1. Such contentious suits do show the power of selfishness in the sinner; how much self-interest is inordinately esteemed. 2. They show the excessive love of the world; how much men overvalue the things which they contend for. 3. They show men's want of love to their neighbours; how little they regard another man's interest in comparison of their own. 4. They show how little such men care for the public good, which is maintained by the concord and love of neighbours. 5. Such contentions are powerful engines of the devil to destroy all christian love on both sides; and to stir up mutual enmity and wrath; and so to involve men in a course of sin, by further uncharitableness and injuries, both in heart, and word, and deed. 6. Poor men are hereby robbed of their necessary maintenance, and their innocent families subjected to distress. 7. Unconscionable lawyers and court officers, who live upon the people's sins, are hereby maintained, encouraged, and kept up. 8. Laws and courts of justice are perverted to do men wrong, which were made to right them. 9. And the offender declareth how little sense he hath of the authority or love of God, and how little sense of the grace of our Redeemer; and how far he is from being himself forgiven through the blood of Christ, who can no better forgive another.
II. The evil of false witness.
1. By false witness the innocent are injured; robbery and murder are committed under pretence of truth and justice. 2. The name of God is horribly abused, by the crying sin of perjury (of which before). 3. The presence and justice of God are contemned, when sinners dare, in his sight and hearing, appeal to his tribunal, in the attesting of a lie. 4. Vengeance is begged or consented to by the sinner; who bringeth God's curse upon himself, and as it were desireth God to plague or damn him if he lie. 5. Satan the prince of malice and injustice, and the father of lies, and murders, and oppression, is hereby gratified, and eminently served. 6. God himself is openly injured, who is the Father and patron of the innocent; and the cause of every righteous person is more the cause of God than of man. 7. All government is frustrated, and laws abused, and all men's security for their reputations, or estates, or lives is overthrown, by false witnesses; and consequently human converse is made undesirable and unsafe. What good can law, or right, or innocency, or the honesty of the judge do any man, where false witnesses combine against him? What security hath the most innocent or worthy person, for his fame, or liberty, or estate, or life, if false witnesses conspire to defame him or destroy him? And then how shall men endure to converse with one another? Either the innocent must seek out a wilderness, and fly from the face of men as we do from lions and tigers, or else peace will be worse than war; for in war a man may fight for his life; but against false witnesses he hath no defence: but God is the avenger of the innocent, and above most other sins, doth seldom suffer this to go unpunished, even in this present world; but often beginneth their hell on earth, to such perjured instruments of the devil.
III. The evil of unrighteous judgments.