3. Yet if such be silent as can teach you, set them on work by some seasonable question. For the best are too dull and backward to good. And many are silent for want of occasion, opportunity, or invitation.

4. When you speak to the ignorant and sinful, do it not in a contemptuous, proud, magisterial way; but with clear convincing reason, and with great love and gentleness. Let instruction and sweet exhortation be instead of reproof, for the most part. And when you must reprove them, do it usually in secret, and not before others; for disgrace will provoke them, and hinder from repentance.

4. Drive home all your holy conference to some practical issue, for your own affection and resolution when you learn of others, and to affect the hearers at the very heart, and bring them to resolve on that which is their duty, when it is your lot to be as a teacher to others.

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5. Avoid two pernicious destroyers of good discourse: 1. Choosing little things, though good, to talk of. As some small controversy, word, or text, less pertinent to men's present necessities. 2. An ignorant, unskilful manner of talking of weighty matters. Abundance of good people breed scorn and contempt in the wittier sort of hearers, by their imprudent manner of speech.

6. Because the ignorant and unlearned cannot well avoid this, when they talk with those that are more witty and learned than themselves, I advise them to say little to such, unless to name some plain text of Scripture which may convince them and, instead of the rest, 1. To get them to read some fit books: 2. And to get them to discourse with some ministers or others that can overwit them, and silence all their cavils.

S. I have but one thing more to desire now that you willteach me how to keep days of humiliation and thanksgiving in private and in public.

P. I would not overwhelm you with precepts: a little may serve for both these, besides what is said on other subjects. 1. In public, the pastors must choose the time of humiliations and fasts, with the order, and words, and circumstances of performance. But in private, your discretion must be chooser. And it must be, 1. After some great sin. 2. Or in some great danger or judgment, private or public. 3. Or when some great mercy is desired, or work to be done. And so thanksgiving are for great mercies and deliverances.

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2. The manner of humiliation is, by due fasting, and confession, and prayer, to humble the soul penitently for sin, and beg the mercy which we want: and the manner of thanksgiving, to rejoice soberly and spiritually, with moderate feasting, when that is convenient, and give God thanks for his mercy, and beg the grace to improve it, and renew our devotion and resolutions of obedience.

3. The outward parts (fasting and feasting) must not be made a form or ceremony of, nor judged to be pleasing to God merely in and for themselves: but must be chosen only as means which help us to their proper ends, humiliation and thanksgiving; and may be varied as men's cases and bodies differ. The weak may be humbled without fasting, or with less: and the poor and the sickly may give thanks without feasting, or with little. And all must take heed of offering God a sacrifice of the sin of sensuality and excess.

4.

True repentance in humiliation, and increased love to God in thanksgiving, and true reformation of life by both, is the great end to be aimed at; and all that attaineth not, or truly intendeth not that end, is vain. But so much for this present conference.

THE EIGHTH DAY'S CONFERENCE.

Directions for a safe and comfortable Death.

Speakers.-Paul, a teacher; and Saul, a learner.

SAUL. Sir, I have been, since I saw you, with divers of my neighbours at their death; and I see that weakness and pain of body, and the terrors of death, and the stir of friends and physicians, are so great impediments to men's preparation then, that I earnestly entreat you to help me to make ready while I am in health. For I am loth to leave so great work to so weak a state, and to so sad, and short, and uncertain a time.

PAUL. It is God's great mercy to make you so wise. There is nothing in which the folly of ungodly men doth more appear than in delaying their serious preparations for death. Is there

Est. iv. 16; Joel i. 14-16; Ezr. viii. 21, &c. h Est. ix. 17, 18; Psalm lxxxi 3.

and

Matt. ix. 13, and xii. 7. * Rom. xiv. 17; 1 Cor. viii. 8; Isa. Iviii. 2, &c.; Psalm 1. 14, 15, 23, xvi.; 1 Cor. v. 8.

any man so brutish as not to know that he must die? And he is scarce a man, much less a Christian, who believeth not that death will pass him into another state of life. There is no man can doubt but this change is sure, and very near; and no man knoweth how near, or when; and O how great a change will it be! The body, which was spruced up and pampered, which must now be honoured, and pleased, and preferred, must then become a loathsome corpse: the pleasant cups, the delicious food, the adorned rooms, the gay attire, the soft beds, the delightful gardens, walks, and fields, the honour and precedency, power and command, are all at an end, and turned into a dark and silent grave. The flesh that must be daily pleased, and nothing is too good for it, must be an ugly, black, and stinking carcass, many years rotting out of sight and smell, lest it should annoy the living, and mar their mirth, before it can come to be dry and less abominable dust, and equal with the common earth. House and lands, wealth and honour, greatness and vain-glory, sports and worldly pleasures, are wholly at an end, and will follow them no further, but be to them as if they had never been. And the soul must appear in another society, among the spirits that have finished their course on earth, and are gone before to receive their doom: there it must see what before we heard of; either the hellish misery of undone souls, which have cast away all their hopes for ever, and the wicked devils which deceived them; or the perfected spirits of the just, the glorious angels, our glorified Redeemer, and the most glorious God. There they will soon see the truth of that word and that world which they doubted of; and quickly feel what they must trust to for evermore. O what a change is it suddenly to pass from our company, our dwellings, our business, our pleasures, and from all this world, and to see a world which we never saw before, and to enter presently upon the joys or sorrows which must never, never end or change! O what a stone is a hardened heart! What a senseless thing is an ungodly man! that can either forget such a day, and such a change as this, or can think of it without awakened resolutions, presently, and with their utmost diligence, to prepare! If they believe not God's word, and the life to come, why do they not come and debate the case with us, and hear what we can say, till they are resolved, upon the best inquiry, whether it be so indeed or not? Do they think that we can give them no bet

