Chapter 12. Thoughtfulness of the Excellency of the Majesty of God

The eighth direction: thoughtfulness of the excellency of the majesty of God; our unacquaintedness with him, proposed and considered.

Eighthly, use and exercise yourself to such meditations as may serve to fill you at all times with self-abasement and thoughts of your own vileness.

1. Be much in thoughtfulness of the excellency of the majesty of God, and your infinite inconceivable distance from him; many thoughts of it cannot but fill you with a sense of your own vileness, which strikes deep at the root of any indwelling sin. When Job comes to a clear discovery of the greatness and excellency of God, he is filled with self-abhorrence, and is pressed to humiliation (Job 42:5-6). And in what state does the prophet Habakkuk affirm himself to be cast, upon the apprehension of the majesty of God? (Habakkuk 3:16). With God (says Job) is terrible majesty (Job 37:22). Hence were the thoughts of them of old, that when they had seen God they should die. The Scripture abounds in this self-abasing consideration, comparing the men of the earth to grasshoppers, to vanity, the dust of the balance in respect of God (Isaiah 40:13-15). Be much in thoughts of this nature, to abase the pride of your heart, and to keep your soul humble within you. There is nothing will render you in a greater indisposition to be imposed on by the deceits of sin, than such a frame of heart. Think greatly of the greatness of God.

2. Think much of your unacquaintedness with him; though you know enough to keep you low and humble, yet how little a portion is it that you know of him! The contemplation hereof cast that wise man into that apprehension of himself, which he expresses (Proverbs 30:2-4): Surely I am more brutish than any man, and have not the understanding of a man. I neither learned wisdom, nor have the knowledge of the Holy. Who has ascended up into heaven, or descended? Who has gathered the wind in his fists? Who has bound the waters in a garment? Who has established the ends of the earth? What is his name, and what is his son's name if you can tell? Labor with this also to take down the pride of your heart. What do you know of God? How little a portion is it? How immense is he in his nature? Can you look without terror into the abyss of eternity? You cannot bear the rays of his glorious being.

Because this consideration is of great use in our walking with God, so far as it may have a consistency with that filial boldness which is given us in Jesus Christ to draw near to the throne of grace, further insistence upon it will give an abiding impression of it to the souls of them who desire to walk humbly with God.

Consider then, to keep your heart in continual awe of the majesty of God, that persons of the most high and eminent attainments, of the nearest and most familiar communion with God, do yet in this life know but a very little of him, and his glory. God reveals his name to Moses, the most glorious attributes that he has manifested in the covenant of grace (Exodus 34:5-6); yet all are but the back-parts of God. All that he knows by it, is but little, low, compared to the perfection of his glory.

Hence it is with peculiar reference to Moses, that it is said, No man has seen God at any time (John 1:18). Of him in comparison with Christ does he speak (verse 17); and of him it is here said, No man (no not Moses, the most eminent among them) has seen God at any time. We speak much of God, can talk of him, his ways, his works, his counsels all the day long; the truth is, we know very little of him; our thoughts, our meditations, our expressions of him are low, many of them unworthy of his glory, none of them reaching his perfections.

You will say, that Moses was under the law, when God wrapped up himself in darkness, and his mind in types and clouds and dark institutions. Under the glorious shining of the Gospel, which has brought life and immortality to light, God being revealed from his own bosom, we now know him much more clearly, and as he is: we see his face now, and not his back-parts only as Moses did.

I acknowledge a vast, and almost inconceivable difference between the acquaintance we now have with God, after his speaking to us by his own Son, and that which the generality of the saints had under the law: for although their eyes were as good, sharp and clear as ours, their faith and spiritual understanding not behind ours, the object as glorious unto them as unto us, yet our day is more clear than theirs was; the clouds are blown away and scattered, the shadows of the night are gone and fled away, the sun is risen, and the means of sight is made more eminent and clear than formerly. Yet:

2. That peculiar sight which Moses had of God (Exodus 34) was a Gospel-sight, a sight of God as gracious; and yet it is called but his back-parts, that is, but low and mean, in comparison of his excellencies and perfections.

