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

Thirdly, our care must principally be on the Lords Day to abstain from all sin, which above all others is to be esteemed the most servile work, seeing the committing thereof is the base service of the devil, and our own carnal lusts. In which regard, as we must at all times avoid it, so especially on the Lords Day, which is an holy rest, consecrated to his worship and service, seeing we cannot offer unto him a greater indignity, then to serve the devil in the works of darkness, when we should serve him in the exercises of piety and Religion. And as we are carefully and conscionably to avoid all kinds of sin, so those principally wherewith the Lords Day is most ordinarily profaned, which being the sins of the times and Country, will by the contagion of evil example, most easily poison and infect us, if we do not warily avoid them. Among these, we may number proud and laborious curiosity in decking and adorning of the body, which doth so wholly take up the time of some, especially of the weaker sex, that they have scarce any leisure for any spiritual exercises, whereby they should privately serve God, and prepare themselves for his public worship in the Congregation. Secondly, excessive and unnecessary feasting, especially of our equals, by which, servants ordinarily are more toiled, then on any other day in the week, and so wholly taken up with these businesses, that they can seldom come to the House of God to do him service. So that as David sometime seemed to envy the happiness ¹of the Sparrows and Swallows, which had that liberty of coming into the Tabernacle which he wanted: so have these poor Cooks and servants cause, not only to envy them, but even their Masters Hawks and Dogs, which accompany them to the House of God, when as they, whose souls are no less precious then their Governors, and purchased at as high a rate, even the inestimable price of Christs Blood, are constrained to stay at home with hungry and starved souls, for want of spiritual food, that they may provide superfluity and abundance of corporal meat for the pampering of the flesh. And with this excessive cheer we may also reckon immoderate eating and drinking of ordinary meats and drinks; for as surfeiting and drunkenness are never seasonable, but are always unlawful, and to be shunned as works of the flesh;