VirginiaHuguenot
Puritanboard Librarian
Richard Steele, "How the Uncharitable and Dangerous Contentions That Are Among Professors of the True Religion May Be Allayed," in Puritan Sermons: 1659-1689, Vol. 4, p. 248:
Apply yourselves to the practice of real piety. By this I mean, that we should employ our chief care to procure and increase a lively faith, to exercise daily repentance, to strengthen our hope, to inflame our love to God and to our neighbour, to grow in humility, zeal, patience, and self-denial: to be more diligent in watchfulness over our thoughts, words, ways, in mortification of our sinful passions and affections, in the examination of our spiritual estate, in meditation, in secret and fervent prayer, and in universal and steady obedience. In these things do run the vital spirits of religion: and whoso is seriously employed in these, will have but little time, and less mind, for unnecessary contentions. These will keep that heat about the heart, which evaporating, degenerates into airy and fiery exhalations, and leaves the soul as cold as ice to any holy desires. "It is a good thing that the heart be established with grace; not with meats, which have not profited them that have been occupied therein." (Heb. xiii.9.)
It is manifest what a sad decay of these hath followed our multiplied quarrels; and how hard it is to be "fervent in spirit," and withal to be fiery in controversies. He that walks with God, and whose "conversation is in heaven," will be quickly weary of windy disputes with men, and will be apt to conclude, with one of the ancients, Lassus sum, dum et cum sermone atque invidia, et cum hostibus et cum nostris, pugno:* which hath occasioned divers great divines the more earnestly to long for heaven, that they might be out of the noise of endless and perverse disputations. The serious practice of godliness hath the promise of divine direction in all material points: "The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him; and he will show them his covenant." (Psalm xxv. 14.) "If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God." (John vii. 17.) And likewise, he that "lives in the Spirit, and walks in the Spirit," dares not "bite or devour" his neighbour. "Let not us," saith the apostle, that so walk, "be desirous of vain-glory, provoking one another, envying one another." (Gal. v. 25, 26.)