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

Now the good things which accompany the duties of a godly life, are either the benefits, which as fruits and effects, attend upon it; or those special and rich privileges, wherewith God of his free mercy is pleased to crown his own graces, and to reward, as with rich wages, that poor service which we perform unto him. The benefits which follow a godly life, are either privative, consisting in our freedom from evil; or positive, in the fruition of good, and both of them either temporal or eternal. The privative benefits of this life are many, according to the multitude of evils unto which it is liable, both in respect of sin and punishment, from which, in the greatest and worst part, we are by the benefit of a godly life freed and delivered. For first, if we lead a godly life, it will be a means to assure us of our freedom from the guilt of all our sins, by sole virtue of Christs death and blood-shed, applied unto us by faith, both in regard that these holy duties of a godly life are the undoubted fruits of a lively faith, approving it to be sincere and unfeigned; and as fruits of our Sanctification, assuring us, that the same virtue of Christs death and Resurrection, which we find effectual for the mortifying of our sins, and our spiritual quickening unto holiness and newness of life, hath been already alike effectual unto us, for the freeing of us from the guilt of sin in our Justification, of which the other are but fruits and effects. And secondly, we shall hereby be freed, in the greatest part, from our fleshly corruption, and innumerable actual sins; seeing those