A Call to the Unconverted

9. Yea the persons that you converse with, and all their actions, you make the occasions of your sin and destruction. If they live in the fear of God, you hate them. If they live ungodlily, you imitate them: if the wicked are many, you think you may the more boldly follow them; if the godly be few, you are the more emboldened to despise them. If they walk exactly, you think they are too precise; if one of them fall in a particular temptation, you stumble upon them, and turn away from holiness, because that ⟨p. 249⟩others are imperfectly holy: as if you were warranted to break your necks, because some others have by their heedlessness sprained a sinew or put out a bone. If an hypocrite discover himself, you say, They are all alike, and think your selves as honest as the best. A Professor can scarce slip into any miscarriage, but because he cuts his finger, you think you may boldly cut your throats. If ministers deal plainly with you, you say they rail. If they speak gently or coldly, you either sleep under them, or are little more affected then the seats you sit upon. If any errors creep into the Church, some greedily entertain them, and others reproach the Christian Doctrine for them, which is most against them. And if we would draw you from any ancient rooted error, which can but plead two, or three, or six, or seven ⟨p. 250⟩hundred years custom, you are as much offended with a motion for Reformation, as if you were to lose you lives by it, and hold fast old errors, while you cry out against new ones. Scarce a difference can arise among the ministers of the Gospel, but you will fetch your own death from it. And you will not hear, or at least not obey the unquestionable Doctrine of any thing that jumps not with your conceits: One will not hear a Minister, because he readeth his Sermon: and another will not hear him, because he doth not read them. One will not hear him, because he saith the Lords prayer: and another will not hear him, because he doth not use it. One will not hear them that are for Episcopacy: and another will not hear them that are against it. And thus I might show it you in many other cases, how you turn all that ⟨p. 251⟩comes near you to your own destruction, so clear is it that the ungodly are self-destroyers, and that their perdition is of themselves.