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

In respect also of our time, which is spent in our recreations; we must use great moderation, making them serve like sauces to our meat, to ¹sharpen our appetite unto the duties of our callings, and not to glut our selves with them, and so to make us the more unfit for any necessary employments. We must remember that they are but recreations to refresh us, and not occupations to tyre us, and that they are allowed us to cheer our spirits, and repair our strength, that we may be made more fit for the well-performing of the duties of Gods service and of our callings, and not that we should by toiling our selves in them, spend and consume them, and so be disabled for any necessary employment. We must consider that God hath not created and redeemed us, that we should wholly follow our pleasures, and with the Israelites, sit down to eat and drink, and rise up to play, but that we should spend our time and strength in the duties of his service, or in the means whereby we may be fitted for them. Neither hath he appointed recreation to be the end of our lives, but only as a means to preserve them, for more high and holy employments, tending to the glory of God and the salvation of our own souls. We must esteem time the most precious treasure, and that the consumption of it is the most dangerous disease, and desperately unrecoverable; that it exceedeth all other losses, and that the wasting of it is the greatest unthriftiness. And therefore we must not turn our recreations into pastimes, as the English name importeth, making only this use of them, to cause idle hours seem less tedious; for this were but to set spurs to a running Horse, which of it self posteth away speedily, and when it is once past, can never be recalled. Let us not fool and trifle out this our most precious treasure, upon every base vanity; or if we have done it in the