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or yours shall prosper, or whether you shall profit by the means of grace, or whether you shall be saved in the end, does produce many dangerous and mischievous effects:

1. It will cause you to neglect the proper use of the means of this life, or of that which is to come, 2 Kings vi. 33, according as you doubt of success in either, or if you neglect them not utterly, yet you will have no heart to go about them. For as those that needlessly intermeddle with other person's business, usually neglect their own, so you will be apt to leave your own work undone, when you take God's work out of his hands; and who is he that will take pains about that which he fears will be to no purpose, or labour lost?

2. You will be ready to use unlawful means for any thing when you doubt of success from lawful, Gen. xii. 11 - 13, xvi. 2, xxvii. 5, 19.

3. Taking thought does divide, distract, overload, and consume the heart and spirits; nothing more.

4. You can never be thankful to God for any thing whereof you fear that you shall have no good success.

5. This anxious thought and distressing fear about success, will deprive you of the comfort of all those good things you have had, and which now you do enjoy.

6. Nothing will bring ill success upon you sooner than unbelieving and distrustful fears about futurity. For when any person shall, notwithstanding the experience he has had, or might have had, of God's power, love, care, and truth of his promises, yet distrustfully care so far, as not to content himself with his own work, so far as prudent care leads him; but also will take God's work, and the burthen of his work upon himself, caring about success, which only belongs to God, and which God only can do, and bear; this folly and presumption does so much provoke God, that it causes him, out of his wise justice to cease caring for such an one, leaving him to his own care, and to his wit, friends, or any other earthly help, to make him by woful experience see and feel, how little any,