A27016:932
A saint or a brute the certain necessity and excellency of holiness, &c. ...…
A saint or a brute the certain necessity and excellency of holiness, &c. ... / by Richard Baxter.
London: printed by R.W. for Francis Tyton, 1662
Title page typeset from the transcription.
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
Go to a company of merry fellows, as you take them, and to a company of serious, godly, prudent people, and secretly write down all the words that you hear from both companies; and read them over together when you come home, and tell me which is the pleasanter discourse. What a hodge-podge of non-sense, impertinency, levity, immodesty, worldliness, pride, and folly shall you find in one; and what savoury, necessary, edifying, encouraging and comforting speeches will you find you have gathered from the other!
Go to a company of merry fellows, as you take them, and to a company of serious, godly, prudent people, and secretly write down all the words that you hear from both companies; and read them over together when you come home, and tell me which is the pleasanter discourse. What a hodg-podge of non-sense, impertinency, levity, immodesty, worldliness, pride, and folly shall you find in one; and what savoury, necessary, edifying, encouraging and comforting speeches will you find you have gathered from the other!
It is far pleasanter to be among the singing birds, the bleating ⟨p. 300⟩sheep, yea the chattering daws, then these idle, prating, foolish companions. For with the former you shall have some natural good, without any mixture of sinful evil: But in foolish, prating company, what shall you perceive, but how Nature is depraved, how sinners are beside themselves, how Satan doth befool them, and how God is forgotten while he is present with them, and they are laughing in the Devils chains, and at the very brink of death and hell! And can a man be merry to hear such mirth as this? It is a sad spectacle to see men laugh in Bedlam: but much more to see them merry in the fetters of their sin, and under the threatenings and wrath of God. Were you but men of right composed minds, I durst refer it to your selves, whether holy company and discourse be not like to be be much pleasanter then yours.
It is far pleasanter to be among the singing birds, the bleating ⟨p. 300⟩