Remains of that excellent minister of Jesus Christ, Mr. Joseph Alleine being a collection…Remaines of that excellent minister of Jesus Christ, Mr. Joseph Alleine being a collection…

11. Set your houses in order that you may not have your estates in the world to settle, when God requires your Souls: Make your wills in your health and vigour, and therein be sure so to settle your estates, as that God and good uses be not shut out, nor forgotten. Wretched men that have so many hundreds to settle upon their Children, can scarce find in their hearts to settle one in the hundred upon Gods special Service.

12. Look often into your Coffins, and behold your bones and dust, as shortly others shall, when turned out of your Graves: Be not strangers to the thoughts of death; expect it, wait all the days of your appointed time when your change shall come; familiarize the thoughts of Death to your selves, that you may be always safe, you must never be secure; you must pray, and set a watch, and be always upon your guard; walk every day some serious turns with Death, let it never come unlooked for; God forbid Death should come upon you, and you say, I did not think of it: You must daily think of it, and look for it. How holy and happy a man was he, that could say, I have not known what to morrow meant this twenty years? Consider your latter end, learn to number your days: God doth number them, why should not you? if the man of the house had known what hour of the night the Thief would have come, he would have watched, and not have suffered his House to be broken up; but it is too late ⟨image 10⟩to think of it, when the House is rifled: Be not of them that put far off the evil day; he that remembers not his end, remembers nothing as he should: It is the remembrance of Death puts life into our Prayers, into our Graces, and all our motions. He that puts off the thoughts of Death, gives his enemy unspeakable advantages: Death comes upon the sleeping and secure sinner, as Jael upon Sisera, and strikes the fatal nail through his temples, and fastens him to the earth: or as David upon the Amalekites, when he and his mighty men came upon them, chafed in their minds, as a Bear robbed of her Whelps, when they found them spread abroad upon the earth, eating, drinking, dancing, and smote them from the twilight to the evening of the day.