may have some competent proportion of honour, profit or pleasure, and religion may not expose me to be undone.' If God will not take them on these terms (as most certainly he never will), he must go look him other servants; and so he will; and make them know at last unto their sorrow, that he needed not their service, but it was they that needed him, and the benefits of his service.

I thought meet (though I have done it oft before) to give you this difference between the hypocrite and the sincere. And now it is my earnest request unto you all, that you will presently call your souls to an account, and know which of these two courses you have taken; and which of these two is your own condition.

If nature had made you such strangers to yourselves, as that you were unable to answer such a question, I would never trouble you with it; but I suppose by faithful inquiry, you may know this much of yourselves, if you are but willing. You know where it is that you have dwelt, and what it is that you have been doing in the world, and you can review the actions of your lives, though they have been of smaller consequence. Why then may you not quickly know if you will, so great a thing, as What hath been the end and business for which you have lived in the world till now? Have you been running so long, and know not yet what is the prize that you have run for? Have you forgot the errand that you have been so long going on? Have you been busy all your days till now, and know not about what or why? Certainly this is a thing that may be known, if you are willing and diligent to know it. It is for one of these two that you have lived; for the world, or for God. To please your flesh, or to please God and be saved. Either to make provision for earth or heaven. Which of these is it? Deal plainly with yourselves, for your salvation is deeply concerned in the account.

Perhaps you will say, that it was for both; for as you have a soul and body, so you must look to both. Yea, but so as one that knoweth, that one thing is needful. As your body is but the prison, the case, the servant, of your souls, so it must be provided for and used but as a servant, and maintained only in a fitness for its work. But the question is, Which of them hath had the preeminence? Which hath had the life of your affections and endeavours. Which of

them was your end; about which hath been the chief business that you have most carefully and diligently carried on? This is the great question.

You cannot have two masters, though you may have many instruments and fellow-servants. You cannot acceptably serve God, if you serve mammon. Every wicked man may do something in religion, and every good man may do something that is contrary to religion. A carnal man may do something for God, and for his soul; and a spiritual man ought to do something subordinately for his body, and too often, álas, doth something for it inordinately. But which bears the sway? and which is first sought? and which comes behind, and but the leavings of the other?

"Be not deceived: God is not mocked. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he reap. If you sow to the flesh, of the flesh you shall reap corruption; but if you sow to the Spirit, of the Spirit shall you reap everlasting life;" Gal. vi. 7, 8. "Love not the world, nor the things that are in the world (for themselves). For if any man love the world (with his chiefest love), the love of the Father is not in him;" 1 John ii. 15. Is it not a wonder that any reasonable man can be such a stranger to himself, as not to know what he lives for, and what hath had his heart, and what hath been the principal business of his life? Some by matters you may easily forget or overlook; but can you do so by your end, which hath been your chiefest care and business?

If indeed you no more know your own minds, nor what you have all this while been doing in the world, ask those that you have conversed with; and judge by the effects and signs. Others can tell what you have most seriously talked of. They may conjecture by their observation, what you have most carefully sought, and resolutely adhered to: whether it be God or the flesh; this world or heaven? The one thing needful, or the many troubling trifles in your way. It is like that wise and godly observers can help you to discern it; though sensualists will but deceive you.

A man's love, at least his chiefest love, cannot be hid, but will appear in his behaviour. If you love God above the world, you will seek him and his glory before the world; and if you do so it may partly be discerned, if you have conversed with discerning men. Heaven and earth are not so

like, nor the way to each of them so like, but it may partly be discerned which way men are going, and what they drive at in their daily course.

But I will urge you no further to the trial. I will take it for granted that your consciences are telling many of you, that you have been troubled about many things, while the one thing needful hath been neglected. And if indeed this be your case, suffer me to tell the guilty plainly, what it is that they have done.

