A saint or a brute the certain necessity and excellency of holiness, &c. ...…

Yet this is not the worst: I will show you one strain more of the distraction of the ungodly world. If these men do but see one person of an hundred that are more diligent for Heaven then carth, to fall into Melancholy, or distress of soul; or suppose it were into some loss of reason; they presently cry out against Religion, and strictness, and preciseness, and making so much ado to be saved; and say it is the way to make men mad: Hence comes the proverb of the Papists [Spiritus Calvinianus est spiritus melancholicus]; and of the profane among our selves, that [A Puritan is a Protestant frightened out of his wits]: They ⟨p. 35⟩dare not study the Scripture so much, nor meddle with such high matters as their salvation, nor be so godly, nor meditate on the world to come, lest it should drive them out of their wits. O miserable men! As if it were possible for you to be more dangerously mad, then you are already! (Unless by growing unto greater wickedness!) Do you lay out your wit, and strength, and time, in feeding a corruptible body for the grave, and spend your lives in running after your own shadows, while your everlasting life is forgotten or neglected! Do you sell your Saviour with Judas for a little money; and change your part in God and Glory, for the brutish pleasures of sin for a season? And are you afraid of altering this course of life, and turning to God, lest it should make you mad? Lord, what a besotting thing is sin! What a cunning cheater is the Devil! What a deluded distracted sort of people are the ungodly? Will you run from God, from Christ, from Grace, from mercy, from Scripture, from the godly, and from Heaven it self for fear of being mad? Why what greater madness can you fear then this? What worse is humane nature capable of? Unless it be the addition of a further measure of the same, and unless it be to hold on in that way, and persecute the contrary with such like aggravations of your madness, I know not of any worse that you should fear. Will you run to Hell to prove your selves to be in your wits? Again I say, the Lord bless us from such a kind of wit. Nay Hell it self hath no such distractedness as yours: The difference between the One thing needful, and your many things, is there better, though too late understood! Is Loving God the way to be mad? and loving the world and fleshly pleasures the way to be wise?

Yet this is not the worst: I will shew you one strain more of the distraction of the ungodly world. If these men do but see one person of an hundred that are more diligent for Heaven then carth, to fall into Melancholy, or distress of soul; or suppose it were into some loss of reason; they presently cry out against Religion, and strictness, and preciseness, and making so much ado to be saved; and say it is the way to make men mad: Hence comes the proverb of the Papists [Spiritus Calvinianus est spiritus melancholicus]; and of the prophane among our selves, that [A Puritane is a Protestant frightned out of his wits]: They