A supplement to The Morning-exercise at Cripple-Gate, or, Several more cases of conscience practically…

3. Here is also a word of caution for professors, to take heed how they make Religion and the concerns thereof subservient to worldly interest. O! what a curse and plague is this, to make the highest excellence subserve the vilest lusts? and yet how common is it? I tremble to think how far many professors will be found guilty hereof at the last day.

4. But that which I mostly design as the close of this Discourse, is some few words of Exhortation and Direction unto Christians.

(1). To labour after an holy contempt of this dirty soul-polluting world. O! what an essential obligation do we all lye under, to contemn the Grandeur and sun-burnt glory of this fading world? What is there in this world you can call yours? can you be content to have your Heaven made of such base metal as mire and clay? O what a transient thing is all the glory of this perishing world! consider the argument which our Apostle useth in the words following our text, 1 John 2.17. and the world. (i. e. all the splendour, pomp, beauty, pleasures, and grandeur of the world) passeth away, [Greek or Hebrew], as a scene, whereon men acted their parts, and then passed away, as 1 Cor. 7.31. alas! were the world guilty of no other defect but this, that it passeth away, what a strong argument is this for the contempt thereof? again, remember this world is but your prison and place of pilgrimage: and oh! how scornful and disdainful is the pilgrims eye? with how much scorn doth he behold other Countries? and ought not Christians with a more generous disdain cry out fie, fie, this dirty world is not like my celestial Canaan? Alas! what have we here to rejoice in but fetters and chains? how soon doth the fashion of this world pass away,