[♦] duplicate word ‘of’ removed
Persons that receive instructions of piety with pleasure, often wonder that they make no farther progress in that religion which they so much admire.
Now the reason is this: religion lives only in their head, but something else has possession of their hearts; and therefore, they continue from year to year mere admirers and praisers of piety, without ever coming up to its precepts.
2. If it be asked, why religion does not get possession of their hearts? It is not because they live in gross sins or debaucheries; but because their hearts are constantly employed, perverted, and kept in a wrong state, by the indiscreet use of such things as are lawful.
The use and enjoyment of their estates is lawful, and therefore it never comes into their heads to imagine any danger from that quarter. They never reflect that there is a vain and imprudent use of their estates: which, though it does nor destroy like gross sins, yet so disorders the heart, and supports it in such sensuality and dullness, as makes it incapable of receiving the life and spirit of piety.
For our souls may be rendered incapable of all virtue, merely by the use of innocent and lawful things.
3. What is more innocent than rest? And yet what more dangerous than sloth and idleness? What is more lawful than eating and drinking? And yet what more destructive of all virtue, and fruitful of all vice, than sensuality.
Now, it is for want of exactness in the use of these innocent and lawful things, that religion cannot get possession of our hearts: and it is in the right management of ourselves, as to these things, that the art of holy living chiefly consists.
4. Gross sins are plainly seen, and easily avoided by persons that profess religion: but the indiscreet use of innocent and lawful things, as it does not shock our consciences, so it is difficult to make people at all sensible of the danger of it.
A gentleman that expends all his estate in sports, and a woman that lays out all her fortune upon herself, can hardly be persuaded that the spirit of religion cannot subsist in such a way of life.