An Exhortation to all professing Christianity, to embrace the foregoing Reasons and Examples. NO CROSS, NO CROWN. PART I. CHAPTER I. I. Of the necessity of the Cross of Christ in general; yet the little regard Christians have to it.--2. The degeneracy of Christendom from purity to lust, and moderation to excess.--3. That worldly lusts and pleasures are become the care and study of Christians, so that they have advanced upon the impiety of infidels.--4. This defection a second part to the Jewish tragedy, and worse than the first: the scorn Christians have cast on their Saviour.--5. Sin is of one nature all the world over; sinners are of the same church, the devil's children: profession of religion in wicked men makes them but the worse.--6. A wolf is not a lamb; a sinner cannot be, whilst such, a saint.--7. The wicked will persecute the good; this, false Christians have done to the true, for non-compliance with their superstitions; the strange carnal measures false Christians have taken of Christianity; the danger of that self-seduction.--8. The sense of that has obliged me to make this discourse for a dissuasive against the world's lusts, and an invitation to take up the daily cross of Christ as the way left us by him to blessedness.--9. Of the self-condemnation of the wicked; that religion and worship are comprised in doing the will of God. The advantage good men have over bad men in the last judgment.--10. A supplication for Christendom, that she may not be rejected in that great assize of the world. She is exhorted to consider what relation she bears to Christ; if her Saviour, how saved, and from what: what her experience is of that great work. That Christ came to save from sin and wrath by consequence; not to save men in sin, but from it, and so from the wages of it. I. Though the knowledge and obedience of the doctrine of the cross of Christ be of infinite moment to the souls of men, for that is the only door to true Christianity, and that path the ancients ever trod to blessedness; yet, with extreme affliction let me say, it is so little understood, so much neglected, and what is worse, so bitterly contradicted by the vanity, superstition, and intemperance of professed Christians, that we must either renounce to believe what the Lord Jesus hath told us, that whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after him, cannot be his disciple; (Luke, xiv. 27;) or, admitting that for truth, conclude, that the generality of Christendom do miserably deceive and disappoint themselves in the great business of Christianity, and their own salvation.