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

WE are resolved if Scripture and Reason can resolve us, that Godliness is the Safest, the Honestest, and the Gainfullest course: I shall next show you that it is the Most Honourable course. I know the world thinks otherwise of it. In most places it is a matter of reproach to be but serious and diligent in Gods service. And though in this place and at this time, through the great mercy of God▪ it is not so with us, unless it be with here and there a sottish drunkard, yet there are too few places that are so much freed from this plague. And it is not yet I fear forgotten of God, since the very practice of a Godly life, was a matter of greater scorn and derision, then to have been the profanest swearer or drunkard. If a man would not have gone to the Ale▪ house with them, nor sworn, or spoke profanely as […] did: and if he made any serious mention of the Scripture, •• •• life to come; if he reproved any gross offender, if he prayed and instructed his family, and spent the Lords Day in holy exercises, this was enough to brand him with the name of Puritan or Precisian, and make him the common by-word of the town, and (let him be never so conformable to Bishops and Ceremonies) if once he went under the name of a Puritan, he was looks upon as Lot in Sodom, by the open enemies of Piety, who insulted over them, and lived securely in open wickedness. This is the chiefest sin that God hath been scourging this nation for, if I am able to understand his judgements: I know men are apt to interpret providences according to their own interests and conceits. But I take the help of the Scripture and the experience of former ages for my interpretation: and I am verily persuaded (not excluding other sins) that the great sin for which God hath plagued England by a sharp and bloody war, was the common scorn that was cast upon his service, it being made the derision of too many in the land. I never came into any place, where meter serious diligence for salvation, was not branded with the name of Puritanism and too much Preciseness; and those that abstained from iniquity were as Owls among