_Direct._ IX. Let the end and order of your meditations be first for the settling of your judgments, and next for the resolving and settling of your wills, and thirdly, for the reforming and bettering of your lives; and, but in the fourth place, after all these, for the raising of your holy passions or lively feeling; which must have but its proper room and place. But indeed where some of these are done already, they may be supposed, and we may proceed to that which is yet to do. As if you know what is sin and duty, but do it not, your meditation must be, not to make you know what you knew not, but first to consider well of what you know, and set the powerful truth before you; and then labour hereby to bring your wills to a fixed resolution of obedience. But if it be a truth whose principal use is on the will and affections, (as to draw up the heart to the love of God, by the meditating on his attractive excellencies,) then the most pains must there be taken. Of which see chap. iii. direct. xi.
_Direct._ X. Turn your cogitations often into soliloquies; methodically and earnestly preaching to your own hearts, as you would do on that subject to others if it were to save their souls.[308] As this will keep you in order, from rambling and running out, and will also find you continual matter, (for method is a wonderful help both to invention, memory, and delight,) so it will bring things soonest to your affections: and earnest pleading of convincing reasons with our own hearts, is a powerful way to make the fire burn, and to kindle desire, fear, love, hatred, repentings, shame, sorrow, joy, resolution, or any good effect. Convictions, upbraidings, expostulations, reprehensions, and self-persuasions may be very powerful; when a dull way of bare thinking is but like a dull way of preaching, without any lively application, which little stirs the hearers. Learn purposely of the liveliest books you read, and of the best and liveliest preachers you hear, to preach to your hearts, and use it orderly, and you will find it a most powerful way of meditating.
_Direct._ XI. Turn your meditations often into ejaculatory prayers and addresses unto God; for that will keep you reverent, serious, and awake, and make all the more powerful, because the more divine. When you meditate on sin, turn sometimes to God, by penitent lamentation, and say, Lord, what a wretch and rebel was I to entertain such an enemy of thine in my heart! and for nothing to offend thee and violate thy laws! O pardon, O cleanse me, O strengthen me! Conquer and cast out this odious enemy of thee and me. So when you are seeking to excite or exercise any grace, send up a fervent request to God to show his love and power upon thy dead and sluggish heart, and to be the principal agent in a work which is so much his own. Prayer is a most holy duty, in which the sold hath so nearly to do with God, that if there be any holy seriousness in the heart, it will be thus excited: a dull and wandering mind will bear some reverence to God; and therefore interest him in all.
_Direct._ XII. Let every meditation be undertaken in a humble sense of thy own insufficiency, with a believing dependence on thy Head and Saviour, to guide and quicken thee by his Holy Spirit, and to cover the infirmities of thy holiest thoughts. Whatever good is written upon our hearts, must be "written by the Spirit of the living God:" and this "trust we must have through Christ to God-ward: not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God," 2 Cor. iii. 3-5. How heavily will all go on, or rather how certainly shall we labour in vain, and cast off all, if Christ cast us off, and leave us to ourselves! Think not that your life and strength are radically in yourselves: go to him by renewed acts of faith, by whom you must be quickened.
_Direct._ XIII. Let not your holy thoughts be so seldom as to keep you strange to the matter of your meditations, nor so short as to be gone before you have made any thing of it. Now and then a cursory thought will not acquaint the soul with God, nor bring it to a habit and temperament of holiness. Whereas that which you think on frequently and seriously, as your business and delight, will become the nutriment and nature of your souls; as the air which we daily breathe in, and the food which we daily live upon, do to our bodies. And you will find that as use will breed skill and strength, so it will cause such acquaintance and familiarity, as will very much tend to the fruit and comfort of the work. Whereas they that only cast now and then a look at God and holiness, or are seldom and short in holy thoughts, do lose so quickly the little which they get, that it makes no great alteration on them.