that all the imaginations of man's heart are evil continually; Gen. vi. 7. Were it but possible for a man to see the affections and motions of all the world at once, as God seeth them, what a pitiful sight would it be! What a stir do they make, alas poor fools, for they know not what! while they forget, or slight, or hate the one thing necessary. What a heap of gadding ants should we see, that do nothing

but gather sticks and straws! Look among persons of every rank, in cities and country, and look into the families about you, and see what trade it is that they are most busily driving on, whether it be for heaven or earth! and whether you can discern by their care and labours that they understand what is the one thing necessary? They are as busy as bees, but not for honey, but in spinning such a spider's web, as the besom of death will presently sweep down; Job viii. 14. They labour hard; but for what? for the food that perisheth, and not for that which will endure to everlasting life ; John vi.27. They are diligent seekers; but for what? Not first for God, his kingdom and righteousness; but for that which they might have had as an addition to their blessedness; Matt. vi. 33. They are still doing; but what are they doing? even undoing themselves by running away from God, to hunt after the perishing pleasures of the world. Instead of providing for the life to come, they are making provision for the flesh to fulfil its lusts; Rom. xiii. 14. Some of them hear the word of God; but they choke it presently by the deceitfulness of riches, and the cares of this life; Luke viii. 14. They are careful and troubled about many things; but the one thing that should be all to them, is cast by as if it were nothing. Providing for the flesh and minding the world, is the employment of their lives. They trouble themselves with it, and trouble their families, and their nearest relations, and ofttimes trouble the whole town or place where they live; so that unless we will let them have their bone to themselves, and give them our cloak when they have taken our coat, and say as Mephibosheth Let him take all,' there is no living quietly by them. A dog at his carrion, or a swine in his trough, is not more greedy than many of these sensualists, that labour of the Caninus appetitus' to their trash. But to holiness they have no appetite, and are worse than indifferent to the things that are indeed desirable. They have no covetousness for the things that they are commanded earnestly to covet; They have so little hunger and thirst after righteousness, that a very little or none will satisfy them. Here they are pleading always for moderation, and against too much, and too earnest, and too long. And all is too much for them that is above stark naught, or dead hypocrisy ; and all is too earnest and too long, that would make religion seem a business, or would