SECTION IV. 37 track, run with double speed the race of christianity that is set before you: press forward beyond your fellows, toward the mark of your high and holy calling, and take larger steps toward the prize. Do you not declare you are the children and followers of those who in the former age were called puritans, becauseof their profession of greater purity of life than their neighbours ? Why then do you not with morezeal and solicitude avoid every degree of impurity and defilement ! Why do you not cleanse yourselves dailyfrom every pollutionof flesh and spirit in a man- ner and measure answerable to your own profession ? In all your religious duties be ye more devout; in the practice of every social and personal virtue be you superior to others; and let the transcendent degrees of your fear and love of God, and your goodness toward men, distinguish you if possible from your neighbours, as much as you are distinguished from your profest and public separation from their forms of worship. Should anyone have asked the disciples of Christ after they had attended a considerable time on his ministry in particular meetings, on mountains, in desarts, and by the sea side ; I say should any one have asked them, Why do you continue in this manner to follow after a new preacher, who has no approbation or countenance from men of figure and power in the established church, and who teaches you to renounce their human inven- tions and traditions ? Surely they would say, it is because we hope to please our God better, and to honour Win much more than the scribes or the priests, than the pharisees and their dis- ciples do, or the bulk and multitude of the Jewish nation : It is becausewe design and hope to make higher advances in virtue and piety than they : we would not expose ourselves to the in- conveniences and difficulties, to the long travel, to the hardships and the reproaches that we sustain, if we could content our- selves with just so much righteousness and religion as the rest of the nation, or even the scribes and the common sort of preachers . of the national church ; and upon this argument we may suppose our Saviour partly to build his question in my text, What do you more than others? And as this was the case of the disciples when they followed after Jesus, a new teacher, and held their particular meetings often in separate places, so it is and will be generally the case of all honest and sincere persons in their religious separations from any established church whatsoever. What advantage is it they aim at in dissentingfrom others in their forms ofnational religion, if it be not that they hope to advance more in the valuable de. signs of sincere godliness, and better to secure to themselves the approbation and favour of God by their peculiar and separate methods of worship. It is therefore' a most important and revonable question c 3
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