The way to true happiness in a serious treatise /

O soul, do not think when thy sins pursue thee, a little praying and reforming thy course will pacify God: thou must begin with thine heart: if that be not renewed, thou canst no more please God, than one that having unspeakably offended thee, should bring thee his vomit in a dish to pacify thee, or having fallen into the mire, should think with his loathed embraces to reconcile thee.

O soul, do not think when thy sins pursue thee, a little praying and reforming thy course will pacifie God: thou must begin with thine heart: if that be not renewed, thou canst no more please God, than one that having unspeakably offended thee, should bring thee his vomit in a dish to pacifie thee, or having fallen into the mire, should think with his loathed embraces to reconcile thee.

It is a great misery to labour in the fire. The Poets could not invent a worser Hell for Sys• phus than to be getting the barrel still up the hill, and then that it should presently fall down again and renew his labour. God threatens it, as the greatest of temporal judgments, that they should build and not inhabit, plant and not gather, and their labours shall be eat up by strangers, Deut. 28. 30, 38, 39, 41. Is it so great a misery to lose our common labours, to •ow•• in vain, and build in vain? how much more to• lose our pains in Religion, to pray, and hear, ⟨p. 67⟩and fast in vain? This is an undoing and eternal loss. Be not deceived, if thou goest on in thy sinful estate, though thou shouldst spread forth thine hands, God will hide his eyes; though thou make many prayers, he will not hear, Isaiah 1. 15. If a man without skill, set about our work, and m•rr it in the doing, though he take much pains, we give him but small thanks. God will be worshipped after the due order,