Meditations on the holy sacrament of the Lords last Supper Written many years sinceMeditations on the holy sacrament of the Lords last Supper Written many yeares since

Secondly, in that Christ gave this Sacrament, ⟨p. 84⟩and did thereby testify his most willing obedience unto a cursed death, we likewise should in all our respects back unto him, break through all obstacles of self-love, or any temptations of Satan, and the world, and though contrary to the bent of our own desires, to the propension of our own corrupt hearts, most willingly render our obedience unto him, and make him the Lord of all our thoughts. First for our understandings, we should offer them as free and voluntary sacrifices, ready not only to yield unto truth out of constraint, but out of willingness and love to embrace it, not only for the evidence, but for the Author^l, and goodness of it, and thus to resign our judgements into Gods hands to be (though never so much against its own natural and carnal prejudices) informed and captivated unto all kind of saving knowledge, even to the extirpating of all those presumptions, prepossessions, and principles of corruption which use to^m smother and adulterate divine truth; for there is naturally in the minds of men, (though otherwise eagerly pursuing knowledge) a kind of dread and shrinking from the evidence of divine truths, (as each faculty avoideth too excellent an object) a voluntary andⁿ affected ignorance, lest^o knowing the truth they should cease to hate it; a faculty of making doubts touching the meaning and extent of ⟨p. 85⟩such truths, whose evidence would cross the corruptions of our practice, and then a framing of arguments and presumptions for that part which is most favourable and flattering unto nature, a certain private^c prejudice against the lustre of the most strict and practical principles, a humour of cavilling and disputing ^dabout those parts of Gods will, which bring with them a more strait obligation on the conscience, a withdrawing the thoughts from acquainting themselves with the more spiritual parts of divine truth under pretence of more important employments, about scholastical and sublime speculations. All which do evidently prove, that there is not in the understanding that willingness, to give up it self unto God, which there was in Christ to bestow himself unto us.