like, nor the way to each of them so like, but it may partly be discerned which way men are going, and what they drive at in their daily course.

But I will urge you no further to the trial. I will take it for granted that your consciences are telling many of you, that you have been troubled about many things, while the one thing needful hath been neglected. And if indeed this be your case, suffer me to tell the guilty plainly, what it is that they have done.

1. Whatever you have been doing in the world, you have lost your time, if you have not been seeking the one thing necessary. If you have been gathering riches, or growing up in honour as the rush groweth in the mire (Job viii. 11.), or filling your purses or your barns, or pleasing your fancies and flesh; you have but fooled away your time, and done just nothing, and much worse. Nothing is done, if the one thing necessary be undone. Believe it, time is a precious thing, and ought not to have been thus cast away. When you come to the end of it, the worst and proudest of you shall confess it is precious. Then, O for one year more! O for a few days or hours more, to make sure of this one thing which you should have spent your lives in making sure of. Will you then think thus, and yet can you now afford to cast away twenty or thirty years upon nothing? If time be worth nothing, your lives are worth nothing. And why should a man desire to live for nothing? You love your lives too much, and yet will you so contemptuously cast them away? He hath lost his life, who hath lost the end of his life. The loss of a hundred pounds in money is not (to yourselves) so great a loss, as the loss of a day's or an hour's time. What then is the loss of so many years? Did you ever well consider of this? If you live a thousand years, it is all lost, if you have not spent it in making sure of the one thing necessary. For is not that lost, and worse a thousand times than lost, that is spent in crossing the end that it is given for? and which is no comfort, but terror in the review, and which leaveth no fruit, but grief and disappointment? Let me tell you, If you hold on thus unto the end, you will wish and wish a thousand times, either that you had never had an hour's time, or else that you had had hearts, to have better perceived the worth and use of it, than to cast it away

as you have done upon nothing. It is but one thing that is worth your time and lives.

2. Whatsoever else you have been doing, you have lost all your labour with your time, if this one thing needful have been neglected. No doubt you have been busy since you came into the world; but to little purpose. You might as well have been idle, as so laboriously doing nothing. No doubt many a journey you have rode and gone, and many a hard day's labour you have taken, and sharpened perhaps with care and grief. But you have lost it all, if it were a hundred times more, if it have not been laid out upon the one thing necessary.

And is it not a pitiful thing that men of reason, should vex themselves, and toil their bodies, and suffer hunger, and thirst, and weariness, and make such a stir and pudder in the world, and all for nothing, and in a vain show? How many mornings have you risen to your labour, and how many days and years have you spent in it, and now it is all lost! How many thoughts and fears, and cares have possessed and pestered your minds, and now they are all lost! Some of you have followed your trades, and some your husbandry, and some have run up and down after recreations.. Some of you have been scraping riches, and some contriving to keep up their reputation, and some to satisfy their appetites, and live in pleasure and contentments to the flesh; and now look back upon all that you have done and gotten, and tell yourselves whether all this be not lost, yea, alas! much worse than lost. If you be not ready to pass this conclusion at the very heart, it is because your hearts are yet blinded and hardened in sin; but God will soon bring that to your hearts that shall convince you of it. If God have made use of any worldly, sensual person of you, for public good, of church or state, as men do of thorns for hedging to their lands, or of briars to stop a gap, or of firewood to warm their family; yet as to any durable benefit to yourselves, I may well say that all your labour is lost.

And this is not all; but the pains also that you have taken in your formal, hypocritical religion, your hearing, reading, receiving sacraments, and pretended prayer, all the thoughts that ever you had of death, and judgment, and the life to come, and all that you have done with reservations and by halves for your own salvation, this also is all lost.

Except as a less measure of misery may go for gain. If you miss of the one thing necessary, you do but lose your labour, whatever else you seem to gain.

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A great stir you make in seeking for preferment, or dominion over others, or about your lands, your honours, or your delights; so great that your neighbours can scarce live quietly by you; and the kingdom cannot be quiet for some you, nor your own consciences be quiet within you for the desperate work that you engage them in, which they know must be heard of another day. And when all is done you will find you have been but hunting of a feather. You would see this now if God would open your eyes by grace. But if you miss of so seasonable an information, you will see it too late in the land of darkness. When death hath opened your eyes, and your impenitent souls do suddenly awake in another world, you will understand that you made all this stir but in your sleep. As busily and seriously as you acted the part of lords and ladies, of gentlemen, tradesmen, or husbandmen in the world, if you did not seriously and first do the work of true believers for the world to come, you will then find too late that your labour is lost, and all was acted but as in a dream,

Do you believe this now, or do you not? If you do, will you yet go on? If you do not believe it, shew me now what you have gotten by all this stir that you have made in the world, that will follow you one step further than the grave, and that you can say shall be your own to-morrow? If you were to die this hour, will it be any lasting comfort to you, that you have laboured to be rich or honourable, or that you have attained it? or that you had your glut of sensual delights; and a merry life as to the fleshly pleasure as long as it would last? Will you die the more comfortably for any of this? or much the less? That yet you are alive, is the great mercy of God, and not to be ascribed to any of these. And when you cease to live, then these will be your grief and torment.

