Therefore, though health be a wonderful great mercy, as enabling him to duty that hath a heart to use it to that end; yet it is by accident a very great danger and snare to the heart itself, to turn it from the way of duty. The best life for the soul, is that which least endangereth it by being over pleasing to the body, and in which the flesh hath the smallest interest, to set up and plead against the Spirit. Not but that the largest stock must be accepted and used for God, when he trusteth us with it; for when he setteth us the hardest work, we may expect his greatest help. But a dwelling as in tents, in a constant unsettledness, in a movable condition, having little, and needing little, never feeling any thing in the creature to tempt us to say, "Soul, take thy rest;" this is to most the safest life, which giveth us the freest advantages for heaven. Take heed therefore, as you love your souls, of falling into the snare of worldly hopes, and laying designs for rising, and riches, and pleasing yourselves in the thoughts and prosecution of these things, for then you are in the readiest way to perdition; even to idolatrous worldliness, and apostasy of heart from God, and opening a door to every sin that seems but necessary to your worldly ends, and to odious hypocrisy for a cloak to all this, and to quiet your guilty minds with something that is like religion. When once you are saying, with worldly security, as he, Luke xii. 17-19, "I will pull down my barns, and build greater, and there will I bestow all my fruits and goods; and I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years, take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry;" you are then befooling yourselves, and near being called away as fools by death, ver. 20, 21. And when, without a sense of the uncertainty of your lives, you are saying, as those in James iv. 13, 14, "To-day or to-morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy, and sell, and get gain, whereas you know not what will be on the morrow;" you forget what your lives are, that they are "a vapour appearing a little while, and then vanishing away," ver. 14. "Boast not thyself therefore of to-morrow, for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth," Prov. xxvii. 1. _Direct._ XX. See that your religion be purely divine, and animated all by God, as the beginning, the way, and the end; and that first upon thy soul, and then upon all that thou hast or dost, there be written "HOLINESS TO THE LORD;" and that thou corrupt not all with an inordinate hypocritical respect to man.