1.          Read and study the Scriptures carefully, wherein is the best learning and only infallible truth.  They can furnish you with the best materials for your sermons; the only rules for faith and practice; the most powerful motives to persuade and convince the conscience; and the strongest arguments to confute all errors, heresies, and schisms.  Therefore, be sure, let all your sermons be congruous to them.  And it is expedient that you understand them as well in the originals as in the translations.

2.         Take not hastily up other men's opinions without due trial, nor vent your own conceits; but compare them first with the analogy of faith and rules of holiness recorded in the Scriptures, which are the proper tests of all opinions and doctrines.

    3.          Meddle with controversies and doubtful points as little as may be in your popular preaching, lest you puzzle your hearers or engage them in wrangling disputations, and so hinder their conversion, which is the main end of preaching.

   4.           Insist most on those points which tend to effect sound belief, sincere love to God, repentance for sin, and that may persuade to holiness of life.  Press these things home to the consciences of your hearers, as of absolute necessity, leaving no gap for evasions; but bind them as closely as may be to their duty.  And, as you ought to preach sound and orthodox doctrine, so ought you to deliver God's message as near as may be in God's words; that is, in such as are plain and intelligible, that the meanest of your auditors may understand.  To which end it is necessary to back all the precepts and doctrines with apt proofs from Holy Scriptures; avoiding all exotic phrases, scholastic terms, unnecessary quotations of authors, and forced rhetorical figures; since it is not difficult to make easy things appear hard; but to render hard things easy is the hardest part of a good orator as well as preacher.

5.            Get your heart sincerely affected with the things you persuade others to embrace, that so you may preach experimentally, and your hearers may perceive that you are in good earnest: and press nothing upon them but what may tend to their advantage, and which you yourself would enter your own salvation on.

6.           Study and consider well the subjects you intend to preach on, before you come into the pulpit, and the words will readily offer themselves.  Yet think what you are about to say before you speak, avoiding all uncouth fantastical words or phrases, or nauseous, indecent, or ridiculous expressions, which will quickly bring your preaching into contempt, and make your sermons and person the subjects of sport and merriment. 

7.           Dissemble not the truths of God in any case, nor comply with the lusts of men, nor give any countenance to sin by word or deed. 

8.           But above all, you must never forget to order your own conversation as becomes the Gospel; that so you may teach by example, as well as by precept, and that you may appear a good divine everywhere, as well as in the pulpit for a minister's life and conversation is more heeded than his doctrine.

   9           Yet, after all this, take heed that you be not puffed up with spiritual pride of your own virtues, nor with a vain conceit of your parts and abilities; nor yet be transported with the applause of men, nor be dejected or discouraged by the scoffs or frowns of the wicked or profane.

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