“Ye magistrates and officers, read this in all your assemblies, and cause all your priests to read it in their churches; that they and you, and all people may hear and fear the God of heaven, as you will answer it at the great and terrible day of judgment, and vengeance of the Lord God Almighty. This is in love to your souls, and for your temporal and eternal good.” G.F. Amsterdam, the 19th of the 7th Month, 1677. “_A Warning to the Magistrates, Priests, and People of the City of Hamburg, to humble themselves before the Lord, and not be high-minded._ “FRIENDS, “You have painted and garnished the inside of your outward houses and high places; but look within your hearts with the light of Christ, which he hath enlightened you and every man that cometh into the world withal, and with it you may see how foul your hearts and insides are with sin and evil, which Christ tells you ye should make clean; who told the Pharisees how they ‘painted the sepulchres of the righteous,’ and they themselves were full of rottenness and corruption. Therefore look into yourselves and your own hearts, what you are full of. To paint the sepulchres of the righteous apostles, and make a trade and a profession of their words, without the same Holy Ghost, and power, and light, and truth which they were in, will not stand the day of God’s vengeance. “Therefore repent while you have time, turn to the Lord with your whole hearts, and do not think yourselves secure, without his immediate almighty protection. For not all your works, nor all your own strength, and power, and defence can protect you; it is not for you to look at them, and think yourselves secure, to sit down in your security, and in it let your hearts be merry, and at rest and ease. But when the Lord brings a scourge upon you, that you are filled with terrors and fears, remember you were warned, that you were set down, but not in the true rest. Then all your own strength and force will stand you in no stead; and you will acknowledge that it must be God that must protect you. Therefore take warning; for your priests and people are too high, and are swallowed up too much in this world. The vanities of it carry your minds away from God, and your care is more for the world than for God, and more after the riches of this world, than after the riches of the world that has no end. Know you not, that all your heaps of outward treasure must have an end, and that you must leave them all behind you?