faith, or grace, but he shall be hazarded by the scoffs of those that are unwilling to judge the private workings of the heart to God-ward, or spiritual exercises of grace, to be any better than conceited whims and unintelligible nonsense: but seeing such men make bold to jeer, not only that language and those forms of speech which the Holy Ghost thought fit to make use of in the Scriptures, but also the very things of ‘Faith,’ ‘Grace,’ and ‘Spirit,’ which are everywhere in the sacred oracles recommended to us with the most weighty seriousness—which with them pass for no better than cheats and fancies—we can easily sit under their contempt; and shall, as we hope, be so far from being jeered out of our religion, that their scorns shall have no more impression upon us than the ravings of a frenzical person that knows not what he speaks. Notwithstanding these, who are no way considerable for weight, there are, I hope, a great many who seriously employ themselves in the inwards as well as the outwards of religion—and who will not suffer themselves to be persuaded that the apostle obtruded an empty notion upon believers, when he recommended that observable truth to them, Rom. ii. 28, ‘He is not a Jew which is one outwardly,’ &c.; for their sakes have I undertaken this labour of collecting and methodising the grand stratagems and chief ways of delusion of the great deceiver. To these I must particularly account for some few things relating to this discourse. As, 1. That I have satisfied myself in the reasons of the publication of these papers, and do not judge it requisite to trouble any so far as to tell what these reasons are. They who desire to resist such an enemy, and whose experience doth convince them that all helps are necessary, will not need them; and those that are men of scorn or of avowed carelessness will not regard them, though I should declare them.