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

The fourth rule is, that we be not busy and curious in prying into the lives of other men, and spying out their infirmities; nor strict and severe in censuring and condemning their faults and imperfections, when we have taken notice of them. For he that undertaketh much business abroad, must of necessity neglect his own at home; he that is curious in searching and examining other mens manners, will find no time to look into his own. The which we see daily verified by woeful and lamentable experience in many Professors of these times, who spend all their zeal in censuring of others, and in exclaiming against the corruptions of the times, the disorders in the Common-wealth, the faults of Governors Civill and Ecclesiastical, the defects and blemishes of the Church, and in the mean time are cold and negligent in searching out their own sins, in reforming their own manners, and in the duties of sanctification, and of a godly life. The which, is oftentimes done, not so much out of a true mislike and hatred of others vices and corruptions (for then they would make speed to pursue ¹and subdue them with greater detestation in themselves, out of a feeling experience of the manifold evils which they bring upon them) but to magnify their own zeal, which will not suffer them with any patience to tolerate such faults and corruptions, to disguise and hide their own vices, under this show of misliking others sins, and to commend themselves, and get the name of forward Christians, by dispraising those