_Direct._ XX. When you compose yourselves to sleep, again commit yourselves to God through Christ, and crave his protection, and close up the day with some holy exercise of faith and love. And if you are persons that must needs lie waking in the night, let your meditations be holy, and exercised upon that subject that is profitablest to your souls. But I cannot give this as an ordinary direction, because that the body must have sleep, or else it will be unfit for labour, and all thoughts of holy things must be serious; and all serious thoughts will hinder sleep, and those that wake in the night, do wake unwillingly, and would not put themselves out of hopes of sleep; which such serious meditations would do. Nor can I advise you (ordinarily) to rise in the night to prayer, as the papists' votaries do. For this is but to serve God with irrational and hurtful ceremony; and it is a wonder how far such men will go in ceremony, that will not be drawn to a life of love and spiritual worship. Unless men did irrationally place the service of God in praying this hour rather than another, they might see how improvidently and sinfully they lose their time, in twice dressing and undressing, and in the intervals of their sleep, when they might spare all that time, by sitting up the longer, or rising the earlier, for the same employment. Besides what tendency it hath to the destruction of health, by cold and interruption of necessary rest; when God approveth not of the disabling of the body, or destroying our health, or shortening life (no more than of murder or cruelty to others); but only calleth us to deny our unnecessary, sensual delights, and use the body so as it may be most serviceable to the soul and him. I have briefly laid together these twenty directions for the right spending of every day, that those that need them, and cannot remember the larger more particular directions, may at least get these few engraven on their minds, and make them the daily practice of their lives; which if you will sincerely do, you cannot conceive how much it will conduce to the holiness, fruitfulness, and quietness of your lives, and to your peaceful and comfortable death. [40] Eph. iv. 28; Prov. x. 4; xii. 24, 27; xiii. 4; xxi. 5; xxii. 29; xviii. 9; xxi. 25; xxiv. 30. [41] Antequam domo quis exeat, quid acturus sit, apud se pertractet. Rursus cum redierit, quid egerit, recogitet. Cleobulus in Laert. p. 59. [42] See Dr. Hammond's Annotat. CHAPTER XVIII. DIRECTIONS FOR THE ORDER OF HOLY DUTIES. _Tit. 1. Directions for the holy spending of the Lord's Day in Families._