30. * Surely it should be as needless to exhort you to look earnestly after every means of recovering your first glorious state, as to exhort the blind to receive their sight, the sick to accept of health, or the captive to suffer his chains to be taken off. For when you see your _misery_ and your _redemption_, both of them so exceeding great, you see _something_ that must needs penetrate the depth of your soul, that leaves you no room to _doubt_ about the nature of any virtue; no liberty to indulge _one vain_ passion, or to think it any hardship that the gospel calls you to be _perfect_. For in this light every virtue of the gospel stands recommended to us, as _health_, _purity_ and _sight_ stand recommended to a _sick, noisome, blind leper_, who was shut up in a place that continually increased all his evils. * It strips us of nothing, but the _uncleanness_ of leprosies, the _miseries_ of sores, pains and blindness. It takes nothing from the world which is about us, but its poison and power of infecting us. * So that to be called to the height of all virtue, however excessive it may seem to the _reasonings_ of flesh and blood, is only being called away from every _misery_ and _evil_ that can be avoided by us. 31. * No virtue therefore has any _blameable extreme_ in it, till it _contradicts_ this general end of religion, till it _hinders_ the restoration of the divine image in us, or makes us _less fit_ to appear amongst the inhabitants of heaven. _Abstinence_, _temperance_, _mortification_ of the senses and passions, can have no excess, till they hinder the purification of the soul, or make the body less subservient to it. _Charity_ can have no excess, till it contracts that love which we are to have in heaven, till it is more than that which would lay down its life even for an enemy, till it exceeds that which the first Christians practised, when they had all things common; till it exceeds that of St. _John_, who requires him that has two coats, to give to him that has none; till it is loving our poor brethren more than Christ has loved us; till it goes beyond the command of loving our neighbour as we love ourselves. 32. See now how the Doctor instructs his readers on those two great articles, Christian _temperance_, and _charity_. To remove restraints of the first kind he says, Our Saviour came eating and drinking, was present at weddings, and other entertainments. The Doctor may go on, and prove these indulgences to be good and pious, because what our Saviour worked a miracle to promote must needs be so. And so the adding another bottle, when friends are rejoicing, may be made a Christian duty.