The Morning exercise [at] Cri[ppleg]ate, or, Several cases of conscience practically resolved

2. Use, Let me press this rule upon you; Live by it, in all your carriage and dealings with men, let it be present to you. Ask your selves upon every occasion, would I that another should deal thus with me, and carry himself thus towards me? But I shall press this chiefly, as to justice and righteousness in our Commerce. It is said that Severus the Emperor caused this Rule to be written upon his palace,¹ and in all public places; let it be writ upon our houses, and shops, and exchanges. This exhortation is not altogether improper for this Auditory; you that frequent these exercises seem to have a good sense of that part of Religion, which is contained in the first Table; do not by your violations of the second, mar your obedience to the first; do not prove your selves Hypocrites in the first Table, by being wicked in the second; give not the World just cause to say, that you are ungodly because they find you to be unrighteous; but manifest your love to God, whom you have not seen, by your love to your Brother whom you have seen; and if any man wrong his Brother, he cannot love him. Do not reject or despise this exhortation, under the contemptuous Name of Morality. Our Saviour tells us, this is a chief part of that which hath ever been accounted Religion in the World, It is the Law and the Prophets; and he by enjoining it hath adopted it into Christianity, and made it Gospel. We should have an especial love to this precept, not only as it is the dictate of nature, and the Law of Moses, not only as it is a Jewish, and Gentile principle, but as it is of the household of Faith. When the young man told Christ, that he had kept the Commandments from his youth, it is said Jesus loved him; ²where-ever we have learned to despise morality, Jesus loved it; when I read the Heathen writers, especially Tully and Seneca, and take notice what precepts of morality, and Laws of kindness are every where in their writings, I am ready to fall in love with them. How should it make our blood to rise in many of our faces who are Christians, to hear with what strictness Tully determines Cases of conscience,³ and how generously he speaks of equity and justice towards all men. Societatis arctissimum vinculum est magis arbitrari esse contra naturam, hominem homini detrahere sui commodi causâ, quàm omnia incommoda subire;