31 - /
How comes it that you read so many Commentators uponCicero, Horace, and Homer, and not one upon the Gospel? How comes it that your love of Cicero, and Ovid, makes you love to read an author that writes like them; and yet your esteem for the Gospel gives you no desire, nay, prevents your reading such Books, as breathe the very spirit of the Gospel?
33 - /
How comes it that you read so many Commentators uponCicero, Horace, and Homer, and not one upon the Gospel? How comes it that your love of Cicero, and Ovid, makes you love to read an author that writes like them; and yet your esteem for the Gospel gives you no desire, nay, prevents your reading such Books, as breathe the very spirit of the Gospel?
34 - /
Why then must the Bible lie alone in your study? Is not the spirit of the saints, the piety of the holy followers of Jesus Christ, as good and necessary a means of entering into the spirit and taste of the Gospel, as the reading of the ancients is of entering into the spirit of antiquity?
35 - /
And if you were to ask Mundanus, and Classicus, or any man of business, or learning, whether piety is not the highest perfection of man, or devotion the greatest attainment in the world, they must both be forced to answer in the affirmative, or else give up the truth of the Gospel.
36 - /
The history of the Gospel, is chiefly the history of Christ’sconquest over this spirit of the world. And the number of true Christians, is only the number of those, who following the Spirit of Christ, have lived contrary to this spirit of the world.
37 - /
The Christian’s great conquest over the world, is all contained in the mystery of Christ upon the Cross. It was there, and from thence, that he taught all Christians how they were to come out of, and conquer the world, and what they were to do in order to be his Disciples. And all the doctrines, sacraments, andinstitutions of the Gospel, are only so many explications of the meaning, and applications of the benefit of this great mystery.
38 - /
It is granted, the world now professeth Christianity. But will anyone say, that this Christian world is of the spirit of Christ? Are its general, tempers the tempers of Christ? Are thepassions of sensuality, self-love, pride, covetousness, ambition, ------------------------------------------------------------
* John xv. 19.
A Serious Call to and vain-glory, less contrary to the spirit of the Gospel, now they are amongst Christians, than when they were amongstheathens? Or will you say, that the tempers and passions of the heathen world are lost and gone?39 - /
It was this world that St. John condemned, as being not of the Father; whether therefore it outwardly professeth, or openly persecuteth Christianity, it is still in the same state of contrariety to the true spirit and holiness of the Gospel.
40 - /
We must therefore be so far from considering the world as in a state of less enmity and opposition to Christianity, than it was in the first times of the gospel, that we must guard against it as a greater and more dangerous enemy now, than it was in those times.
41 - /
How many directions of the Gospel lie by unregarded, and how unconcernedly do particular persons read them, for no other reason, but because they seem unregarded by the Christian world?
43 - /
Who that reads the Gospel, would want to be persuaded of the necessity of great self-denial, humility, and poverty of spirit, but that the authority of the world has banished this doctrine of the cross?
44 - /
Whilst pride, sensuality, covetousness, and ambition, had only the authority of the heathen world, Christians were thereby made more intent upon the contrary virtues. But when pride, sensuality, covetousness, and ambition, have the authority of the Christian world, then private Christians are in the utmost danger, not only of being shamed out of the practice, but of losing the very notion of the piety of the Gospel.
45 - /
How great a stranger must he be to the Gospel, who does not know, that it requires this to be the spirit of a pious woman?