A Christian Directory, Part 2: Christian EconomicsBaxter, Richard
Religion
A Christian Directory, Part 2: Christian Economics
Baxter, Richard
Casuistry; Christian sociology
_Direct._ III. When you understand what it is in point of
practice that the preacher driveth at, observe especially the uses and
the moving reasons, and plead them with your own hearts; and let
conscience be preaching over all that the minister preacheth to you.
You take them to be soul-murderers, that silence able, faithful
preachers, and also those preachers that silence themselves, and feed
not the flock committed to their care; and do you think it a small
matter to silence your own conscience, which must be the preacher that
must set home all, before it can come to resolution or practice? Keep
conscience all the while at work, preaching over all that to your
hearts, which you hear with your ears; and urge yourselves to a speedy
resolution. Remember that the whole body of divinity is practical in
its end and tendency, and therefore be not a mere notional hearer; but
consider of every word you hear, what practice it is that it tendeth
to, and place that deepest in your memory. If you forget all the words
of the reasons and motives which you hear, be sure to remember what
practice they were brought to urge you to. As if you heard a sermon
against uncharitableness, censoriousness, or hurting others, though
you should forget all the reasons and motives in particular, yet still
remember that you were convinced in the hearing, that censorious and
hurtful uncharitableness is a great sin, and that you heard reason
enough to make you resolve it. And let conscience preach out the
sermon to the end, and not let it die in bare conviction; but resolve,
and be past wavering, before you stir: and above all the sermon,
remember the directions and helps for practice, with which the truest
method usually shuts up the sermon.
_Direct._ IV. When you come home, let conscience in secret also
repeat the sermon to you. Between God and yourselves, consider what
there was delivered to you in the Lord's message, that your souls were
most concerned in? what sin reproved which you are guilty of? what
duty pressed which you omit? And there meditate seriously on the
weight and reasons of the thing; and resist not the light, but yet
bring all to a fixed resolution, if till then you were unresolved: not
insnaring yourselves with dangerous vows about things doubtful, or
peremptory vows without dependence on Christ for strength; but firmly
resolving and cautelously engaging yourselves to duty; not with carnal
evasions and reserves, but with humble dependence upon grace, without
which of yourselves you are able to do nothing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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