I mean not that you should overdo, and overthrow your brains and bodies, nor forbear such sober exercise as is most necessary to your health; for a sick body is an ill companion for a student, and much more a crazed brain. But time-wasters are lovers of pleasure or idleness, more than of knowledge and holiness: and wisdom falleth not into idle, sluggish, dreaming souls. If you think it not worth your painfullest and closest studies, you must take up with idle ignorance, and go abroad with swelling titles and empty brains, as the deceivers and the scourgers of the church.
_Direct._ IX. Keep up a delight in all your studies, and carry them on not in an unwilling weariness: and, if it be not by notable error in matter or method, gratify your delight with such things as you are best pleased with, though they bring some smaller inconvenience; because else your weariness may bring much more.
I know that a delight in sin and vanity is not to be gratified; and force must be used with a backward mind in case of necessity and weight. But if it be but in the variety of subjects, and the choice of pleasing studies which are profitable, though simply some other might be fitter, something is to be yielded to delight. But especially the heart must be got to a delight in holy things: and then, time will be improved; the memory will be helped; much will be done; and you will persevere; and it will preserve the mind from temptations to needless recreations, and from the deadly plague of youthful lusts, when your daily labour is a greater pleasure to you.
_Direct._ X. Get some judicious man to draw you up the titles of a threefold common-place book: one part for definitions, axioms, and necessary doctrines; another part for what is useful for ornament and oratory; and another for references as a common index to all the books of that science which you read: for memory will not serve for all.
Ordinarily students have not judgment enough to form their own common-place books till they are old in studies, and have read most of the authors which they would remember; and therefore the young must here have a judicious helper. And when they have done, injudiciousness will be apt to fill it with less necessary things, and to make an unmeet choice of matter, if they have not care and an instructor.
_Direct._ XI. Highly esteem a just method in divinity, and in all your studies; and labour to get an accurate scheme or skeleton, where at once you may see every part in its proper place. But remember that if it be not sound, it will be a snare; and one error in your scheme or method will be apt to introduce abundance more.[319]
It is a poor and pitiful kind of knowledge, to know many loose parcels, and broken members of truth, without knowing the whole, or the place and the relation which they have to the rest. To know letters and not syllables, or syllables and not words, or words and not sentences, or sentences and not the scope of the discourse, are all but an unprofitable knowledge. He knoweth no science rightly that hath not anatomized it, and carrieth not a true scheme or method of it in his mind. But among the many that are extant, to commend any one to you which I most esteem, or take to be without error, is more than I dare do.
_Direct._ XII. Still keep the primitive, fundamental verities in your mind, and see every other truth which you learn as springing out of them, and receiving their life and nourishment from them: and still keep in your minds a clear distinction between the truths of several degrees, both of necessity, and certainty, always reducing the less necessary to the more necessary, and the less certain to the more certain, and not contrarily.[320]
If God had made all points of faith, or Scripture revelation, of equal necessity, our baptism would not only have mentioned our belief in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; nor should we ever have seen the ancient creed, nor the ten commandments. And if all points were of equal evidence, and plainness, and certainty to us, we should not have some so much controverted above others: "Some things" in Scripture are "hard to be understood," but not "all things," 2 Pet. iii. 16. To pretend that any truth is more necessary than it is, doth tend to uncharitableness and contention: and to say that any is less necessary than it is, doth tend to the neglect of it, and to the danger of souls. To pretend any point to be more plain and certain than it is, doth but show our pride and ignorance. But to set up uncertain and unnecessary points, and make a religion of them, and reduce things certain or necessary to them, this is the method of turbulent heretics.