THE PRAYER.

O holy and most glorious God, who before the publication of thy eternal Son, the Prince of Peace, didst send thy servant, John the Baptist, by the examples of mortification, and the rude austerities of a penitential life, and by the sermons of penance, to remove all the impediments of sin, that the ways of his Lord and ours might be made clear, ready, and expedite; be pleased to let thy Holy Spirit lead me in the straight paths of sanctity, without deflections to either hand, and without the interruption of deadly sin, that I may with facility, zeal, assiduity, and a persevering diligence, walk in the ways of the Lord. Be pleased that the axe may be laid to the root of sin, that the whole body of it may be cut down in me, that no fruit of Sodom may grow up to thy displeasure. Thoroughly purge the floor and granary of my heart with thy fan, with the breath of thy diviner Spirit, that it may be a holy repository of graces, and full of benediction and sanctity; that when our Lord shall come, I may at all times be prepared for the entertainment of so divine a guest, apt to lodge him and to feast him, that he may for ever delight to dwell with me. And make me also to dwell with him, sometimes retiring into his recesses and private rooms by contemplation, and admiring of his beauties, and beholding the secrets of his kingdom: and at all other times walking in the courts of the Lord's house by the diligences and labours of repentance and an holy life, till thou shalt please to call me to a nearer communication of thy excellencies: which then grant, when by thy gracious assistances I shall have done thy works, and glorified thy holy name, by the strict and never-failing purposes and proportionable endeavours of religion and holiness, through the merits and mercies of Jesus Christ. Amen.

DISCOURSE IV.

Of Mortification and corporeal Austerities.

1. FROM the days of John the Baptist, the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the vio

lent take it by force,' said our Saviour. For now that the new covenant was to be made with man, repentance, which is so great a part of it, being in very many actions a punitive duty, afflictive and vindicative from the days of the Baptist, (who first by office and solemnity of design published this doctrine,) violence was done to the inclinations and dispositions of man, and by such violences we were to be possessed of the kingdom. And his example was the best commentary upon his text; he did violence to himself: he lived a life in which the rudenesses of camels' hair, and the lowest nutriment of flies and honey of the desert, his life of singularity, his retirement from the sweetnesses of society, his resisting the greatest of temptations, and despising to assume false honours, were instances of that violence, and explications of the doctrine of self-denial and mortification, which are the pedestal of the cross, and the supporters of Christianity, as it distinguishes from all laws, religions, and institutions of the world.

2. Mortification is the one half of Christianity: it is a dying to the world, it is a denying of the will and all its natural desires; and abstinence from pleasure and sensual complacencies, that the flesh being subdued to the spirit, both may join in the service of God, and in the offices of holy religion.' It consists in actions of severity and renunciation; it refuses to give entertainment to any vanity, nor uses a freer licence in things lawful, lest it be tempted to things unlawful; it kills the lust of the flesh by taking away its fuel and incentives, and

· Τὴν ἐπὶ καθαιρέσει τοῦ φρονήματος σαρκὸς πρὸς τὸν τῆς ἐυσεβείας σκοπὸν ἐπιτηδευομένην ἀποχὴν τῶν ἡδέων. S. Basil.

by using to contradict its appetite, does inure it with more facility to obey the superior faculties: and, in effect, it is nothing but a great care we sin not, and a prudent and severe using such remedies and instruments which in nature and grace are made apt for the production of our purposes, and it consists in interior and exterior offices: these being but instruments of the interior, as the body is organical or instrumental to the soul; and no part of the duty itself, but as they are advantages to the end, the mortification of the spirit; which, by whatsoever means we have once acquired and do continue, we are disobliged from all other exterior severities, unless by accident they come to be obligatory, and from some other cause.

3. Mortification of the will or the spirit of man, that is the duty; that the will of man may humbly obey God, and absolutely rule its inferior faculties; that the inordinations of our natural desires, begun by Adam's sin, and continued and increased by our continuing evil customs, may be again placed in the right order; that since many of the divine precepts are restraints upon our natural desires, we should so deny those appetites that covet after natural satisfactions, that they may not serve themselves by disserving God. For therefore our own wills are our greatest dangers and our greatest enemies, because they tend to courses contradictory to God. God commands us to be humble; our own desires are to be great, considerable, and high; and we are never secure enough from contempt, unless we can place our neighbours at our feet here therefore we must deny our will, and appetites of greatness for the purchase of humility. God commands temperance and chastity; our de

sires and natural promptness break the bands asunder, and entertain dissolutions to the licentiousness of Apicius, or the wantonness of a Mahometan paradise, sacrificing meat and drink-offerings to our appetites, as if our stomachs were the temples of Bel, and making women and the optunities of lust to be our dwelling and our employment, even beyond the common loosenesses of entertainment. Here therefore we must deny our own wills, our appetites of gluttony and drunkenness, and our prurient beastly inclinations, for the purchase of temperance and chastity. And every other virtue is either directly or by accident a certain instance of this great duty, which is, like a catholicon, purgative of all distemperatures, and is the best preparative and disposition to prayer in the world.

4. For it is a sad consideration, and of secret reason, that since prayer of all duties is certainly the sweetest and easiest, it having in it no difficulty or vexatious labour, no weariness of bones, no dimness of eyes or hollow cheeks is directly consequent to it, no natural desires of contradictory quality, nothing of disease, but much of comfort and more of hope in it; yet we are infinitely averse from it, weary of its length, glad of an occasion to pretermit our offices: and yet there is no visible cause of such indisposition, nothing in the nature of the thing, nor in the circumstances necessarily appendant to the duty. Something is amiss in us, and it wanted a name, till the Spirit of God, by enjoining us the duty of mortification, hath taught us to know that immortification of spirit is the cause of all our secret and spiritual indispositions: we are so incorporated to the desires of

sensual objects, that we feel no relish or gust of the spiritual. It is as if a lion should eat hay, or an ox venison; there is no proportion between the object and the appetite, till by mortification of our first desires our wills are made spiritual, and our apprehensions supernatural and clarified. For as a cook told Dionysius the tyrant, the black broth of Lacedæmon will not do well at Syracusa, unless it be tasted by a Spartan's palate; so neither can the excellencies of heaven be discerned but by a spirit disrelishing the sottish appetites of the world, and accustomed to diviner banquets. And this was mystically signified by the two altars in Solomon's temple, in the outer court whereof beasts were sacrificed, in the inner court an altar of incense the first representing mortification or slaying of our beastly appetites; the second the offering up our prayers, which are not likely to become a pleasant offertory, unless our impurities be removed by the atonement made by the first sacrifices without our spirit be mortified, we neither can love to pray, nor can God love to hear us.

5. But there are three steps to ascend to this altar. The first is, to abstain from satisfying our carnal desires in the instances of sin; and although the furnace flames with vehement emissions at some times, yet to walk in the midst of the burning without being consumed, like the children of the captivity, that is the duty even of the most imperfect, and is commonly the condition of those good persons whose interest in secular employments speaks fair, and solicits often, and tempts highly; yet they manage their affairs with habitual justice, and a constant charity, and are tempe