The Fountain of Life Opened

Fourth Query, Have you not been unjust to your Parents, and defrauded them? First help to make them poor, and then despise them because they are poor. O horrid wickedness! What a complicated evil is this! Thou art in the Language of Scripture a companion with destroyers, Prov. 28.24. This is the worst of theft in Gods account. You think you may make bold with them, but how bold do you make with conscience, and the command of God?

Fourth Query, Have you not been unjust to your Parents, and defrauded them? First help to make them poor, and then dispise them because they are poor. O horrid wickedness! What a complicated evil is this! Thou art in the Language of Scripture a companion with destroyers, Prov. 28.24. This is the worst of theft in Gods account. You think you may make bold with them, but how bold do you make with conscience, and the command of God?

Fifth Query, Are you not, or have you not been ungrateful to Parents? Leaving them to shift for themselves in those straights that you have helped to bring them into. Oh consider it, Children, this is an evil which God will surely avenge, except ye repent. What to be hardened against thine own flesh! To be cruel to thine own Parents, that with so much tenderness fed thee, when else thou hadst perished! I remember Luther gives us a story of one (and oh that it might be a warning to all that hear it) who having made over all he had to his Son, reserving only a maintenance for himself; at last his Son despised him, and grudged him the very meat he eat, and one day the Father coming in when the Son and his Wife were at dinner upon a Goose, they shuffled the meat under the Table; but see the remarkable vengeance of God, upon this ungracious, unnatural Son; the Goose was turned into a monstrous Toad which seized upon this vile wretch and killed him. If any of you be guilty of these evils, to humble you for them, and reclaim you from them, I desire these six Considerations may be laid to heart.