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 these are the properties which respect the duties themselves. The properties which concern the manner of doing them, are divers, and respect either the causes that move us to perform them, or our disposition in doing them. The causes are either efficient, or final. The efficient cause moving us to perform all the duties of a godly life, ought to be the love of God, which is the fountain of true obedience, and should be so powerful in us, that we should thereby be moved to serve, like children, our heavenly Father, though there were no reward promised to our service, which is the motive that induceth mercenaries and servants, rather then children, to do their duty. For howsoever we may in our obedience have an eye with Moses, to the recompense of reward; yet the chief argument ¹that prevaileth with us, ought to be, not the love of our selves, and out of it, the desire of our own salvation; but the love of God, who is the chief Goodness, whose glory is much to be preferred before our own good. Neither is it enough that the love of God accompany our actions, and that they be done in and with it, as running together (as it were) in the same stream, but also that it be the fountain from which all our obedience doth spring and flow. Consider we therefore when we undertake the performance of any Christian duty, what is the cause that moveth us unto it; and if we find, that it is love of the world, or love of our selves, either to obtain a reward, or to avoid punishment, temporal or eternal, let us put it back as coming out of due place, and labour that the love of God, which is much more worthy, may have the precedency, as the first and chief motive that persuadeth us to well-doing.