3. The Apostle exalting to the utmost this glory of Gospel light above that of the law, manifesting that now the veil causing darkness is taken away; so that with open or uncovered face we behold the glory of the Lord; tells us how: As in a glass (2 Corinthians 3:18). In a glass — how is that? Clearly, perfectly? Alas no: he tells you how that is (1 Corinthians 13:12): We see through a glass darkly. It is a looking-glass whereunto he alludes (where are only obscure species and images of things, and not the things themselves) and a sight therein, that he compares our knowledge to. He tells you also that all that we do see through this glass is in a riddle, in darkness and obscurity; and speaking of himself (who surely was much more clear-sighted than any now living) he tells us that he saw but in part; he saw but the back-parts of heavenly things (verse 12); and compares all the knowledge he had attained of God, to that he had of things when he was a child (verse 11). We know what weak, feeble, uncertain notions and apprehensions children have of things of any abstruse consideration; how when they grow up with any improvements of parts and abilities, those conceptions vanish, and they are ashamed of them. It is the commendation of a child, to love, honor, believe and obey his father; but for his science and notions, his father knows their childishness and folly. Notwithstanding all our confidence of high attainments, all our notions of God are but childish in respect of his infinite perfections. We lisp and babble — saying we know not what, for the most part — in our most accurate (as we think) conceptions and notions of God. We may love, honor, believe and obey our Father, and therewith he accepts our childish thoughts, for they are but childish. We see but his back-parts, we know but little of him. Hence is that promise, wherewith we are so often supported and comforted in our distress; we shall see him as he is; we shall see him face to face; know as we are known; comprehend that for which we are comprehended (1 Corinthians 15:12; 1 John 3:2); and positively, Now we see him not — all concluding that here we see but his back-parts, not as he is, but in a dark obscure representation, not in the perfection of his glory.

The queen of Sheba had heard much of Solomon, and framed many great thoughts of his magnificence in her mind thereupon; but when she came and saw his glory, she was forced to confess, that the one half of the truth had not been told her. We may suppose that we have here attained great knowledge, clear and high thoughts of God; but alas! when he shall bring us into his presence, we shall cry out, we never knew him as he is: the thousandth part of his glory and perfection and blessedness, never entered into our hearts.

The Apostle tells us (1 John 3:2) that we know not what we ourselves shall be; what we shall find ourselves in the end; much less will it enter into our hearts to conceive, what God is, and what we shall find him to be.

First, we know so little of God, because it is God who is thus to be known; that is, he who has described himself to us very much by this, that we cannot know him: what else does he intend where he calls himself invisible, incomprehensible, and the like? That is, he whom we do not, cannot know as he is; and our further progress consists more in knowing what he is not, than what he is. Thus is he described to be immortal, infinite; that is, he is not as we are, mortal, finite, and limited. Hence is that glorious description of him (1 Timothy 6:16): Who only has immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto, whom no man has seen nor can see. His light is such as no creature can approach unto: he is not seen, not because he cannot be seen, but because we cannot bear the sight of him. The light of God (in whom is no darkness) forbids all access to him by any creature whatever: we who cannot behold the sun in its glory, are too weak to bear the beams of infinite brightness.

On this consideration (as was said) the wise man professes himself a very beast, and not to have the understanding of a man (Proverbs 30:2) — that is, he knew nothing in comparison of God, so that he seemed to have lost all his understanding, when once he came to the consideration of him, his work and his ways. In this consideration let our souls descend to some particulars.

1. For the being of God; we are so far from a knowledge of it, so as to be able to instruct one another therein, by words and expressions of it, as that to frame any conceptions in our mind, with such species and impressions of things as we receive the knowledge of all other things by, is to make an idol to ourselves, and so to worship a God of our own making, and not the God that made us. We may as well and as lawfully hew him out of wood, or stone, as form him a being in our minds suited to our apprehensions.

The utmost of the best of our thoughts of the being of God is, that we can have no thoughts of it. Our knowledge of a being is but low, when it mounts no higher but only to know that we know it not.

