_To my most dearly beloved friends, in |Taunton|, grace and peace._
_Most endeared Christians._
MY heart is with you, though I am absent. Dear fellow soldiers under the captain of our salvation, consider your calling, and approve yourselves men of resolution; be discouraged with no difficulties of your present warfare. As for human affairs, I would have you to be as you are, _men of peace_. I would have you _armed, not for resisting_, God forbid; but for _suffering only_. You should resist, to the uttermost, striving against sin. Here you must give no quarter! For if you spare but one _Agag_, the life of your souls must go for the life of your sin. God will not smile on that soul that smiles on sin, nor have any peace with him, that is at peace with his enemy. Other enemies you must forgive, and love, and pray for; but for these spiritual enemies, all your affections, and all your prayers must be engaged against them: yea, you must admit no parley: it is dangerous to dispute with temptations. *Remember what _Eve_ lost by parleying with Satan: you must fly from temptations, and put them off at first with a peremptory denial. If you will but hear the devil’s arguments, and the flesh’s pleas, it is an hundred to one but you are insnared. And for this present evil world, the Lord deliver you from it. Surely you had need watch and be sober, or else this _world_ is like to undo you. I have often warned you not to build upon an external happiness; and to promise yourselves nothing but hardship here: Oh still remember your station; soldiers must not count upon rest, and fullness, but hunger, and hardness. Labour to get right apprehensions of the world. Do not think these things necessary. One thing is needful: you may be happy in the want of all outward comforts. Do not think yourselves undone, if brought to want or poverty: study eternity, and you will see it to be little material to you, whether you are poor or rich: you may have never such an opportunity for your advantage in all your lives, as when you seem to run the vessel upon the rocks. Set your enemies one against the other; death against the world; no such way to get above the world, as to put yourselves into the possession of death.
*Look often upon the dust that you shall be reduced to, and imagine you saw your bones tumbled out of your graves, as they are like shortly to be, and men handling your skulls, and enquiring whose is this? Tell me, of what account will the world be then? Put yourselves often into your graves, and look out from thence upon the world, and see what judgment you have of it. Must not you shortly be forgot among the dead? Your places will know you no more, and your memory will be no more among men, and then what will it profit you to have lived in fashion and repute? One serious walk over a church-yard, might make a man mortified to the world. Think upon how many you tread; but ye know them not: no doubt they had their estates, their friends, their businesses, and kept as much stir in the world as others do now. But alas, what are they the better for all this? Know you not that this must be your own case shortly? Oh the unhappiness of man; how is he bewitched; and befooled, that he should expend himself for that which he knows shall forever leave him! Brethren, I beseech you lay no stress upon these perishing things, but labour to be at a holy indifference about them: is it for one that is in his wits to sell his God, his soul, for things he is not sure to keep a day, and which he is sure after a few sleepings and wakings more, to leave behind him for ever? Go, and talk with dying men, and see what apprehensions they have of the world? If any should come to these, and tell them here is such and such preferments for you; you shall have such titles of honour and delights, if you will now disown religion, do you think such a motion would be embraced? Brethren, why should we not be wise in time! Why should we not now be of the mind, of which we know we shall be all shortly? Woe to them that will not be wise, till it be to no purpose! Woe to them whose eyes nothing but death and judgment will open! Woe to them that though they have been warned by others, and have heard the world’s greatest darlings in death cry out of its vanity, yet would take no warning; but must serve themselves too, for warnings to others. Ah! my beloved, beware there be none among you, that will rather part with their consciences than with their estates; that have secret reserves to save themselves whole, when it comes to the pinch; and not to be of the religion that will undo them in the world. Beware that none of you have your hearts where your feet should be, and love your _mammon_ before your Maker.
May the Lord of Hosts be with you, and the God of _Jacob_ your refuge. Farewell my dear brethren, farewell, and be strong in the Lord. I am
_Your’s to serve you in the gospel, whether by doing or suffering_