(2.) Secondly, Satan’s second care for the advancement of error, after he hath given it all the countenance he can from Scripture, is to gild it over with _specious pretences_. He sets it off with all the bravery he can, and then urgeth that as an argument of its truth. Men are apt to judge that what doth better their spiritual condition cannot be a lie or delusion; and the argument were the more considerable, if the advantages were such as he pretends them to be; but the very noise and boast of advantages please the unwary, without a due inquiry into their reality. The apostle, in Rom. xvi. 18, reduceth all this policy of the deceiver to two heads: (1.) Good words, χρηστολογίας—words that set out the profit and advantage of the thing; (2.) And fair speeches, εὐλογίας—speeches that flatter the condition of the party. His art, as to the first of these, is to tell them that the notions offered to them are special discoveries, rare mysteries, which have been hidden from others; and thence infers, that it must of necessity conduce much to their happiness and spiritual perfection to know and embrace them. Those that troubled the church in Paul’s days with false doctrines, used this sleight of boasting, as appears by that expression in 1 Tim. vi. 20, ‘oppositions of science.’ It seems they called their opinions, though they were but profane and vain babblings, by the name of ‘science’ or ‘knowledge,’ implying that all others, even the apostles themselves, were in the dark, and came short of their illumination. The like we have in Rev. ii. 24 of that abominable prophetess Jezebel, who recommended her blasphemous, filthy doctrines under the name of ‘depths,’ profundities or hidden knowledge, though the Spirit of God told that church they were not such; but if depths, they were ‘depths of Satan’—as it is added there by way of correction—and not of the Spirit of God. We may trace these footsteps of Satan in all considerably prevailing errors; for what hath been more common than to hear men speak of the designs they have been carrying on under the specious titles of Christ’s coming to set up a righteous kingdom, the church’s coming out of Babylon and out of the wilderness, the dawning of the day of the Lord, the day of reformation, ‘the time of the restitution of all things,’ with abundance of brags of the same kind? I shall add no particular instance of this nature, but a few strains of H. Nicholas, with whom such high promising vaunts were ordinary. His service of love he compares to the ‘most holy;’ whereas John’s doctrine of repentance was but a preparation to the holy, and the service of Christ he allowed to be no more than as the holy of the temple. This his service he calls ‘the perfection of life, the completion of prophecies, the perfect conclusion of the works of God, the throne of Christ, the true rest of the chosen of God, the last day, the sure word of prophecy, the new Jerusalem,’ and what not.