The divine life in three treatises

To this I answer, 1. Every Christian hath a God to serve▪ and a Soul to save, and a Christ to believe in and obey, and an endless happiness to secure and enjoy, as well as Preachers: Pastors must study to instruct their flock, and to save themselves▪ and those that hear them: The people must study to understand and receive the mercy offered them, and to make their own calling and election sure. It is not said of Pastors only, but of every blessed man, that His delight is in the Law of the Lord, and therein doth he meditate day and night, Psal. 1. 2. 2. And the due meditation of the soul upon God, is so far from taking you off from your necessary business in the world, that it is the only way to your orderly and successful management of it. 3. And it is not a distracting thoughtfulness that I persuade you to, or which is included in a Christians walk with God: but it is a directing, quickening, exalting, comforting course of meditation: ⟨p. 223⟩Many a hundred have grown melancholy and mad with careful discontentful thoughts of the world; it doth not follow therefore that no man must think of the world at all, for fear of being mad or melancholy; but only that they should think of it more regularly, and correct the error of their thoughts and passions: so is it about God and heavenly things: Our thoughts are to be well ordered, and the error of them cured, and not the use of them forborne. Atheism and Impiety, and forgetting God, are unhappy means to prevent melancholy: There are wiser means for avoiding madness, than by renouncing all our Reason, and living by sense like the beasts that perish, and forgetting that we have an everlasting life to live.

To this I answer, 1. Every Christian hath a God to serve▪ and a Soul to save, and a Christ to believe in and obey, and an endless happiness to secure and enjoy, as well as Preachers: Pastors must study to instruct their flock, and to save themselves▪ and those that hear them: The people must study to understand and receive the mercy offered them, and to make their own calling and election sure. It is not said of Pastors only, but of every blessed man, that His delight is in the Law of the Lord, and therein doth he meditate day and night,