Since the gospel of Christ gives no just occasions of shame, you that are professors of it should take heed that you do nothing to cast shame on this gospel. Do not mingle the christian faith with doubtful notions of your own. Do not defile your christian conversation with sinful practices. Do not make the lesser circumstances and appendages of your religion the matter of loud contest, and a party strife; for all these things expose the gospel to shame, and may justly put its professors to the blush, in the face of the world, when they are guilty of these practices. Let me insist a little upon each of these. 1. Do not mingle the christian faith with doubtful notions and fancies of your own. The articles of our christianity, and the necessary truths of the gospel, are divine and glorious: Take heed you do not bring in your peculiar sentiments and favourite opinions, which have no sufficient evidence from the word of God, and join them in the same dignity with the articles of your faith; and much less should you dare to impose them upon the consciences of your fellow-christians. The gospel itself will suffer by it, and sink in the esteem of the world, when the divine doctrines of it are mingled with our weaknesses, and debased by the addition of our doubtful sentiments. 2. Defile not your christian conversation with sinful practices. Indulge not a conformity to this present evil world in any of the corrupt and unlawful customs and courses of it. Mingle not your practice of the lovely duties which this gospel enjoins, with lying, and slandering, and railing; do not interline your lives with religion and sin, with devotion and shameful lusts. It is a gospel that forbids all iniquity, it requires that you mortify sin and _cleanse yourselves from every defilement of flesh and spirit_, and that you go on to _perfect holiness in the fear of the Lord_; 2 Cor. vii. 1. The very design and end of it in God’s eternal counsels and contrivance, is, _that you might be holy, and without blame before him in love_; Eph. i. 4. If you pursue this advice, then shall others, who behold you, confess that there is something divine in christianity, when you thus adorn the doctrine of God your Saviour. Thus you give the gospel its due honour by believing all it reveals, by worshipping according to the methods of its appointment, and by that purity of conversation which it enjoins.