To the Religious Reader

Who are you (O Christian) that being sick in soul, and desire to be sound? Sorrowful in spirit, and crave comfort? Unquiet in mind, and seek to be at rest? Wounded in conscience and would be in safety? Tormented in thought, and long for relief? Who are you (I say) that having offended your God, and are therefore punished? Tried with tribulation, and cry out to be refreshed? Visited with affliction, and fain would be delivered? Get you to God's word, and there learn your lesson: hear his holy Gospel preached, and thereby receive instruction: peruse and ponder, examine and consider, meditate and exercise yourself in the good books of God's faithful servants, and they shall teach you wisdom.

And among all books tending to this [illegible] Christian to be embraced and followed, this notable exposition of that zealous man of God, Master John Knox upon the sixth Psalm, containing sundry comfortable and excellent doctrines, in number many, in matter weighty, under the person of that princely Prophet David, and after his example and pattern to be applied to all such as are touched either in mind or body, with any kind of cross or calamity, to direct them to the path of patience, and to show them by a president, to whom they must run for refuge in the time of their visitation, if they desire either partly to have their miseries mitigated, or themselves wholly from troubles to be delivered.

The benefit of this book belongs to every particular member of Christ's mystical body, and they only have the grace to use this and the like at convenient seasons. Moreover, the manifold comforts of this worthy author's most fruitful epistle, written for the consolation of Christ's afflicted flock, are of no less force and virtue, in cases of calamity, than his other treatise: the one, commodious, the other necessary, both beneficial.

Your to do you good, Abraham Flemming.