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

Contrariwise, want of this knowledge, and ignorance of God, and his will, maketh us strangers from God and the Common wealth of Israel, and ¹howsoever we be the Church, yet to be no true members of the Church. For God hath promised to all that are in the Covenant of grace, that he will put his Law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts, and that they shall all know him, from the least of them, to the greatest of them. And our Saviour saith, that he knoweth all the sheep of his fold, and is known of them; and that they know his voice, and are able to discern it from the voice of a stranger. And as it makes us strangers from God, and the Covenant of grace, so also from the life of God, or the godly life which he commandeth, as we see in the example of the Gentiles, who, having their understanding darkened, were alienated from the life of God, through the ignorance that was in them, because of the blindness of their heart. And contrariwise, thrusts us headlong into all manner of sin; for as the Apostle saith in the same place, When the Gentiles, through their ignorance, were thus estranged from the life of God, they became past feeling, and so gave themselves over to lasciviousness, ²to work all uncleanness with greediness. So Hosea, having set down a Catalogue ³