CHAP. XVI.
Recommending devotion at twelve o’clock, called, in scripture, the sixth hour of the day. This frequency of devotion, equally desirable by all orders of people. Universal love is recommended to be the subject of prayer at this hour. Of intercession, as an act of universal love.
1.IT will, perhaps, be thought by some, that these hours of prayer come too thick, and are only fit for monasteries, or such people as have no more to do in the world than they have.
To this it is answered, this method of devotion is not pressed upon any as absolutely necessary, but recommended to all people, as the best and the happiest way of life.
And if exemplary devotion is as much the happiness and perfection of a merchant, a soldier, or a man of quality, as it is the happiness and perfection of the most retired, contemplative life, then it is as proper to recommend it without any abatements to one order of men as to another.
Here is therefore no excuse for men of business and figure. First, Because it would be to excuse them from that which is the end of living, to make them less beneficial to themselves, and less serviceable to God and the world.
*Secondly, Because most men of business and figure engage too far in worldly matters; much farther than the reasons of human life, or the necessities of the world require.
*Merchants and tradesmen, for instance, are generally ten times farther engaged in business than they need; which is so far from being a reasonable excuse for their want of time for devotion, that it is their crime, and must be censured as a blameable instance of covetousness and ambition.
Gentry, and people of figure, either give themselves up to state-employments, or to the gratifications of their passions, in a life of gaity and debauchery. And if these things might be admitted as allowable avocations from devotion, devotion must be reckoned a poor circumstance of life.