What shall I do now to make up these defects? What can I do more pleasing and profitable to you, than to seize the advantages of my retirement, to review some of those discourses which have assisted your faith and joy in my former ministry, and to put them into your hands? Thus something of me shall abide with you in your several houses, while I am so incapable of much public labour, and of personal visits. This, my friends, is the true design of sending this volume to the press: And though many of my brethren may compose far better sermons than I, whose persons I love and honour, and their labours I read with reverence and improvement, yet I am persuaded, that share which I have in your affections, will render these discourses at least as agreeable to your taste, as those of superior excellency from other hands. If any other christians shall think fit to peruse them, and find any spiritual benefit, they must make their acknowledgments to God and you. I cannot invite the loose and fashionable part of mankind, the vain censors of the age, and the deriders of the ministry, to become my readers: Too many of them grow weary of christianity, and look back upon heathenism with a wishful eye, as the Jews did of old upon the leeks and onions of Egypt, when they grew angry with Moses, and began to loathe the bread of heaven. These persons will find but little here that suits their taste; for I have not entertained you with lectures of philosophy, instead of the gospel of Christ; nor have I affected that easy indolence of style which is the dry delight of some modish writers, the cold and insipid pleasure of men who pretend to politeness. You know it has always been the business of my ministry to convince and persuade your souls into practical godliness, by the clearest and strongest reasons derived from the gospel, and by all the most moving methods of speech, of which I was capable; but still in a humble subserviency to the promised influences of the Holy Spirit, I ever thought it my duty to press the conviction with force on the conscience, when light was first let into the mind. A statue hung round with moral sentences, or a marble pillar with divine truths inscribed upon it, may preach coldly to the understanding, while devotion freezes at the heart: But the prophets and apostles were _burning and shining lights_; they were all taught by inspiration to make the words of truth glitter like sun-beams, and to operate like _a hammer_, and _a fire_, and _a two-edged sword_[15]. The movements of sacred passion may be the ridicule of an age which pretends to nothing but calm reasoning. Life and zeal in the ministry of the word, may be despised by men of luke-warm and dying religion: _Fervency of spirit is the service of the Lord_[16], may become the scoff and jest of the critic and the profane: But this very life and zeal, this sacred fervency, shall still remain one bright character of a christian