And your familiar companions have great advantage to help or hinder your salvation, as well as your teachers.[71] The matter is not so great, whom you meet by the way, or travel with, or trade and buy and sell with, as whom you make your intimate or familiar friends. For such have both the advantage of their interest in your affections, and also the advantage of their nearness and familiarity; and, if they have but also the advantage of higher abilities than you, they may be powerful instruments of your good or hurt. If you have a familiar friend, that will defend you from error, and help you against temptations, and lovingly reprove your sin, and feelingly speak of God, and the life to come, inditing his discourse from the inward power of faith, and love, and holy experience; the benefit of such a friend may be more to you, than of the learnedest or greatest in the world. How sweetly will their speeches relish of the Spirit, from which they come! How deeply may they pierce a careless heart! How powerfully may they kindle in you a love and zeal to God and his commandments! How seasonably may they discover a temptation, prevent your fall, reprove an error, and recover your souls! How faithfully will they watch over you! How profitably will they provoke, and put you on; and pray with you fervently when you are cold; and mind you of the truth, and duty, and mercy, which you forget! It is a very great mercy to have a judicious, solid, faithful companion in the way to heaven. But if your ears are daily filled with froth and folly, with ribaldry or idle stories, with oaths and curses, with furious words or scorns and jeers against the godly, or with the sophistry of deceivers, is it likely this should leave a pleasant or wholesome relish on your minds? Is it likely that the effect should not be seen, in your lean or leprous hearts and lives, as well as the effects of an infected or unwholesome air or diet will be seen upon your diseased bodies? He is ungodly, that liketh such company best: and he is proud and presumptuous, that will unnecessarily cast himself upon it, in confidence that he shall receive no hurt: and he is careless of himself, that will not cautiously avoid it: and few that long converse with such, come off without some notable loss; except when we live with such, as Lot did in Sodom, grieving for their sin and misery, or as Christ conversed with publicans and sinners, with a holy zeal and diligence to convert and save them, or as those that have not liberty, who bear that which they have not power to avoid.