hearts and ways, and if you found how great
that he is, you could not but fear the danger of it, for it being no less
than a denying of Jesus Christ, and a real renunciation of him, it puts
you without the refuge of sinners, and is most likely to keep you without
the blessed city, for "there shall in no wise enter therein anything that
defileth, or maketh a lie," Rev. xxi. 27. What shall then become of them
whose life all along is but one continued lie?

Sermon XIII.

1 John i. 6.--"If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk
in darkness, we lie," &c.

That which is the sum of religion, sincerity, and a correspondency between
profession and practice, is confirmed by reason, and much strengthened by
nature itself, so that religion, reason, and nature, conspire in one, to
hold out the beauty and comeliness of sincerity, and to put a note and
character of infamy and deformity upon all hypocrisy and deceit,
especially in the matters of religion. There is nothing so contrary to
religion, as a false appearance, a show of that which is not for religion
is a most entire and equable thing, like itself, harmonious in all parts
of it, the same within and without, in expression and action, all
correspondent together. Now, to mar this harmony, and to make it up of
unequal, dissimilar parts, and to make one part give the lie to the other,
the course of a man's life, in ignorance, negligence, and sin, proclaiming
contrary to the profession of Christianity, this is to make religion a
monstrous thing, to deny the nature of it, and in our imaginations to
contrive an impossible union of inconsistent things. It is a creature made
up of contradictions, which can have no subsistence in the truth, but only
in the fancies of deluded souls, one professing Christianity, and so by
consequence fellowship with the original light, the Sun of righteousness
and yet darkness of ignorance possessing the mind, and the heart carried
away in the ways of the lusts of ignorance, and walking in that darkness.
This is a monster in Christianity, one so far misshapen, that the very
outward form and visage of it doth not remain. But I told you, reason
confirms this. For what more suitable to the very natural frame and
constitution of a reasonable being, than that the outward man should be
the image and expression of the inward, and that they should answer one
another as face answers face in the water, that the tongue should be the
in