courtships, feigned stories, flatteries, and fruitless novelties, and what not; invented and used to your diversion, to make you easy in your forgetfulness of God: which never was the Christian way of living, but entertainment of the heathens that knew not God? Oh! were you truly touched with a sense of your sins, and in any measure born again; did you take up the cross of Jesus and live under it, these, which so much please your wanton and sensual nature, would find no place with you. This is not seeking the things that are above, (Col. iii. 1,) to have the heart thus set on things that are below; nor working out your own salvation with fear and trembling, to spend your days in vanity. This is not crying with Elihu, "I know not to give flattering titles to men; for in so doing my Maker would soon take me away." This is not to deny self, and lay up a more hidden and enduring substance, an eternal inheritance in the heavens, that will not pass away. Well, my friends, whatever you think, your plea of custom will find no place at God's tribunal: the light of Christ in your own hearts will overrule it; and this Spirit, against which we testify, shall then appear to be what we say it is. Say not I am serious about slight things; but beware you of levity in serious things. X. Before I close, I shall add a few testimonies from men of general credit, in favour of our nonconformity to the world in this particular. Luther, the great reformer, whose sayings were oracles with the age he lived in, and of no less reputation now, with many that object against us, was so far from condemning our plain speech, that in his Ludus, he sports himself with _you_ to a single person as an incongruous and ridiculous speech, viz. _Magister, vos estis iratus?_ Master, are you angry? As absurd with him in Latin, as My masters, art thou angry? is in English. Erasmus, a learned man, and an exact critic in speech, than whom I know not any we may so properly refer the grammar of the matter to, not only derides it, but bestows a whole discourse upon rendering it absurd: plainly manifesting that it is impossible to preserve numbers if _you_, the only word for more than one, be used to express _one_: as also, that the original of this corruption was the corruption of flattery. Lipsius affirms of the ancient Romans, "That the manner of greeting now in vogue was not in use amongst them." To conclude: Howel, in his History of France, gives us an ingenious account of its original; where he not only assures us, "That anciently the peasants thou'd their kings, but that pride and flattery first put inferiors upon paying a plural respect to the single person of every superior, and superiors upon receiving it." And though we had not the practice of God and man so undeniably to justify our plain and homely speech, yet, since we are persuaded that its original was from pride and flattery, we cannot in conscience use it. And however we may be