that your sin will find you out.[181] Your secret lust, your covetous over-reaching, your secret gluttony or tippling, much more your crimson sins, will surely find you out.[182] Alas! what then will those miscreants do, whose sins are scarlet, bloody persecutions, under pretence of promoting unity, and obedience, and the catholic church, while the cloak or cover of it is but the thin, transparent spider-web of human traditions, and numerous ceremonies, and childish complimenting with God; and when they have nothing but the prayers of a long liturgy, to cover the effects of their earthly, sensual, and diabolical zeal and wisdom, (as St. James calls it, chap. iii. 15, 16,) and to concoct the widows' houses which they devour, and to put a reverence upon the office and work, which they labour all the week to render reproachful, by a sensual, luxurious, idle life, and by perfidious making merchandise of souls.[183] As ever you care what becometh of your souls, take heed lest sin grow bold under prayers, and grow familiar and contemptuous of sermons and holy speeches, and lest you keep a custom of religious exercises and wilful sins. For oh, how doth this harden now, and wound hereafter! He is the best hearer, that is the holiest liver, and faithfullest obeyer. _Direct._ XIV. Be not a bare hearer of the prayers of the pastor, whether it be by liturgy or without. For that is but hypocrisy, and a sin of omission; you come not thither only to hear prayers, but to pray; and kneeling is not praying; but it is a profession that you pray. And will you be prayerless even in the house of prayer, and when you profess and seem to pray, and so add hypocrisy to impiety? I fear many that seem religious, and would have those kept from the sacrament that pray not in their families, do very ordinarily tolerate themselves in this gross omission, and mocking of God, and are prayerless themselves even when they seem to pray.