A guide to godliness or a Treatise of a Christian life showing the dutiesA guide to godlynesse or a Treatise of a Christian life shewing the duties

With like care we must in our solitariness watch over our hearts, that they be not poisoned with carnal concupiscence, nor inveigled and enamoured with the pleasures of sin, and that they do not affect and fasten themselves upon worldly vanities, nor dote upon uncertain riches, voluptuous delights, and vain honours, unto which naturally they are so much inclined, and so commit with them a kind of contemplative idolatry, when as they are debarred of actual fruition, and cannot, in this solitary absence, perform unto them any real worship. But seeing God requireth to have them as his own peculiar and chief possession, we must keep ¹them fast linked unto him, and so fasten them upon spiritual and heavenly excellencies, that no worldly thing may cause a separation. And because we have no bond strong enough to tie them together in this inseparable union, we must often pray with David, that the Lord will knit our hearts ²unto him with his holy Spirit, and so engrave his Law, and put his fear in them, that they may never depart from him. And that they may not be fixed and fast glued unto earthly things, we must with an holy violence pull them often asunder, and lift them up with holy desires, affecting, yea ³