2. There are some things of God, which he himself has taught us to speak of, and to regulate our expressions of them; but when we have so done, we see not the things themselves, we know them not: to believe and admire is all that we attain to. We profess (as we are taught) that God is infinite, omnipotent, eternal; and we know what disputes and notions there are about omnipresence, immensity, infiniteness and eternity. We have words and notions about these things, but as to the things themselves, what do we know? What do we comprehend of them? Can the mind of man do any more but swallow itself up in an infinite abyss, which is as nothing; give itself up to what it cannot conceive, much less express? Is not our understanding brutish in the contemplation of such things? and is as if it were not; yea the perfection of our understanding, is, not to understand, and to rest there: they are but the back-parts of eternity and infiniteness that we have a glimpse of. What shall I say of the Trinity, or the subsistence of distinct persons in the same individual essence; a mystery by many denied, because by none understood; a mystery whose every letter is mysterious.

Who can declare the generation of the Son, the procession of the Spirit, or the difference of the one from the other? That infinite and inconceivable distance that is between him and us, keeps us in the dark as to any sight of his face, or clear apprehension of his perfections.

We know him rather by what he does, than by what he is: by his doing us good, than by his essential goodness; and how little a portion of him (as Job speaks) is hereby discovered?

Secondly, we know little of God, because it is faith alone whereby here we know him. I shall not now discourse about the remaining impressions on the hearts of all men by nature that there is a God, nor what they may rationally be taught concerning that God, from the works of his creation and providence, which they see and behold. It is confessedly (and that upon the woeful experience of all ages) so weak, low, dark, confused, that none ever on that account glorified God as they ought, but notwithstanding all their knowledge of God, were indeed without God in the world.

The chief and (upon the matter) almost only acquaintance we have with God, and his dispensations of himself, is by faith. He that comes to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that seek him (Hebrews 11:6). Our knowledge of him, and his rewarding (the bottom of our obedience or coming to him) is believing. We walk by faith, and not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7). Faith is all the argument we have of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1). As to its rise, it is built purely upon the testimony of him whom we have not seen; as the Apostle speaks, How can you love him whom you have not seen? — that is, whom you know not but by faith that he is: faith receives all upon his testimony, whom it receives to be, only upon his own testimony. As to its nature it is an assent upon testimony, not an evidence upon demonstration; and the object of it is (as was said before) above us. Hence our faith (as was formerly observed) is called a seeing darkly as in a glass: all that we know this way (and all that we know of God we know this way) is but low, and dark, and obscure.

But you will say, all this is true, but yet it is only so to them that know not God (perhaps) as he is revealed in Jesus Christ; with them who do so, it is otherwise. It is true, No man has seen God at any time, but the only begotten Son, he has revealed him (John 1:17-18); and, the Son of God is now come, and has given us an understanding that we may know him that is true (1 John 5:20).

The illumination of the glorious Gospel of Christ who is the image of God shines upon believers (2 Corinthians 4:4); yea and God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, shines into their hearts, to give them the knowledge of his glory in the face of his Son (verse 6). So that though we were darkness, yet we are now light in the Lord (Ephesians 5:8). And the Apostle says, We all with open face behold the glory of the Lord (2 Corinthians 3:18); and we are now so far from being in such darkness, or at such a distance from God, that our communion and fellowship is with the Father and the Son (1 John 1:3). The light of the Gospel whereby now God is revealed, is glorious; not a star, but the sun in his beauty is risen upon us; and the veil is taken from our faces; so that though unbelievers, yea and perhaps some weak believers may be in some darkness, yet those of any growth, or considerable attainments have a clear sight and view of the face of God in Jesus Christ.

1. The truth is, we all of us know enough of him to love him more than we do, to delight in him, and serve him, believe him, obey him, put our trust in him above all that we have hitherto attained.

Our darkness and weakness is no plea for our negligence and disobedience. Who is it that has walked up to the knowledge that he has had of the perfections, excellencies, and will of God? God's end in giving us any knowledge of himself here, is that we may glorify him as God; that is, love him, serve him, believe and obey him, give him all the honor and glory that is due from poor sinful creatures, to a sin-pardoning God, and Creator; we must all acknowledge, that we were never thoroughly transformed into the image of that knowledge which we have had. And had we used our talents well, we might have been trusted with more.

