The divine life in three treatises

14. Moreover, those few friends that are truest to you, may be utterly unable to relieve you in your distress, or to give you ease, or do you any good. The case may be such that they can but pity you and lament your sorrows, and weep over you: you may see in them that man is not as God, whose friendship can accomplish all the good that he desireth to his friends. The wisest and greatest and best of men are silly comforters, and uneffectual helps: you may be sick, and pained, and grieved, and distressed, notwithstanding any thing that they can do for you: Nay perhaps in their ignorance, they may increase your misery, while they desire your relief▪ and by striving indirectly to help and ease you, may tie the knot faster and make you worse. They may provoke those more against you that oppress you, while they think they speak that which should tend to set you free: They may think to ease your troubled minds by such words as shall increase the trouble: or to deliver you as Peter would have delivered Christ, and saved his Saviour, first by carnal counsel, Matth. 16. 22. [Be it far from thee Lord; this shall not be unto thee] And then by carnal unjust force, (by drawing his sword ⟨p. 312⟩against the officers.) Love and good meaning will not prevent the mischiefs of ignorance and mistake. If your friend •ut your throat while he thought to cut but a vein to cure your disease, it is not his friendly meaning that will save your lives. Many a thousand sick people are killed by their friends, that attend them with an earnest desire of their life; while they ignorantly give them that which is contrary to their disease, and will not be the less pernicious for the good meaning of the giver. Who have more tender affections then Mothers to their children? And yet a great part of the calamity of the world of sickness, and the misery of mans life, proceedeth from the ignorant and erroneous indulgence of Mothers to their children, who to please them, let them eat and drink what they will, and use them to excess and gluttony in their childhood, till nature be abused and mastered and clogged with those superfluities and crudities, which are the dunghill matter of most of the following diseases of their lives.

14. Moreover, those few friends that are truest to you, may be utterly unable to relieve you in your distress, or to give you ease, or do you any good. The case may be such that they can but pitty you and lament your sorrows, and weep over you: you may see in them that man is not as God, whose friendship can accomplish all the good that he desireth to his friends. The wisest and greatest and best of men are silly comforters, and uneffectual helps: you may be sick, and pained, and grieved, and distressed, notwithstanding any thing that they can do for you: Nay perhaps in their ignorance, they may increase your misery, while they desire your relief and by striving indirectly to help and ease you, may tye the knot faster and make you worse. They may provoke those more against you that oppress you, while they think they speak that which should tend to set you free: They may think to ease your troubled minds by such words as shall increase the trouble: or to deliver you as Peter would have delivered Christ, and saved his Saviour, first by carnal counsel,