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

And thus we are in company to frame our speeches upon all occasions, that they may tend to the spiritual edification of our brethren. But though such conference in company is to be performed as most excellent, yet may such speeches have their due place, which concern moral and civill things, about any subject which may better and improve our knowledge for the service of the Church or common wealth, or mutual good duties to be performed towards one another; about the health and well-fare of our bodies, or our common affairs and businesses which we have in the world one with another, and such matters as concern the good of our estates, of which we may lawfully aduize and take counsel one of another, for the better directing and managing of all our actions and endeavours. Yea sometime our speeches and conferences may tend to honest delight, and to the mutual comfort and refreshing of one another, that our spirits being cheered and revived, we may be the better fitted for duties of an higher nature. For howsoever it be lawful sometimes to use speeches tending to our worldly profit and delight, yet let us carefully take heed, that we be not (like most men at their meetings) wholly taken up with them, talking of nothing else but of carnal and earthly things; but seeing God is the Author and giver of this excellent faculty of speech, let our tongues be chiefly employed (when we are at our free choice, and not straightened in our desired liberty by our earthly necessities that press upon us) in such conferences as tend to Gods glory, and the mutual edification one of another; that so it may appear that we are pilgrims on earth, and Citizens of heaven, when as our conversation is about heavenly matters; and that we are free Burgesses of the new Jerusalem, when as we speak the language of Canaan.