Beloved hearers, I have no desire, the Lord knows, to discompose your minds, or to disquiet you with any molesting, unnecessary scruples; nor causelessly to dishonour either you or your employments. But I must needs say that it is a doleful case, that men in their wits should spend a life of precious time, and also a great deal of care and labour, in

doing nothing, and much worse than nothing, when they have a work of everlasting consequence to do, and they know that the devil's chiefest hopes do consist in the success of these diversions! I must seriously profess to you, that I am constrained by the word and teachings of God, and by undeniable reason itself, to look upon all the labour of your lives, the highest, and the busiest, but as the picking of straws, of playing with a feather, or riding upon a staff or a hobby-horse, or such like actions as children, fools, or madmen use, as long as you mind not, and seek not after the one thing necessary. Whatever they may be to others, they are no wiser or better to yourselves. This is my judgment; yea, this is the judgment of the Spirit of God; Phil. iii. 8. If Paul was not mistaken, your gain itself is to be accounted loss, and all but dung, in comparison of the knowing and winning of Christ, that you might be found. in him, and have his righteousness. Think not the name of dung too base, which God himself hath written here upon your highest endowments and honours, by his Spirit. And indeed what will they all do more than dung to procure you the favour of God, or the pardon of your sins? If you offer him gold, will it do any more than if you offered him so much dirt? Is not the prayer of a beggar heard as soon as of a lord or gentleman? If they would do any thing to buy you peace of conscience, or everlasting life, or if they would but keep you alive on earth, I should not marvel at your course. But when they will do none of this, but make your way to heaven more difficult, yea, your salvation a thing impossible while you thus live after the flesh (Rom. viii. 13.), how then can any easier sentence be passed upon your choice? Be you the greatest or the wisest in your own esteem, or in the esteem of others of your mind, I believe, yea, I am sure, that you are all this while but laboriously idle, and honourably debasing yourselves, and delightfully tormenting yourselves, and wisely befooling yourselves, and thriftily undoing yourselves for ever. I have reason to say that your rising, and honourable, and voluptuous employments, are not only like children's play in the sand, and making them houses with sticks and stones; but so much more pitiful, as the reason which you abuse exceedeth theirs. And could you all attain to be lords and ladies, I should look upon you but as a king or queen upon a chess-board, as

to any felicity that it bringeth to yourselves; whatsoever use the overruling providence of God may make of you for his churches. The wise merchant is he that seeking pearls doth find this one of greatest price, and selleth all that he hath and buyeth it; even all the worldly treasures which you so highly value; Matt. xiii. 45, 46. There is more true riches in this one pearl, than in a thousand loads of sand or dirt. If you will load yourselves with mire and clay, conceiting it to be your treasure, your back will be broken before you will have enough to make you rich.

O sirs, with what eyes, with what hearts do you use to read such passages of Christ that speak so plainly to you, as if he named you, and so piercingly as one would think should make you feel, Luke xiiì. 19-21. “Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry. But God said to him, Thou fool, this night shall thy soul be required of thee; and then whose shall those things be which thou hast provided? So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich towards God." Would you have Christ speak plainer to you; or more closely apply it, that you may perceive he speaks to you? You have lost all the labour of your lives; but that is not all.

3. But furthermore consider, that if the one thing needful have been neglected, whatever else you have been doing or whatever you have got (unless as preparatory to this), you have not only lost your labour, but you have all this while been busily undoing yourselves, and labouring for your own perdition.

If it were but the loss of your time and labour, you would then die but as brutes, and be as if you had never been; and to those that have brutified themselves, this will seem more tolerable, than to live in holiness to God. But alas, you have done much worse than this! You have not only been digging your own graves, but barring up against yourselves the doors of heaven, and kindling the unquenchable fire to torment you; Mark ix. 4.

I beseech you give me a considerate hearing, you ambitious gentlemen, you covetous worldlings, and you that serve your lusts and pleasures! Do you think you had been doing the work of wise men, if you had all this while been burning your own fingers, or cutting your own flesh, or set