And yet you acknowledge (nay and frequently contend for this with a peculiar earnestness) that every Christian is called to be _zealous of good works_, as well as to _deny himself and take up his cross daily_. How then do you depart from your own principles, when you are gluttons, drunkards or epicures? When you live at your ease, in all the elegance and voluptuousness of a plentiful fortune! How will you reconcile the being adorned with gold, arrayed in purple and fine linen, and faring sumptuously every day, with the _denying yourself and taking up your cross daily_? Surely while you indulge the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eye, and the pride of life, the excellent rules of self-denial that abound in your own writers, leave you of all men most inexcusable. 12. Neither can this self-indulgence be reconciled, with the being _zealous of good works_. For by this needless and continual expence, you disable yourself from doing good. You bind your own hands. You make it impossible for you to do that good which otherwise you might. So that you injure the poor in the same proportion as you poison your own soul. You might have cloathed the naked; but what was due to them, was thrown away on your costly apparel. You might have fed the hungry, entertained the stranger, relieved them that were sick or in prison. But the superfluities of your own table swallowed up that whereby they should have been profited. And so this wasting of thy Lord’s goods, is an instance of complicated wickedness; since hereby thy poor brother perisheth, for whom Christ died. I will not recommend to you either the writings or examples of those whom you account _hereticks_, (although some of these, if you could view them with impartial eyes, might _provoke you to jealousy_.) But O! that God would write in your hearts the rules of self-denial and love, laid down by _Thomas a Kempis_! Or that you would follow both in this and in good works, that burning and shining light of your own church, the Marquis _de Renty_! Then would all who know and loved the Lord rejoice to acknowledge you as the _church of the living God_: when ye were zealous of every good word and work; and abstained from all appearance of evil: when it was hereby shewn that you were filled with the Holy Ghost, and delivered from all unholy tempers: when ye were all _unblameable and unrebukable, without spot or wrinkle, or any such thing; a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people, shewing forth_ to all Jews, infidels and hereticks, by your active, patient, spotless love of God and man, _the praises of him, who had called you out of darkness into his marvellous light_.