_Direct._ IX. Forget not how dear all that must cost you, which you gain unlawfully. The reckoning time is yet to come. Either you will truly repent or not; if you do, it must cost you remorse and sorrow, and shameful confession, and restitution of all that you have got amiss; and is it not better to forbear to swallow that morsel, which must come up again with heartbreaking grief and shame? But if you repent not unfeignedly, it will be your damnation; it will be opened in judgment to your perpetual confusion, and you must pay dear for all your gain in hell. Never look upon the gain therefore, without the shame and damnation which must follow. If Achan had foreseen the stones, and Gehazi the leprosy, and Ahab the mortal arrow, and Jezebel the licking of her blood by dogs, and Judas the hanging or precipitation, and Ananias and Sapphira the sudden death, or any of them the after misery, it might have kept them from their pernicious gain. Usually even in this life, a curse attendeth that which is ill gotten, and bringeth fire among all the rest. _Direct._ X. If you are poor, consider well of the mercy which that condition may bring you, and let it be your study how to get it sanctified to your good. If men understood and believed that God doth dispose of all for the best, and make them poor to do them good, and considered what that good is which poverty may do them, and made it their chief care to turn it thus to their gain, they would not find it so intolerable a thing, as to seek to cure it by fraud or thievery. Think what a mercy it is, that you are saved from those temptations to over-love the world, which the rich are undone by. And that you are not under those temptations to intemperance, and excess, and pride as they are: and that you have such powerful helps for the mortification of the flesh, and victory over the deceiving world. Improve your poverty, and you will escape these sins.