Jeremiah 35

REFLECTIONS UPON CHAP. XXXV.—Never let us be ashamed of the honest employment of our ancestors, however mean. And let us prudently accommodate ourselves to our place, rank, and condition; but never live above it. Humility and contentment in obscurity are often the best policy and surest protection. If we be strangers in this world, we should abstain from fleshly lusts, and treat the objects of sense with a gracious and generous disdain. The more we are confirmed in so doing, temptation will have the less force. The more mortified we are to this world, the more meet we are for the next, and the more willing shall we be to go to it; nay, we are the more meet for suffering here. But no rules of external discipline ought to exclude a dispensation when necessity requires. To neglect proper means of safety is to tempt God. It is superlatively absurd and wicked to refuse doing as much in obedience to God as we would be ready to do in obedience to a progenitor who is long since dead and can never remind us of our obligation: and such as are guilty may expect vengeance, sure, however slow. But, while sinners are ruined, the temperate and 2 obedient are often preserved in this world. And often such as live soberly on small estates have the most numerous and flourishing families. Nay, temperance, and mortification to this world, do much befriend the exercises of piety, and help to transmit the observance thereof to posterity, as their principal honour