_Direct._ I. Avoid the company of those distracted men, that dare revile the servants and ways of God. There is that in your corrupted natures, which will incline you to imitate the most horrid blasphemies if you often hear them. We have seen it in our days, that in imitation of others, men have been drawn to sins not to be named: to drink healths to the devil, to make "God damn me" an ordinary by-word. Be not therefore companions of them.
_Direct._ II. Take heed of sinning yourselves into blindness of mind and hardness of heart. Forsake not God, lest you be forsaken by him. It is men forsaken of God that ordinarily come to this desperate degree of sin: insomuch that the book of Homilies thus describing them saith, "The third sort he calleth scorners, that is, a sort of men whose hearts are so stuffed with malice, that they are not contented to dwell in sin, and to lead their lives in all kind of wickedness, but also they do contemn and scorn in others, all godliness, true religion, all honesty and virtue. Of the two first sorts of men, I will not say but they may take repentance and be converted unto God: of the third sort, I think I may without danger of God's judgment pronounce, that never any yet were converted unto God by repentance, but continued still in their abominable wickedness, heaping up to themselves damnation against the day of God's inevitable judgment."[562] Though I take this to be too severe, yet it is the judgment of the church of England, and terrible to scorners that profess their assent to it.