Compassionate counsel to all young men especially I. London apprentices, II. students of divinity,…

§. 15. II. The Case being so important I shall briefly conjoin your Danger and your Remedy, beseeching you as you have any care for your Souls, your Country, or the Church of God, or any thing which Faith or reason should regard, that you will soberly weigh the Counsel that I give you.

§. 15. II. The Case being so important I shall briefly conjoyn your Danger and your Remedy, beseeching you as you have any care for your Souls, your Country, or the Church of God, or any thing which Faith or reason should regard, that you will soberly weigh the Counsel that I give you.

I. The first of your dangers which I shall mention lieth in a too hasty resolving for the Sacred Ministry. Pious and prudent desires and purposes I would not discourage: But two sorts of Parents in this prove greatly injurious to the Church: First, Worldly men, that set their Sons to the Universities in order to their worldly Maintenance and Preferment, looking at the Ministry merely as a Profession or Trade to live by; Secondly, and many honest, godly Parents ignorantly think it a good work to design ⟨p. 142⟩their Children to the Ministry, and call it a devoting them to God, without due considering whether they are like to be fit for it or not. And when they have bin some years at the University, they think a Parsonage or Vicarage is their due; Ordained they must be; what have they else studied for: Its too late now to change their purposes, when they have been at seven years cost and labour, to prepare for the Ministry: They are too old and too proud to go Apprentices or Servants. Husbandmen they cannot be. They are used to an idler kind of Life. To be Lawyers will cost them more time and study than they can now afford having lost so much: and there are more already than can have practice. Physicians are already so many that the younger sort know not how to live, though they would for money venture on their Neighbours lives to their greater danger than I am willing to express. So that there is no way left but for a Benefice to become Church Mountebanks and Quacks, and undertake the Pastoral care of Souls: before they well know what Souls are, or what they are made for, or whither they are going, or how they must be conducted and prepared for their endless state. And it seems to some, the glory of a Nation, to have many thousand such Lads at the Universities