Take Heed of the Infection of National Vices - Nature, Causes Apostasy

Chapter 13 continued--If professors will so immerse themselves into the body of the people as insensibly to learn their manners, they will be carried down the stream with them into perdition- and the danger hereof is beyond what most men conceive. Grace was but sparingly administered unto the community of the people under the old testament, and therefore, after the giving of the law, God would not trust them to live among other people, nor other people to live among them, as knowing how unable they were to withstand the temptations of conformity unto them. Hereon he appointed that all the nations should be utterly extirpated where they were to inhabit, that they should not learn their customs, Leviticus 18-30. The neglect of this wisdom of God, the transgression of his will herein, by mixing themselves with other nations and learning their manners, was that which proved their ruin. Under the gospel there is a more plentiful effusion of the Spirit. God now entrusts all that are called unto the obedience of it to live in the midst of all nations under heaven- yet he so cloth it as to warn them of their danger thereby, and to require them to stand upon their guard herein continually. This is that part of true religion which the apostle James calls the -keeping of ourselves unspotted from the world,- chapter 1-27. Most men think it enough that no more can be required of them nor expected from them than that they wallow not in the mire and pollutions of it. If their practice be free from actual open sins, they care not what spots of a worldly conversation are upon them- but they know not what will be the end of this.