A20762:1836
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
A guide to godliness or a Treatise of a Christian life showing the duties wherein it consisteth, the helps enabling & the reasons persuading unto it the impediments hindering the practise of it, and the best means to remove them whereunto are added divers prayers and a treatise of carnal security by John Douname Bachelor in Divinity and minister of Gods Word.A guide to godlynesse or a Treatise of a Christian life shewing the duties wherein it consisteth, the helpes inabling & the reasons parswading vnto it ye impediments hindering ye practise of it, and the best meanes to remoue them whereunto are added diuers prayers and a treatise of carnall securitie by Iohn Douname Batcheler in Diuinitie and minister of Gods Word.
London: printed by Felix Kingstone and William Stansby for Ed, 1622
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
§. Sect. 5 That company and worldly business should not hinder us from this exercise of Meditation.
§. Sect. 5 That company and worldly busines should not hinder vs from this exercise of Meditation.
The outward distractions, which are alleged as necessary impediments of this holy exercise, are the company of friends, who coming to visit us, take up that time which should be spent about it, the multitude of business, which affordeth us no leisure, and want of convenient place, wherein we might be privately by our selves, to perform this duty which cannot be done in the company of others. But for the first; no company should be so dear unto us, as that it should cause us to break off our communion ⟨p. 550⟩and society with God. Or if to avoid incivility and giving offence, we do intermit this exercise, and put it off to another time: this must not make us to neglect it altogether, but we must set our selves about it when our company is gone, and redeem this loss by doubling our diligence in this holy exercise. And for our business and employments, we are, according to our Saviours counsel, to think this one thing 1necessary, and to be preferred before all other, and first to seek the Kingdom of God, and his righteousness, esteeming no business so necessary, as 2the enriching of our souls with spiritual grace, and using the means which may further and assure us of our salvation; accounting those employments worldly, carnal, and not worthy our pains, which shoulder and thrust out spiritual exercises. And yet if our important business should wholly take us up, and that the necessity of our estate and calling should so strictly at all times bind us unto them, that we had no leisure for religious duties, there were some colour (and but a colour) of excuse: but the fault is not in the multitude of our employments, but either in our want of wisdom and providence, that we do not rightly dispose of them, and allot to all sorts of duties their seasonable times; or in our worldliness and immoderate love of earthly things, which maketh us think all time lost that is not spent about them, and that we are quite undone, if but a little while we intermit our diligence in seeking of them. For God by one Commandment doth not cross another, nor bringeth us into such straits, but that we may (if it be not our own fault) have seasonable time of yielding our obedience to them all.