The divine life in three treatises

O poor distracted senseless world! Is not God Great enough to command and take up your chiefest cogitations? Is not Heaven enough to find them work, and afford them satisfaction and delight? And yet is the dung and dotage of the world enough? Is your honour and wealth, and fleshly delights and sports enough? God will shortly make you know, whether this were wise and equal dealing! Is God so low, so little, so undeserving, to be so oft and easily forgotten, and so hardly and so slightly remembered? I tell you, ere long he will make you think of him to your sorrow, whether you will or no, if grace do not now set open your hearts, and procure him better entertainment.

O poor distracted senseless world! Is not God Great enough to command and take up your chiefest cogitations? Is not Heaven enough to find them work, and afford them satisfaction and delight? And yet is the dung and dotage of the world enough? Is your honour and wealth, and fleshly delights aed sports enough? God will shortly make you know, whether this were wise and equal dealing! Is God so low, so little, so undeserving, to be so oft and easily forgotten, and so hardly and so sleightly remembred? I tell you, ere long he will make you think of him to your sorrow, whether you will or no, if grace do not now set open your hearts, and procure him better entertainment.

But perhaps you will think that you walk with God, because you think of him sometimes ineffectually, and as on the by. But is he esteemed as your God, if he have not the Command, and if he have not the precedency of his creatures? Can you dream that indeed you walk with God, when your hearts were never grieved for offending him, nor never much solicitous how to be reconciled to him; nor much inquisitive whether your state or way be pleasing or displeasing to him? when all the business of an unspeakable importance, which you have to do with God, before you pass to judgement, is forgotten and undone, as if you knew not of any such work that you had to do! when you make no serious preparation for death, when you call not upon God in secret, or in your families, unless with a little heartless lip labour; and when you love not the spirituality of his worship, but only delude your souls with the mockage of hypocritical outside complement. Do you walk with God while you are plotting for preferment, and gaping after worldly greatness, while you are gratifying all the desires of your flesh, and making provision for the future satisfying of its lusts?