A10945:312
Seven treatises containing such direction as is gathered out of the Holy Scriptures, leading…Seuen treatises containing such direction as is gathered out of the Holie Scriptures, leading…
Seven treatises containing such direction as is gathered out of the Holy Scriptures, leading and guiding to true happiness, both in this life, and in the life to come: and may be called the practise of Christianity. Profitable for all such as heartily desire the same: in the which, more particularly true Christians may learn how to lead a godly and comfortable life every day. Penned by Richard Rogers, preacher of the word of God at Wethersfield in Essex.Seuen treatises containing such direction as is gathered out of the Holie Scriptures, leading and guiding to true happines, both in this life, and in the life to come: and may be called the practise of Christianitie. Profitable for all such as heartily desire the same: in the which, more particularly true Christians may learne how to leade a godly and comfortable life euery day. Penned by Richard Rogers, preacher of the word of God at Wethersfield in Essex.
London: printed by Felix Kyngston for Thomas Man, 1603
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
If then such an heart be the guide of our life, how monstrous, and loathsome §Emust that life needs be? Hereby therefore it is clear, that the heart must be purged of this corruption, as I have said: it must be changed from this nature and custom; that when any departing from sin should be, or any duty to God offered, this may not be a pullback, and hinderer, but ready to give consent thereunto; and a furtherer thereof, in subduing the corruption of the same, from time to time. For who seeth not that this were otherwise a toil most tedious, yea, a thing altogether impossible; as oft as we ⟨p. 88⟩should go about any good duty, then to have our heart to seek (as they say)§F and to be set in frame:1 as if an husbandman should always be driven to mend and sharpen his plough share, when, and as oft as he tilleth the ground; or a Carpenter to grind his tools so oft as he goeth to work: but much more, seeing the heart is backward, and not willing, and ready to any good thing, yea rather rebellious against it; must not all of necessity the more preposterously go forward?2 But to proceed, more particularly to anatomize and describe the heart, and in few words to say much of it; we must know that it is overspread with unbelief, deceitful, unruly, loose, hardened, wilful, vain, idle, blockish, cold in goodness, and without savour, and soon weary of it: high, big, proud, disdainful, self-loving, uncharitable, unkind, conceited,§G impatient, angry, fierce, envious, revenging, unmerciful, froward and touchy, churlish, sullen, meddling, worldly, filthy and unclean, loving pleasure more than godliness; unprofitable, repining, earthly, greedy, or covetous; idolatrous, superstitious, unreverent, hypocritical, disobedient to betters, judging rashly, hardly reconciled: and in a word, prone to all evil: is it not then hardly tamed? Which must needs be granted, when the most part of people under the Gospel, do either not know, nor suspect this, and therefore are far from ability to hunt these corruptions out: and they who know it, do yet love them as their own flesh, and therefore be never the nearer to the purging out, or removing of them.