A Christian Directory

§. 2. Direct. 2. Understand the excellency of your calling, and what fair opportunities you have to promote ¹those noble ends; and also how great a charge you undertake; that so you may be kept from sloth and superficialness, and may be quickened to a diligent discharge of your undertaken trust. 1. You have not a charge of Sheep or Oxen, but of rational creatures. 2. You have not the care of their bodies, but of their minds: You are not to teach them a trade to live by only in the world, but to inform their minds with the knowledge of their Maker, and to cultivate their wits, and advance their reason, and fit them for the most manlike conversations. 3. You have them not (as Pastors) when they are hardened in sin by prejudice and long custom; but you have the tenderest twigs to bow, and the most tractable ductile age to tame: you have paper to write on, (not wholly white, but that) which hath the fewest blots and lines to be expunged. 4. You have them not as volunteers, but as obliged to obey you, and under the correction of the rod; which with tender age is a great advantage. 5. You have them not only for your auditors in a general Lecture (as Preachers have them at a Sermon): but in your nearest converse, where you may teach them as particularly as you please, and examine their profiting, and call them daily to account. 6. You have them not once a week (as Preachers have them) but all the week long, from day to day, and from morning until night. 7. You have them at that age, which doth believe their teachers, and take all upon trust, before they are grown up to self-conceitedness, and to contradict and quarrel with their Teachers (as with their Pastors they very ordinarily do). All these are great advantages to your ends.

§. 2. Direct. 2. Understand the excellency of your calling, and what fair opportunities you have to promote ¹those noble ends; and also how great a charge you undertake; that so you may be kept from sloth and superficialness, and may be quickened to a diligent discharge of your undertaken trust. 1. You have not a charge of Sheep or Oxen, but of rational creatures. 2. You have not the care of their bodies, but of their minds: You are not to teach them a trade to live by only in the world, but to inform their minds with the knowledge of their Maker, and to cultivate their wits, and advance their reason, and fit them for the most manlike conversations. 3. You have them not (as Pastors) when they are hardened in sin by prejudice and long custome; but you have the tenderest twigs to bow, and the most tractable ductile age to tame: you have paper to write on, (not wholly white, but that) which hath the fewest blots and lines to be expunged. 4. You have them not as volunteers, but as obliged to obey you, and under the correction of the rod; which with tender age is a great advantage. 5. You have them not only for your auditors in a general Lecture (as Preachers have them at a Sermon): but in your nearest converse, where you may teach them as particularly as you please, and examine their profiting, and call them daily to account. 6. You have them not once a week (as Preachers have them) but all the week long, from day to day, and from morning untill night. 7. You have them at that age, which doth believe their teachers, and take all upon trust, before they are grown up to self-conceitedness, and to contradict and quarrel with their Teachers (as with their Pastors they very ordinarily do). All these are great advantages to your ends.