think that the Father of love will ever abandon his own offspring while it cries out to him, and with pitiful and bemoaning looks implores his aid and compassion? Surely this cannot choose but move his fatherly bowels, and make them yearn and turn towards it, and by a strong sympathy draw his compassionate arm to aid and relieve it. Let us therefore but faithfully use our own endeavours, and fervently implore God's grace, and then to be sure he will never suffer that divine fire, which he hath kindled within us, to be overborne by our corruptions, but will kindly cherish it with his own influence, and touch it with an outstretched ray from himself, till it hath burned through all that rubbish that oppresses it, and till it rises into a victorious flame.

CHAP. III.

Of some motives to mortification, taken from the mischiefs of sin.

HAVING shewn you at large what are the proper instruments of mortification, I shall in the next place proceed to press you with some prevailing motives and arguments faithfully to employ and use them. And here I shall not insist upon those arguments which arise from the consideration of the future state, because these will fall in hereafter, when I come to discourse upon it: all the arguments that I shall here urge therefore, to press you to mortify your sins, shall be drawn from the consideration of those present miseries and inconveniencies which they bring you into. And these I shall rank under two general heads:

First, Such as are outward and bodily.

Secondly, Such as are inward and spiritual. I. The outward and bodily inconveniencies which our sins bring upon us are chiefly these four:

First, They destroy our health, and shorten our lives.

Secondly, They stain our reputation.

Thirdly, They waste our estates.

Fourthly, They disturb even our sensual pleasures and delights.

1. Consider how your sins destroy your health and shorten your lives. And to convince you of this, I need do no more than only to lead you into the slaughterhouses of death, and to shew you how thick they are hung round about with the numerous trophies of lust and intemperance: behold, there lieth an adulterer choked with the stench of his own rottenness; there a drunkard fettered with gouts, and drowned in catarrhs and dropsies; there a glutton stifled with the loads of his own undigested meals; lo, there lie the dismembered martyrs of revenge and insolence, that have lost their limbs upon the field in a foolish quarrel for vanity and mistresses; and there the envoys of rapine and murder, whose infamous carcasses have furnished the scaffolds and the gallows. These and such like woful examples almost every day's experience presents to our view, which one would think were sufficient to warn men of those vices which they so commonly find attended with such tragical effects and indeed there is no vice whatsoever, but does one way or other undermine our health, and impair the strengths of nature. For all viciousness consists in an excess either of our passions or our appetites; and it is plain and obvious

how destructive to our health the wild excesses of our appetites are: how naturally wantonness doth melt our strength, consume our spirits, and rot our bones; how gluttony obstructs our breath, oppresses our stomachs, and drowns our bodies in unwholesome crudities; how drunkenness inflames our livers, corrupts our blood, dilutes our brains, and converts us into walking hospitals of diseases. And as for the excesses of our passions, it is no less apparent how much they disturb and discompose our natures: thus anger, we see, fires the spirits and inflames the blood, and makes the humours sharp and corroding: thus immoderate sorrow oppresses the heart, dries the bones, shrivels the skin, and overcasts the spirits with clouds of melancholy thus envy swells the hypochondres, which, by drinking up the nourishment of the neighbouring parts, makes the whole body lean and meagre and in a word, thus excessive fear stagnates the flowing spirits, and turns the blood into a trembling jelly. And such disorders as these, when they are frequent, must needs gradually undermine the forts of life, and hasten them into an untimely ruin. Now is it not very strange, that those men who are commonly so over-tender of their lives, should be fond of diseases, and court their own executioners? that they should choose to swallow sicknesses, and to drink dead palsies and foaming epilepsies, and to pass through so severe a discipline of torments, only to get an habit of destroying themselves? It is true indeed, some there are that have been so naturalized to their vices, that they cannot live nor be well without them; that are sick while they are temperate, and are not able to sleep, but in a sea of liquor, and are fain to put themselves into

excesses of passion to ferment their blood, and rouse their drowsy spirits: but then it is to be considered that generally they bring themselves to this sad pass by their own evil habits and customs, which they acquire by doing great violence to themselves, and committing forcible outrages on their own natures. There is no unreasonable passion or appetite can be necessary to our health or ease, till we are first habituated to them; and before we can be habituated, we must undergo a tedious course of pain and uneasiness: many a fit of tormenting rage must be endured, many an uneasy draught and sickly qualm and fainting sweat must be undergone, before wrath and intemperance can be made easy and pleasant to us; and much more before they become necessary remedies and it is rare, if ever, we have need of these excesses, till by a long course of violence upon ourselves we have first overturned our natural temper and constitution. And what man in his wits would ever swallow poison, merely to force his nature into a reconciliation with it; when he is sure beforehand, that if he doth not die in the experiment, (as it is a great chance but he doth,) yet that he must undergo many a sickness and bitter agony, before his nature is so accustomed to it as to be preserved and nourished by it? But, alas! by that time we are arrived to that pitch of intemperance, as to be drunk without the penance of a surfeit or a fever, the heat and vigour of our nature is usually so quenched with crude humours, our spirits so drowned in rheums and dropsies, and our brains so drenched in clouds of unwholesome moisture, that all our life after we are but so many walking statues of earth and phlegm ; and having washed away all the principles of reason

and discretion in us, we grow old in folly and sottishness, and at the last die changelings. Thus sin, you see, is a disease to the body; it wastes our strength, and either makes the candle of our life to burn dim, or blazes it out into an untimely period. Why then should we not be as earnest in the cure of this, as we are of our other diseases? For doubtless, would we but as carefully apply the means and instruments of mortification, as we do, when we are sick of a fever or an ague, the proper remedies against them, we should quickly cure those excesses of our passions and appetites, which do so disease our bodies and disturb our natures.

2. Consider how your sins do stain and blemish your reputation. For there is nothing in the whole world more natural to men, than to admire virtue and disesteem vice, wheresoever they find it: this we seem to do by a natural instinct, antecedently to all our reasoning and discourse; and it is no more in our power not to do it, than it is to choose whether our pulse shall beat or our blood circulate. For that virtue is an ornament, and vice a deformity to human nature, is a proposition so self-evident, that at the first proposal it commands the assent of all rational beings; nor is it in any man's power so far to offer violence to his own faculties, as to believe vice praiseworthy, or commendable, any more than it is to believe that to be white and straight, which he sees to be black and crooked: and accordingly you will find, that by all mankind it hath ever been branded with an infamous character, and looked on as a disparagement to the noblest accomplishments. For in all the monuments of former ages, never were any man's lusts and intemperances recorded