The Sincere Convert

Thus when some good things are seen in themselves, pride puffs them with an overweening conceit of it, and so they cozen their own souls.

Thus when some good things are seene in themselves, pride puffs them with an overweening conceit of it, and so they cozen their owne soules.

Secondly, the understandings Obstinacy: whereby the mind having been long rooted in this opinion, that I am in a good estate, will not suffer this conceit to be plucked out of it. Now, your old rooted, yet rotten professors, having grown long in a good conceit of themselves, will not believe that they have been fools all their life-time, and therefore now must pull down, and lay the foundation again; and hence you shall have many say of a faithful Minister, that doth convince and condemn them and their estate to be most woeful; what? shall such an upstart teach me? doth he think to make me dance after his pipe, and to think that all my good prayers, ⟨p. 169⟩my faith, my charity, have been so long abominable and vile before God? No silver can bribe a man to cast away his old traditional opinions and conceits whereby he cheats himself, till Christs blood do it, 1 Pet. 1. 18. And hence the woman of Samaria objected this against Jesus Christ, that their old Fathers worshipped in that Mountain, and therefore it was as good a place as Jerusalem, the place of Gods true worship, Joh. 4. 20. Men grow crooked and aged with good opinions of themselves, and can seldom or never be set straight again. Hence such kind of people though they would fain be taken for honest religious Christians, yet will never suspect their estates to be bad themselves, neither can they endure, that any other should search or suspect them to be yet rotten at the heart: And are not those wares and commodities much to be suspected, nay concluded to be stark naught which the seller vvill needs put upon the chapman without seeing or looking on them first? It's a strong argument