THE

PREFACE

TO THE

READER.

Having been desired by my learned and pious Friend Mr. Edmund Elys, to draw up such a Persuasive as I now present the Reader with; finding my self well at leisure from other Business, and considering that it was suitable to my Profession, and present Condition; as being conducive to my preparation for that change, which the pains and infirmities I laboured under, seemed to threaten the near approach viof, and might possibly be in some measure useful and beneficial to others: I was easily induced to comply with his Request, and to employ those Intervals I had of ease or remission of pain, in Meditations upon this Subject. I do not pretend to any thing new, or not delivered by others. Practical Divinity and Morality are such beaten Subjects, and have exercised the Wits and Pens of so many thinking Men, that there is nothing of this Nature can be said or written, which hath not already been so. But because not every Man, nay scarce any Man, hath read all that hath been written upon this, or any other Subject, something new to every Reader may perchance occur in this Writing: And yet if there does not, it may not be unprofitable to read the same things over again, as the Apostle in effect saith, Philip. iii. 1. But to do every Man right, I must acknowledge viimy self to have borrowed a good part of my Matter out of the Right Reverend Father in God, Dr. John Wilkins, late Lord Bishop of Chester, his Treatise of Natural Religion; wherein he hath in my judgment written so well concerning the Happiness that attends a Religious Life in this World, that little which is material can be added; and therefore I might well have spared my pains: Only this Tractate may possibly fall into the hands of some who never saw, nor would else have seen that; and recommend to them the reading of the whole.