_Direct._ III. If God call you to a married life, expect all these troubles, or most of them; and make particular preparation for each temptation, cross, and duty which you must expect. Think not that you are entering into a state of mere delight, lest it prove but a fool's paradise to you. See that you be furnished with marriage strength and patience, for the duties and sufferings of a married state, before you venture on it. Especially, 1. Be well provided against temptations to a worldly mind and life: for here you are like to be most violently and dangerously assaulted. 2. See that you be well provided with conjugal affections: for they are necessary both to the duties and sufferings of a married life. And you should not enter upon the state without the necessary preparations. 3. See that you be well provided with marriage prudence and understanding, that you may be able to instruct and edify your families, and may live with them as men of knowledge, 1 Pet. iii. 7, and may manage all your business with discretion, Psal. cxii. 15. 4. See that you be provided with resolvedness and constancy, that you vex not yourself and relations by too late repentings; and come not off with, had I wist, or _non putaram_. Levity and mutability is no fit preparative for a state that only death can change. Let the love and resolutions which brought you into that state, continue with you to the last. 5. See that you be provided with a diligence answerable to the greatness of your undertaken duties. A slothful mind is unfit for one that entereth himself voluntarily upon so much business; as a cowardly mind is unfit for him that listeth himself a soldier for the wars. 6. See that you are well provided with marriage patience; to bear with the infirmities of others, and undergo the daily crosses of your life, which your business and necessities, and your own infirmities, will unavoidably infer. To marry without all this preparation, is as foolish as to go to sea without the necessary preparations for your voyage, or to go to war without armour or ammunition, or to go to work without tools or strength, or to go to buy meat in the market when you have no money.
_Direct._ IV. Take special care, that fancy and passion overrule not reason, and friends' advice, in the choice of your condition, or of the person. I know you must have love to those that you match with; but that love must be rational, and such as you can justify in the severest trial, by the evidences of worth and fitness in the person whom you love. To say you love, but you know not why, is more beseeming children or mad folks, than those that are soberly entering upon a change of life of so great importance to them. A blind love which maketh you think a person excellent and amiable, who in the eyes of the wisest that are impartial, is nothing so, or maketh you overvalue the person whom you fancy, and be fond of one as some admirable creature, that in the eyes of others is next to contemptible, this is but the index and evidence of your folly. And though you please yourselves in it, and honour it with the name of love, there is none that is acquainted with it, that will give it any better name than lust or fancy. And the marriage that is made by lust or fancy will never tend to solid content or true felicity; but either it will feed till death on the fuel that kindled it, and then go out in everlasting shame; or else more ordinarily it proveth but a blaze, and turneth into loathing and weariness of each other. And because this passion of lust (called love) is such a besotting, blinding thing, (like the longing of a woman with child,) it is the duty of all that feel any touch of it to kindle upon their hearts, to call it presently to the trial, and to quench it effectually; and till that be done (if they have any relics of wit or reason) to suspect their own apprehensions, and much more to trust the judgment and advice of others.
[Sidenote: How to cure lustful love.]