1. Of the way of living among the first Christians.--2. An exhortation to all professing Christianity, to embrace the foregoing reasons and examples.--3. Plain dealing with such as reject them.--4. Their recompenses.--5. The author is better persuaded and assured of some: an exhortation to them.--6. Encouragement to the children of light to persevere, from a consideration of the excellency of their reward; the end and triumph of the Christian conqueror. The whole concluded with a brief supplication to Almighty God. THE CONCLUSION. I. Having finished so many testimonies as my time would give me leave, in favour of this subject, No Cross, No Crown; no temperance, no happiness; no virtue, no reward: no mortification, no glorification: I shall conclude with a short description of the life and worship of the Christians, within the first century or hundred years after Christ: what simplicity, what spirituality, what holy love and communion, did in that blessed age abound among them! It is delivered originally by Philo Judæus, and cited by Eusebius Pamphilius, in his Ecclesiastical history;[78] that those Christians renounced their substance, and severed themselves from all the cares of this life; and forsaking the cities, they lived solitarily in fields and gardens. They accounted their company who followed the contrary life of cares and bustles, as unprofitable and hurtful unto them, to the end that with earnest and fervent desires, they might imitate them which led this prophetical and heavenly life--"In many places," says he, "this people liveth, for it behoveth as well the Grecians as the Barbarians, to be partakers of this absolute goodness; but in Egypt, in every province, they abound: and especially about Alexandria. From all parts the better sort withdrew themselves into the soil and place of these worshippers, as they were called, as a most commodious place, adjoining to the lake of Mary, in a valley very fit, both for its security and the temperance of the air. They are further reported to have had meeting-houses, where the most part of the day was employed in worshipping God: that they were great allegorizers of the Scriptures, making them all figurative; that the external show of words, or the letter, resembleth the superficies of the body; and the hidden sense or understanding of the words seem in the place of the soul; which they contemplate by their beholding names, as it were, in a glass." That is, their religion consisted not chiefly in reading the letter, disputing about it, accepting things in literal constructions, but in the things declared of the substance itself, bringing things nearer to the mind, soul, and spirit, and pressing into a more hidden and heavenly sense; making religion to consist in the temperance and sanctity of the mind, and not in the formal bodily worship, so much now-a-days in repute, fitter to please comedians than Christians.