A treatise on comforting afflicted consciences - The Digital Puritan

202 INSTRUCTIOxXS FOR COMFORTINGCHAP. XV.Tlie Fiftli Advice to the Afflicted. Two Directions to the Minister, tobe observed towards his Patient.V. Since thou art now upon terms of turning unto God,taking profession upon thee, and giving up thy name untoChrist, the blessedest business that ever thou wentest about,be well advised, consider seriously what thou undertakest,and cast deliberately beforehand what it is like to cost thee.Thou must make an account to become the drunkard's song,and to have those " that sit in the gate to speak againstthee ;" the vilest of men to rail upon thee, and the wisestof the world to laugh at thee. Thou must be content tolive a despised man, to be scoffed at, to "be hated of allmen," to " "crucify the flesh with the affections and lusts ;to look upon the world, set out in the gaudiest manner withall her baits and Babels of riches, honours, favours, greatness,pleasures, &c. as upon an unsavoury rotten carcass.Thou and the world must be as two dead bodies upon onebier, without any delightful mutual commerce or intercourse,strangers and stark dead one unto another in respectof thy any farther trading with the vanities thereof. Forkeeping a good conscience, standing on God's side and forChrist's sake, thou must deny thyself thy v/orldly wisdom,carnal reason, corrupt affections ; thy acceptation with theworld, favour of great ones, credit and applause with themost ; thy passions, profit, pleasures, possibility of risingand growing great ; thy nearest friends, dearest companions,ease, liberty, life ; and grow by little and little into Esther'smost noble and invincible resolution, when doing God's willthreateneth any earthly danger; "And if 1 perish, Iperish " ; but not to perish so is everlastingly to perish, andso to perish is to be saved for ever. Thou must thus resolveupon this self-denial when thou first enterest into profession,or else thou wilt never be able to hold out in thy spiritualbuilding, or conquer in the Christian warfare (See and considerthe occasion, and how earnestly Christ enjoins it.Matt, xvi, 24 ; Luke xiv, 26, &c., and presses it with twoparables.) ; but all will come to nought, and thou cursedlyconclude in open apostasy, gross hypocrisy, or self- deceivingformality. Consider the young man in the gospel. Hecame hastily to Jesus Christ, and would needs be his discipleand follower upon the sudden. But alas ! he did wofullymistake. Little did he know, neither indeed would know,what belonged unto it. That the servant of such an heaveiilyMaster must be no earth-worm ; that every one of his dis-