II. USE OF EXHORTATION
MOTIVES BY WAY OF INDUCEMENT TO
KEEP THE HEART
If the keeping of the heart be so important a business; if such choice advantages accrue to you thereby; if so many dear and precious interests be wrapt up in it, then let me call upon the people of God every where to fall close to this work.
O study your hearts, watch your hearts, keep your hearts! away with fruitless controversies and all idle questions; away with empty names and vain shews; away with unprofitable discourse and bold censures of others; turn in upon yourselves; get into your closets, and now resolve to dwell there. You have been strangers to this work too long; you have kept others vineyards too long, you have trifled about the borders of religion too long; this world hath detained you from your great work too long; will you now resolve to look better to your hearts? Will you haste and come out of the crowds of business, and clamours of the world, and retire yourselves more than you have done? O that this day you would resolve upon it!
Reader, methinks I should prevail with thee: all that I beg for is but this, that thou wouldst step a little oftener to talk with God, and thine own heart; that thou wouldst not suffer every trifle to divert thee; that thou wouldst keep a more true and faithful account of thy thoughts and affections; that thou wouldst but seriously demand of thine own heart, at least every evening, O my heart, where hast thou been to day? Whither hast thou made a road to day? If all that hath been said by way of inducement be not enough, I have yet more motives to offer you. And the first is this:
1. Motive. The studying, observing, and diligent keeping of your own hearts, will marvellously help your understanding in the deep mysteries of religion.
An honest well experienced heart, is a singular help to a weak head; such a heart will serve you instead of a commentary upon a great part of the scriptures: by this means you shall far better understand the things of God, than the learned rabbis and profound doctors (if graceless and unexperienced) ever did; you shall not only have a more clear, but a more sweet perception and gust of them: a man may discourse orthodoxly and profoundly of the nature and effects of faith, the troubles and comforts of conscience, the sweetness of communion with God, that never felt the efficacy and sweet impressions of these things upon his own spirit: But, O how dark and dry are these notions, compared with his upon whose heart they have been acted! When such a man reads David’s psalms, or Paul’s epistles, there he finds hos own objections made and answered. O, said he, these holy men speak my very heart: their doubts were mine, their troubles mine, and their experiences mine. I remember Chrysostom, speaking to his people of Antioch about some choice experiences, used this expression: Sciunt initiati quid dico: those that are initiated, know what I say: experience is the best school-master. O then, study your hearts, keep your hearts!
Motive 2. The study and observation of your own hearts will antidote you against the dangerous and infecting errors of the times and places you live in.
For what think you is the reason that so many professors in England have departed from the faith, giving heed to fables; that so many thousands have been led away by the error of the wicked; that Jesuits and Quakers, who have sown corrupt doctrine, have had such plentiful harvests among us, but because they have met with a company of empty notional professors, that never knew what belongs to practical godliness, and the study and study of their own hearts.
If professors did but give diligence to study, search and watch their own hearts, they would have that steadfastness of their own, that Peter speaks of, 1 Pet. iii. 17, and this would ballast and settle them, Heb. xiii. 9. Suppose a subtil Papist would talk to such, of the dignity and merit of good works, could he ever work the persuasion of it into that heart, that is conscious to itself of so much darkness, deadness, distraction and unbelief attending its best duties? It is a good rule, Non est disputandum de gustus: there is no disputing against taste. What a man hath felt and tasted, one cannot beat him off from that by argument.