Of the first part of this advice, (against a bare opinionative religion,) I have spoken already, in my "Directions for a Sound Conversion." To change your opinions is an easier matter than to change the heart and life. A holding of the truth will save no man, without a love and practice of the truth. This is the meaning of James ii. where he speaketh so much of the unprofitableness of a dead, unaffected belief, that worketh not by love, and commandeth not the soul to practice and obedience. To believe that there is a God, while you neglect him and disobey him, is unlike to please him. To believe that there is a heaven, while you neglect it, and prefer the world before it, will never bring you thither. To believe your duty, and not to perform it, and to believe that sin is evil, and yet to live in it, is to sin with aggravation, and have no excuse, and not the way to be accepted or justified with God. To be of the same belief with holy men, without the same hearts and conversations, will never bring you to the same felicity. "He that knoweth his master's will and doth it not," shall be so far from being accepted for it, that he "shall be beaten with many stripes." To believe that holiness and obedience is the best way, will never save the disobedient and unholy. And yet if judgment be not your guide, the most zealous affections will but precipitate you; and make you run, though quite out of the way, like the horses when they have cast the coachman or the riders.[48] To ride post when you are quite out of the way, is but laboriously to lose your time, and to prepare for further labour. The Jews that persecuted Christ and his apostles, had the testimony of Paul himself, that they had a "zeal of God, but not according to knowledge," Rom. x. 2. And Paul saith of the deceivers and troublers of the Galatians, (whom he wished even cut off,) that they did zealously affect them, but not well, Gal. iv. 17. And he saith of himself, while he persecuted christians to prison and to death, "I was zealous towards God as ye are all this day," Acts xxii. 3, 4. Was not the papist, St. Dominick, that stirred up the persecution against the christians in France and Savoy, to the murdering of many thousands of them, a very zealous man? And are not the butchers of the Inquisition zealous men? And were not the authors of the third Canon of the General Council at the Lateran, under Pope Innocent the third, very zealous men, who decreed that the pope should depose temporal lords, and give away their dominions, and absolve their subjects, if they would not exterminate the godly, called heretics? Were not the papists' powder-plotters zealous men? Hath not zeal caused many of latter times to rise up against their lawful governors? and many to persecute the church of God, and to deprive the people of their faithful pastors without compassion on the people's souls? Doth not Christ say of such zealots, "The time cometh, when whosoever killeth