Direct. XXVI. Understand in what time and order it is that Christ giveth his grace and saveth his people from their sins; that he doth it not all at once, but by degrees, and taketh all the time of this present life to do it in. As able as your Physician is, he will not finish the cure till your life be finished. The next life is the state of absolute perfection; all things are imperfect here: despair not therefore of all that you have not yet attained; your sin may be more mortified yet, and your grace yet more strengthened. If it be done before you come to judgment it is well for you: do your part in daily diligence: do you plant and water, and he will give the increase. Read more of this before, part ii. against Melancholy.
[CHAPTER VIII.]
DIRECTIONS FOR THE GOVERNMENT OF THE SENSES.
PART I.
General Directions for the Government of the Senses (by a Life of Faith).
The most wise and gracious God, having been pleased to constitute us of soul and body, that our nobler part, in its preparation and passage to a nobler state, might have a companion and instrument suited to the lower place and employment, through which it is to pass, hath appointed our senses not only for the exercise and helps of life, and the management of our inferior actions, and the communication of his inferior mercies, but also to be the common passage to the fantasy, and so to the mind, and to be serviceable to our rational powers, and help in our service of our Maker, and communion with him in his higher gifts. To these ends all our senses should be used; as being capable of being sanctified and serviceable to God. But sin made its entrance by them, and by sin they are now corrupted and vitiated with the body, and are grown inordinate, violent, and unruly in their appetite; and the rational powers having lost and forsaken God, their proper end and chiefest object, have hired or captivated themselves to the sensitive appetite, to serve its ends. And so the sensitive appetite is become the ruling faculty in the unsanctified, and the senses the common entrance of sin, and instruments of Satan: and though the work of grace be primarily in the rational powers, yet secondarily the lower powers themselves also are sanctified, and brought under the government of a renewed mind and will, and so restored to their proper use. And though I cannot say that grace immediately maketh any alteration on the senses, yet mediately it doth, by altering the mind, and so the will, and then the imagination, and so the sensitive appetite, and so in exercise the sense itself. We see that temperance and chastity do not only restrain, but take down the appetite from the rage and violence which before it had: not the natural appetite, but the sensitive, so far as it is sinful.
The sanctifying and government of the senses and their appetite, lieth in two parts: first, In guarding them against the entrance of sin: and secondly, In using them to be the entrance of good into the soul. But this latter is so high a work that too few are skilled in it; and few can well perform the other.
Direct. I. The principal part of the work is about the superior faculties, to get a well-informed judgment, and a holy and confirmed will; and not about the sense itself. Reason is dethroned by sin; and the will is left unguided and unguarded to the rapes of sensual violence. Reason must be restored, before sense will be well governed; for what else must be their immediate governor? It is no sin in brutes to live by sense, because they have not reason to rule it: and in man it is ruled more or less, as reason is more or less restored. When reason is only cleared about things temporal, (as in men of worldly wisdom,) there sense will be mastered and ruled as to such temporal ends, as far as they require it. But where reason is sanctified, there sense is ruled to the ends of sanctification, according to the measure of grace.
Direct. II. It is only the high, eternal things of God and our salvation, objectively settled in the mind and will, and become as it were connatural to them, and made our ruling end and interest that can suffice to a true and holy government of the senses. Lower things may muzzle them, and make men seem temperate and sober as far as their honour, and wealth, and health, and life require it: but this is but stopping a gap, while most of the hedge lieth open, and engaging the sense to serve the flesh, the world, and the devil, in a handsome, calm, and less dishonoured way, and not so filthily and furiously as others.