more and more mercies; and will you despise and lose them? If you were heirs to land, or had an annuity, which amounted but to a hundred pounds a year, and you were every day to receive a proportionable part of it, or lose it; would you lose it through neglect, and say, 'I will begin to receive it when I am old?' Poor labourers will work hard all the day, that at night they may have their wages: and will you contemptuously lose your every-day mercies, your communion with God, your daily blessings and his grace, which you should daily beg and may daily receive?

5. Either you will repent and live to God, or not; if not you are undone for ever. O how much less miserable is a dog, or a toad, than such a sinner! But if God will shew you so great mercy, O how will it grieve you to think of the precious time of youth which you madly cast away in sin! Then you will think, 'O what knowledge, what holiness might I then have gotten! What a comfortable life might I have lived! O what days and years of mercy did I cast away for nothing!' Yea, when God hath given you the pardon of your sin, the taste of his love, and the hopes of heaven, it will wound your hearts to think that you should so long, so unthankfully, so heinously offend so good a God, neglect so merciful a Saviour, and trample upon Infinite Divine love, for the love of so base a fleshly pleasure,—that ever you should be so bad, as to find more pleasure in sinning than in living unto God.

6. And be it known to you, if God in mercy convert and save you, yet the bitter fruit of your youthful folly may follow you in this world to the grave. God may forgive the pains of hell to a penitent sinner, and not forgive the temporal chastisement to his flesh. If you waste your estate in youth, you may be poor at age. If you marry a wicked wife, you may feel it till death, notwithstanding your repentance. If by drinking, gluttony, idleness, or filthy lust, you contract any incurable diseases in youth, repentance may not cure them till death. All this might have been easily prevented, if you had but had foreseeing wisdom. Beggary, prisons, shame, consumptions, dropsies, stone, gout, &c., which make the lives of many miserable, are usually caused by youthful sins.

7. If ever you think to be men of any great wisdom, and usefulness in the world to yourselves or others, your prepa

rations must be made in youth. Great wisdom is not gotten in a little time. Who ever was an able lawyer, physician, or philosopher, without long and hard study? If you will not learn in the grammar-schools in your childhood, you will be unfit for the University at riper age; and if, when you should be doctors, you are to learn to spell and read, your shame will tell you that you should have sooner begun. O that you well knew how much of the safety, fruitfulness and comfort of all your after-life, dependeth on the preparations of your youth, on the wisdom and the grace which you should then obtain ! as men's after-trading doth depend on their apprenticeship.

8. O what a dreadful danger is it, lest your youthful sin become remediless, and custom harden you, and deceivers blind you, and God forsake you for your wilful resistance of his grace! God may convert old hardened sinners: but how ordinarily do we find, that age doth but answer the preparations of youth, and the vessel ever after savoureth of the liquor which first thoroughly tainted it! And men are but such as they learned to be and to do at first. If you will be perfidious breakers of your baptismal vows, it is just with God to leave you to yourselves, to a deluded understanding, to think evil good, and good evil, to a seared conscience, and a hardened heart, and, as “ past feeling, to work uncleanness with greediness," (Ephes. iv. 19,) and to fight against grace and your own salvation, till death and hell convince you you of your madness. O sport not with the justice of a sin-hating God! Play not with sin, and with the unquenchable fire! To forsake God, is the way to be forsaken of him. And what is a forsaken soul, but a miserable slave of Satan!

9. Yea, did you but know of what moment it is to prevent all the heinous sins that else you will commit, you would make haste to repent, though you were sure to be forgiven. Forgiveness maketh not sin to be no sin, or to be no evil, no shame or grief to the soul that hath committed it. You will cry out, O that I had never known it!' To look back on such an ill-spent life, will be no pleasant thought. Repentance, though a healing work, is bitter; yea, ofttimes exceedingly bitter: make not work for it, if you love your peace.

10. Is it a small thing to you, that you are all this while doing hurt to others, by drawing them to sin, and plunging

them into that dangerous guilt which can no way be pardoned but by the blood of Christ, upon true conversion? When they have joined with you in lust and fleshly pleasure, it is not in your power to turn them, that they may join with you in sound repentance; and if not, they must lie in hell for ever. Can you, then, make a sport of your own and other men's damnation?

But this leadeth me to the second point. I have shewed you of what vast concernment it is TO YOURSELVES to begin betimes a holy life. I will next shew you of what concernment it is TO OTHERS.

CHAP. III.

Of what public concernment the quality of youth is.