ter proof of it, than what their unstudied brains lay hold on; or no better than the devil giveth them against it? But if they do believe it, O what self-condemning wretches are they! What! believe such a change as sure and near, and not prepare for it? Believe that they must be in heaven or hell for ever, and yet live as if they cared not which of them it be?

S. I confess it is an evident truth and duty which you urge, and an undeniable madness in men to forget so great, and sure, and near a change; for death is a thing past all dispute. It is no controversy whether we must die. And a man that loveth himself should think, then, whither we must go next.

P. If we tell men, in preaching, of things which they never knew before, they understand us not; and, instead of learning, they cavil and question whether they are true; and when we tell them of such things as they know already, and all the world knoweth, they despise it, and say, 'Who knoweth not this?' But, by this, you may see that we have need to preach nothing more than that which all men's tongues confess. It is a shame, either for the preachers or hearers, that so many sermons are preached of death. If there be no need of it, the shame is ours; but if there be, the shame is theirs. O man! what a dark, and dead, and sottish thing art thou become, that hast need to be told that thou must die; and need to be told it at every funeral; yea, every day; and all too little: as if the place which we meet in did not tell it us, where we tread on the dust of so many generations, and, within a yard or two of our feet, some carcasses lie in black and loathsome rottenness, and the skulls and bones of others forget what once they were pleased with on earth. Our diseases and pains of body forewarn us; our weariness in our labours tells us that we have a body that must break at last ; our grey hairs will tell us, as the golden leaves on the trees in autumn, that our fall is at hand; our children tell us that others are rising up in our steads, while we are going off the stage. Every bit that we eat, and cup that we drink, doth tell us what bodies we have, that can be no longer upheld than new reparations are daily made of their decays; our every night's sleep warneth us to prepare for that sleep from which the resurrection only will awake us; all the poor beasts, and birds, and fishes, whose lives must go to keep up ours, do tell us that our own will not be long, and that we must die as well as they, and that a life maintained by so many lives, at so dear a rate, should be well spent for his service that giveth us these, and all. When we

plough up and dig the earth for our seed, and cast it in, where it must corrupt before it spring up again, we do but represent the digging of our graves, and the burial of this body till the rising day. Every time that the sun setteth at night and riseth again the next morning, it warneth us how our lives must set and rise again; and so doth every fall and spring. Every bell that tolleth or ringeth for the dead, is our call to prepare to follow them; yea, every bell that calleth to the church doth tell us that the same bells must shortly be tolled for our burial. Every clock that striketh, every watch that moveth, every hourglass that runneth, hath a voice to call senseless sinners. See and hear, O man or woman, how thy time passeth away; how quickly will thy last m hour come; yea, every breath that we fetch ourselves, and every stroke that our pulse both beat, doth call to sinners, 'Your days are numbered; it is determined how many more breaths you must breathe, and how many times more your pulse must beat; your last pulse and your last breath is near at hand!' O what abundance of preachers have we to tell us that we must die! and yet men live as if they did not believe it, or never had been warned to prepare.

S. But sure, sir, it is a thing that men know so well, that they need not be told that they must die; but only be told better how to prepare for it.

P. I tell you, to the shame of corrupted nature, that men have need to be told, and told again, a thousand times, with the loudest voice, that they must die. It was not a vain lesson which the philosopher told the great emperor, 'Remember that thou art mortal.' O had I a voice that could be heard all over the land, to cry to all men, 'Remember that you must die;' and could I speak it to their hearts, it would awaken the secure, it would unbefool the dreaming world, who are playing away their lives for nothing. I tell you, the preacher that doth but thunder this in the ears of a sleepy, worldly congregation, 'O sinners, you must die, you must die, as sure as you are alive you must die,' doth not preach an unprofitable sermon. If you believe me not, answer me these few questions:

Quest. 1. Why else are men so surprised with the fears of death when it is just coming? They knew, all their lives before, that it would come, and yet they live merrily and carelessly till it is just upon them; and then when the physician tells them there is no hope, O what heart-sinking terror are they in, as if

Matt. xxiv. 44, and xxv. 10; Luke xii. 40.