A Christian Directory

72. It is possible to Love God and Holiness and Heaven, as a conceited state and means of our sensual felicity, and escape of pain and misery: But to Love God as the true felicity of the Intellectual nature, and as our spiritual Rest, and yet to Love him only or chiefly for our selves, and not rather for Himself as our highest end, implieth a contradiction. The same I say of Holiness, as Loved only for our selves. The evidence whereof is plain, in that it is Essential to God, to be not only better than our selves and every creature, but also to be the Ultimate End of all things, to which they should tend in all their perfections. And it is Essential to Holiness to be the souls devotion of it self to God as God, and not only to God as our felicity. Therefore to Love God only or chiefly for our selves, is to make him only a means to our felicity, and not our chief End; and it is to make our selves Better, and so more Amiable than God, that is, to be Gods our selves.

72. It is possible to Love God and Holiness and Heaven, as a conceited state and means of our sensual felicity, and escape of pain and misery: But to Love God as the true felicity of the Intellectual nature, and as our spiritual Rest, and yet to Love him only or chiefly for our selves, and not rather for Himself as our highest end, implyeth a contradiction. The same I say of Holiness, as Loved only for our selves. The evidence whereof is plain, in that it is Essential to God, to be not only better than our selves and every creature, but also to be the Ultimate End of all things, to which they should tend in all their perfections. And it is Essential to Holiness to be the souls devotion of it self to God as God, and not only to God as our felicity. Therefore to Love God only or chiefly for our selves, is to make him only a means to our felicity, and not our chief End; and it is to make our selves Better, and so more Amiable than God, that is, to be Gods our selves.

73. This is much of the sense of the Controversy between the Epicureans and the sober Philosophers (as is to be seen in Cicero, &c.) The sober Philosophers said that Virtue was to be loved for it self, more than for Pleasure: Because if Pleasure as such, be better than virtue as such, than all sensual Pleasure would be better than Virtue as such. The Epicureans said, that not all pleasure but the pleasure of Virtue, was the chief good (as Torquatus his words in Cicero show). And if it had been first proved, that a mans self is his just ultimate end, as the finis cui, or the personal end, than it would be a hard question whether the Epicureans were not in the right as to the finis cujus, or the Real end, (which indeed is but a medium to the personal, cui.) But when it is most certain that no mans person is to be his own ultimate end, as cui, but God, and then the Universe, and societies of the world as beforesaid, it is then easy to prove that the sober Philosophers were in the right, and that no mans Pleasure is his ultimate end, finis cujus: Because no mans Pleasure is either such a demonstration of the Divine perfection as Virtue is as such; nor yet doth it so much conduce to the common good of societies or mankind, and so to the pleasing and glorifying of God. And this way Cicero might easily have made good his cause against the Epicureans.