Means to quicken us to pray with more fervour for the leading of the Holy Spirit 1/3

           First Means.  Let the dread of those scriptures which set forth the danger of errors and false doc­trines fall upon thee, that thou mayest not think thou goest upon a slighty errand, when praying to be pre­served from them, as if the odds were not great, whether thou hast thy request or hast it not.  It is one of the devil’s master-policies, by sinking the price of errors in the thoughts of men, to make them thereby the more vendible.  Many think they shall not pay so dear for an error in judgment as for a sin in practice. Yea, some have such a latitude, that they fancy a man may be saved in any religion—a principle that must needs tend to make them that hold it careless and incurious in their choice.  That sin shall not want cus­tomers which men think they shall pay little or noth­ing for.  Some can be content to be drunk on free cost, that would not, were they assured their own purse should pay soundly for the reckoning.  How comes fornication to abound so much among the Romish clergy, but because it is counted so petty a sin by them?  And I wish that error and heresy—which are the fornication of the mind—were not by many among ourselves sized as low.  But woe to those clerks of the devil’s market, that tempt and toll men on to sin by setting cheaper rates on their head than the word of God hath done.  If once the dread of a sin be word off the conscience, no wonder then if we see men as boldly leap upon it, as the frogs in the fable on the log, that lay so still and tame at the bottom of the river.  Fear makes the body more apt to take in­fection, but it preserveth the soul from the infection of sin.

           Now that thou mayest the more stand in fear of drinking in the poison of any corrupt and unsound doctrine, let thy mind ponder on a few scriptures, which show both their detestable, and also damning nature of them.  Gal. 5:19, there heresy is called ‘a work of the flesh,’ and reckoned among those sins which shut the doors of them out of heaven; ‘they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God,’ ver. 21.  They are called ‘doctrines of devils,’ I Tim. 4:1.  And if they come from the devil, whither must they lead but to hell? Such as are against the fundamental principles of the gospel are inconsistent with the love and favour of God.  He that ‘abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God,’ II John 9.  And who, think you, shall have him that hath not God? Were there no other scripture against this kind of sin, but that one, II Peter 2:1, it were enough to strike the heretic through his loins, and make the knees of every seducer, like Belshazzar’s at the sight of the ‘handwriting on the wall,’ to knock one against the other.  ‘But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heres­ies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction.’  So that if a man hath a mind to get the start of other sinners, and desires to be in hell before them, he need do no more than open his sails to the wind of heretical doctrine, and he is like to make a short voyage to hell of it; for these bring upon their maintainers ‘swift destruction.’ Nay, the Spirit of God, the more to aggravate their deplored state brings in three most dreadful instances of divine vengeance that ever was executed upon any sinners, viz. the detrusion of the apostate angels from heaven to hell, the drowning of the old world, and the conflagration of Sodom and Gomorrah by raining hell, as it were, out of heaven upon them.  I say, he brings these as patterns and pledges of that vengeance which shall certainly befall this kind of sinners.  And by this time I hope thou wilt be warm in thy prayer against this dangerous enemy.  But,