‘They allure through the lusts of the flesh, through much wantonness.’ Jude 4, ‘There are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation; ungodly men, turning the grace of God into lasciviousness:’ ver. 16, ‘These are murderers, complainers, walking after their own lusts,’ &c. 2 Tim. iii. 2-5, ‘Men shall be lovers of their own selves; covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, truce-breakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; of this sort are they which creep into houses.’ All which do set forth heretical persons as the most scandalous wicked wretches that we shall meet with; grossly filthy in themselves, corrupted in all the duties of their relations, natural and civil; defiled in all the ways of their converse with men. Neither are these wicked practices issuing from gross errors to be looked upon as rare, accidental, or extraordinary effects thereof, but as the natural and common fruits of them; for Christ makes this to be the very special property and note whereby false prophets may be discovered, Mat. vii. 16, ‘Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes off thorns, or figs off thistles?’ &c. These fruits were not their doctrines, but their lives; for to know false prophets by false doctrines is no more than to know false doctrine by false doctrine. If any object that many false teachers appeared in the shape of seeming holiness and strictness of life, they may be answered from Christ’s own words; for there he tells us, to avoid mistakes, that their first appearance, and it may be the whole lives of some of the first seedsmen of any error, is under the form of sanctity: ‘They come to you in sheep’s clothing,’ in an outward appearance of innocency and plausible pretences; but then he adds, that their fruits afterward will discover them. A tree at its first planting is not discovered what it is, but give it time to grow to its proper fruitfulness, and then you may know of what kind it is; so that we need not affirm that damnable doctrines produce wicked lives in all that entertain them at the very first. It is enough for discovery if there be a natural consequential tendency in such doctrines to practical impieties, or that at last they produce them, though not in all, yet in many.