they build some better estimation of
themselves. But, I pray you, what will that avail you, to be unlike them,
if you be more unlike your pattern than they are unlike you? It must be,
others will compare with those that are good, but it is with that which is
worst in them, and not that which is best. How often do men reckon this
way,--here is a good man, here is an eminent person, yet he is such and
such, subject to such infirmities, and here self-love flatters itself,
and, by flattering, deceives itself. My beloved, let us learn to establish
a more perfect rule, which may show all our imperfections. Let our rule
ascend, that our hearts may descend in humility. But when our role and
pattern descends to men of like infirmities, then our pride and self
conceit ascends, and the higher we be that way in our own account, the
lower we are indeed, and in God's account, and the lower we be in
ourselves we lose nothing by it; for, as God is higher in our account, so
we are higher in God's account, according to that standing rule, Matth.
xxiii. 12, "Whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased, and he that
shall humble himself shall be exalted."

Sermon XXI.

1 John ii. 1.--"My little children, these things write I unto you,
that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the
Father," &c.

The gospel is an entire uniform piece, all the parts of it are interwoven
through other, and interchangeably knit together, so that there can be no
dividing of it any more than of Christ's coat that was without seam. If
you have it not altogether by the divine lot, you cannot truly have any
part of it, for they are so knit together, that if you disjoin them, you
destroy them, and if they cease to be together, they cease altogether to
be. I speak this, because there may be pretensions to some abstracted
parts of Christianity. One man pretends to faith in Jesus Christ, and
persuasion of pardon of sin, and in this there may be some secret glorying
arising from that confidence, another may pretend to the study of holiness
and obedience, and may endeavour something that way to do known duties,
and abstain from gross sins. Now, I say, if the first do not conjoin the
study of the second, and if the second do not lay down the first as the
foundation, both of them embrace a shadow for the thing itself, because
they separate those things that God hath joined, and so can have no being
but in men's fancy, when they a