1. Whatever you have been doing in the world, you have lost your time, if you have not been seeking the one thing necessary. If you have been gathering riches, or growing up in honour as the rush groweth in the mire (Job viii. 11.), or filling your purses or your barns, or pleasing your fancies and flesh; you have but fooled away your time, and done just nothing, and much worse. Nothing is done, if the one thing necessary be undone. Believe it, time is a precious thing, and ought not to have been thus cast away. When you come to the end of it, the worst and proudest of you shall confess it is precious. Then, O for one year more! O for a few days or hours more, to make sure of this one thing which you should have spent your lives in making sure of. Will you then think thus, and yet can you now afford to cast away twenty or thirty years upon nothing? If time be worth nothing, your lives are worth nothing. And why should a man desire to live for nothing? You love your lives too much, and yet will you so contemptuously cast them away? He hath lost his life, who hath lost the end of his life. The loss of a hundred pounds in money is not (to yourselves) so great a loss, as the loss of a day's or an hour's time. What then is the loss of so many years? Did you ever well consider of this? If you live a thousand years, it is all lost, if you have not spent it in making sure of the one thing necessary. For is not that lost, and worse a thousand times than lost, that is spent in crossing the end that it is given for? and which is no comfort, but terror in the review, and which leaveth no fruit, but grief and disappointment? Let me tell you, If you hold on thus unto the end, you will wish and wish a thousand times, either that you had never had an hour's time, or else that you had had hearts, to have better perceived the worth and use of it, than to cast it away

as you have done upon nothing. It is but one thing that is worth your time and lives.

2. Whatsoever else you have been doing, you have lost all your labour with your time, if this one thing needful have been neglected. No doubt you have been busy since you came into the world; but to little purpose. You might as well have been idle, as so laboriously doing nothing. No doubt many a journey you have rode and gone, and many a hard day's labour you have taken, and sharpened perhaps with care and grief. But you have lost it all, if it were a hundred times more, if it have not been laid out upon the one thing necessary.

And is it not a pitiful thing that men of reason, should vex themselves, and toil their bodies, and suffer hunger, and thirst, and weariness, and make such a stir and pudder in the world, and all for nothing, and in a vain show? How many mornings have you risen to your labour, and how many days and years have you spent in it, and now it is all lost! How many thoughts and fears, and cares have possessed and pestered your minds, and now they are all lost! Some of you have followed your trades, and some your husbandry, and some have run up and down after recreations. Some of you have been scraping riches, and some contriving to keep up their reputation, and some to satisfy their appetites, and live in pleasure and contentments to the flesh; and now look back upon all that you have done and gotten, and tell yourselves whether all this be not lost, yea, alas! much worse than lost. If you be not ready to pass this conclusion at the very heart, it is because your hearts are yet blinded and hardened in sin; but God will soon bring that to your hearts that shall convince you of it. If God have made use of any worldly, sensual person of you, for public good; of church or state, as men do of thorns for hedging to their lands, or of briars to stop a gap, or of firewood to warm their family; yet as to any durable benefit to yourselves, I may well say that all your labour is lost.

And this is not all; but the pains also that you have taken in your formal, hypocritical religion, your hearing, reading, receiving sacraments, and pretended prayer, all the thoughts that ever you had of death, and judgment, and the life to come, and all that you have done with reservations and by halves for your own salvation, this also is all lost.

Except as a less measure of misery may go for gain. If you miss of the one thing necessary, you do but lose your labour, whatever else you seem to gain.

A great stir you make in seeking for preferment, or dominion over others, or about your lands, your honours, or your delights; so great that your neighbours can scarce live quietly by you; and the kingdom cannot be quiet for some of you, nor your own consciences be quiet within you for the desperate work that you engage them in, which they know must be heard of another day. And when all is done you will find you have been but hunting of a feather. You would see this now if God would open your eyes by grace. But if you miss of so seasonable an information, you will see it too late in the land of darkness. When death hath opened your eyes, and your impenitent souls do suddenly awake in another world, you will understand that you made all this stir but in your sleep. As busily and seriously as you acted the part of lords and ladies, of gentlemen, tradesmen, or husbandmen in the world, if you did not seriously and first do the work of true believers for the world to come, you will then find too late that your labour is lost, and all was acted but as in a dream.

Do you believe this now, or do you not? If you do, will you yet go on? If you do not believe it, shew me now what you have gotten by all this stir that you have made in the world, that will follow you one step further than the grave, and that you can say shall be your own to-morrow? If you were to die this hour, will it be any lasting comfort to you, that you have laboured to be rich or honourable, or that you have attained it? or that you had your glut of sensual delights; and a merry life as to the fleshly pleasure as long as it would last? Will you die the more comfortably for any of this? or much the less? That yet you are alive, is the great mercy of God, and not to be ascribed to any of these. And when you cease to live, then these will be your grief and torment.

Beloved hearers, I have no desire, the Lord knows, to discompose your minds, or to disquiet you with any molesting, unnecessary scruples; nor causelessly to dishonour either you or your employments. But I must needs say that it is a doleful case, that men in their wits should spend a life of precious time, and also a great deal of care and labour, in