1. THE welfare of the world is of far greater worth than that of any single person; and he hath put off humanity who doth not more earnestly desire it. If this world consisted but of one generation, then to make that generation wise and good would be enough to make it a happy world. But it is not so. In heaven, and in the future glorious kingdom, "there is neither marrying, nor giving in marriage, but they are as the angels,” in a fixed everlasting state, and one continued generation maketh up the New Jerusalem: being once holy and happy, they are so for ever. But here it is not so: one generation cometh, and another goeth: if the father be as wise as Solomon, the son may be as foolish as Rehoboam. O what a great work it is to make a man truly wise and good! How many years' study doth it usually require! What wisdom and diligence in teachers! What teachableness and diligence in learners; and especially the grace of God! And when all is done, the man quickly dieth, and obtaineth his ends in another world. But his children are born as ignorant, and perhaps as bad, as he was born: he can neither leave them his knowledge, nor his grace. They must have. all the same teaching, and labour, and blessing as he had, to bring them to the same attainments. The mercy and covenant of God taketh them into his church, where they have great advantages and helps, and promiseth them more for their relation to a faithful parent, if he or they do make no

forfeiture of it. But as their nature is the same with others, so their actual wisdom must come by God's blessing on the use of the same means, which are necessary to the children of the worst men. A Christian's child is born with no more knowledge than a heathen's, and must have as much labour and study to make him wise.

2. It is certain then, that the welfare of this world lieth on a good succession of the several generations; and that all the endeavours of one generation, with God's greatest blessing on them, will not serve for the ages following. All must begin anew, and be done over again, or all will be as though undone to the next age. And it is not the least blessing on the faithful, that their faith and godliness dispose them to have a care for posterity, and to devote their children wholly to God, as well as themselves, and to educate them in his fear. If nature had not taught birds and beasts to feed their young, as well as to generate them, their kind would be soon extinct. O what a blessed world were it, if the blessings of men famous for wisdom and godliness were entailed on all that should spring from them! and if this were the common case!

3. But the doleful miseries of the world have come from the degenerating of good men's posterity. Adam hath his Cain, and Noah his Ham, and David his Absalom; Solomon, Hezekiah, and Josiah, left not their like behind them. The present state of the Eastern churches, is a dreadful instance. What places on earth were more honourable for faith and piety, than Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, Constantinople, Ephesus, Philadelphia, and the rest of those great and noble countries? and these also strengthened with the most powerful Christian empire that ever was on earth. And now they are places of barbarism, tyranny, and foolish Mahometanism, where the name of Christ is made a scorn, and the few that keep up that sacred profession, are, by tyranny, kept in so great ignorance, that (alas!) the vices of most of them dishonour their profession, as much as the persecutions of their enemies do. O what a doleful difference is there between that great part of the world now, and what it was fourteen hundred or one thousand years ago!

And alas! were it not for the name of a pompous Christian church, how plain an instance would Rome be of the

same degeneracy! and some countries that received the blessing of Reformation, have revolted into the darkness of popery. What a change was in England by Queen Mary's reign! And how many particular cities and towns are grown ignorant and malignant, which in former times were famous for religion! The Lord grant it may never be the case of London! Yea, how many persons of honourable and great families have so far degenerated from the famous wisdom and piety of their grandfathers, yea, and fathers, as to hate that which their parents loved, and persecute those their ancestors honoured! The names of many great men stand honoured in history for their holiness to God, and for their service to their several countries, whose posterity are the men from whom we are in danger. Alas! in how few such houses hath piety kept any long succession! Yea, some take their fathers' virtues to be so much their dishonour, that they turn malignant persecutors, to free themselves from the supposed reproach of their relations. Yea, some preachers of the Gospel, devoted to God by pious parents, become revilers of their own parents, and despisers of their piety, as the effect of factious ignorance.

4. And on the other side, when piety hath successively, as a river, kept its course, what a blessing hath it proved! (But how rare is that!) And when children have proved better than their parents, it hath been the beginning of welfare to the places where they lived. How marvellously did the Reformation prevail in Germany in Luther's time, when God brought out of Popish monasteries many excellent instruments of his service; and princes became wise and pious, whose parents had been blind or impious! Godliness or wickedness, welfare or calamity, follow the changes and quality of posterity.

Men live so short a time, that the work of educating youth aright is one half of the great business of man's life. He that hath a plantation of oaks, may work at other employment for twenty generations: but he that planteth gardens and orchards with plants that live but a little time, must be still planting, watering, and defending them.

5. Among the ancient sages of the world, the Greeks and Romans, and much more among the Israelites, the care of posterity and of the public welfare was the great thing which