_Direct._ XX. Trust not to your own judgment, in your melancholy state, either as to the condition of your souls, or the choice and conduct of your thoughts or ways; but commit yourselves to the judgment and direction of some experienced, faithful guide. You are no fit judges of your own condition, nor of the way of your duty, in this dark, distempered condition that you are in. Either your mind and imagination is well or ill: if it be well, why complain you of all those disturbances, and confusions, and disability to meditate and pray? If it be ill, why will you be so self-conceited as to think yourselves able to judge of yourselves, with such a distempered fantasy of mind? It is one of the worst things in melancholy persons, that commonly they are most wise in their own eyes, and stiff in their own conceits, when their brains are sickest, and their understanding weakest; and that they are confident, and unruly, and unpersuadable, as if they were proud of those pitiful understandings, and thought nobody knows so well as they. Oh! say they, you know not my case! Am not I liker to know your case, who have seen so many score in that case, than you are that never knew it in any but yourself? A man that stands by may better know the case of a man that is in a dream, than he can know his own. You say that others feel not what you feel! no more doth the physician feel what a man in a fever, or falling-sickness, or distraction feeleth; and yet by the report of what you say you feel, and by what he seeth, he far better knoweth your disease, the nature and the cure of it, than you that feel it. Therefore as a wise man, when he is sick, will trust himself, under God, to the direction of his physician and the help of his friends about him, and not lie wrangling against their help and counsel, and wilfully refuse it, because they advise him contrary to his feeling; so will you do, if you are wise; trust yourself with some fit director; and despise not his judgment either about your state, or about your duty. You think you are lost, and there is no hope: hear what he saith that is now fitter to judge. Set not your weak wit too wilfully against him. Do you think he is so foolish as to mistake? should not humility make you rather think so of yourself? Be advised by him about the matter of your thoughts, the manner and length of your secret duties, and all your scruples that you need advice in. Will you answer me this one question? Do you know any body that is wiser than yourself? and fitter to judge of your condition and advise you? If you say, no; how proud are you of such a crazed wit! If you say, yea; then believe and trust that person, and resolve to follow his direction. And I would ask you, were you not once of another judgment concerning yourself? If so, then were you not as sound and able to judge, and liker to be in the right than you are now.
_Direct._ XXI. My last advice is, to look out for the cure of your disease, and commit yourself to the care of your physician, and obey him; and do not as most melancholy persons do, that will not believe that physic will do them good, but that it is only their soul that is afflicted; for it is the spirits, imagination, and passions, that are diseased, and so the soul is like an eye that looketh through a coloured glass, and thinks all things are of the same colour as the glass is. I have seen abundance cured by physic; and till the body be cured, the mind will hardly ever be cured, but the clearest reasons will be all in vain.
_Tit._ 6. _Directions for young Students, for the most profitable ordering of their studying Thoughts._
_Direct._ I. Let it be your first and most serious study to make sure that you are regenerate, and sanctified by the Holy Ghost, and justified by faith in Christ, and love God above all, as your reconciled Father, and so have right to the heavenly inheritance.
For, 1. You are nearest to yourselves, and your everlasting happiness is your nearest and your highest interest: what will it profit you to know all the world, and to lose your own souls? to know as much as devils, and be for ever miserable with devils?
2. It is a most doleful employment to be all day at work in Satan's chains! to sit studying God and the holy Scriptures, while you are in the power of the devil, and have hearts that are at enmity to the holiness of that God and that Scripture which you are studying! It is a most preposterous and incongruous course of study, if you first study not your own deliverance. And if you knew your case, and saw your chains, your trembling would disturb your studies.