2. Comparatively, that knowledge which we have of God by the revelation of Jesus Christ in the Gospel, is exceeding eminent and glorious. It is so in comparison of any knowledge of God that might otherwise be attained, or was delivered in the law under the Old Testament, which had but the shadow of good things, not the express image of them. This the Apostle pursues at large (2 Corinthians 3). Christ has now in these last days revealed the Father from his own bosom, declared his name, made known his mind, will and counsel in a far more clear, eminent, distinct manner than he did formerly, while he kept his people under the pedagogy of the law. And this is that which for the most part is intended in the places before mentioned; the clear, perspicuous delivery and declaration of God, and his will in the Gospel is expressly exalted in comparison of any other way of revelation of himself.

3. The difference between believers and unbelievers as to knowledge, is not so much in the matter of their knowledge, as in the manner of knowing. Unbelievers some of them may know more, and be able to say more of God, his perfections and his will, than many believers, but they know nothing as they ought: nothing in a right manner, nothing spiritually and savingly; nothing with a holy, heavenly light. The excellency of a believer is not, that he has a large apprehension of things, but that what he does apprehend (which perhaps may be very little) he sees it in the light of the Spirit of God, in a saving soul-transforming light: and this is that which gives us communion with God, and not prying thoughts, or curious raised notions.

4. Jesus Christ by his word and Spirit, reveals to the hearts of all his, God as a Father, as a God in covenant, as a rewarder, every way sufficiently to teach us to obey him here, and to lead us to his bosom, to lie down there in the fruition of him to eternity. But yet now:

5. Notwithstanding all this, it is but a little portion we know of him, we see but his back-parts. For:

(1) The intendment of all Gospel revelation is not to unveil God's essential glory, that we should see him as he is, but merely to declare so much of him as he knows sufficient to be a bottom of our faith, love, obedience, and coming to him. That is, of the faith which here he expects from us: such services as befit poor creatures in the midst of temptations; but when he calls us to eternal admiration and contemplation, without interruption, he will make a new manner of discovery of himself, and the whole shape of things, as it now lies before us, will depart as a shadow.

(2) We are dull and slow of heart to receive the things that are in the word revealed. God by our infirmity and weakness, keeping us in continual dependence on him, for teachings and revelations of himself out of his word, never in this world bringing any soul to the utmost of what is from the word to be made out and discovered; so that although the way of revelation in the Gospel be clear and evident, yet we know little of the things themselves that are revealed.

Let us then revive the use and intendment of this consideration; will not a due apprehension of this inconceivable greatness of God, and that infinite distance wherein we stand from him, fill the soul with a holy and awful fear of him; so as to keep it in a frame unsuited to the thriving or flourishing of any lust whatever? Let the soul be continually accustomed to reverential thoughts of God's greatness and omnipresence, and it will be much upon its watch, as to any undue deportments. Consider him with whom you have to do; even our God is a consuming fire; and in your greatest abashments at his presence and eye, know, that your very nature is too narrow to bear apprehensions suitable to his essential glory.

The third direction: load the conscience with the guilt of the troubling disorder. The ways and means of doing this. The fourth direction: a deep longing for deliverance. The fifth direction: some disorders are deeply rooted in men's natural temperament — considerations for dealing with such disorders and the ways of addressing them. The sixth direction: occasions and advantages for sin must be avoided. The seventh direction: the first stirrings of sin must be vigorously resisted.

This is the third direction:

Load your conscience with the guilt of it. Do not merely acknowledge that it has guilt — press the guilt of its actual outbreaks and disturbances upon your conscience.

For the right application of this rule, some specific steps are needed.

First, follow God's method: begin with general considerations and work down to specific ones.

(1) Charge your conscience with the guilt that appears in your sin when measured against the righteousness and holiness of the law. Bring the holy law of God before your conscience. Hold your corruption up against it and pray that you would be affected by it. Reflect on the holiness, spirituality, burning severity, inwardness, and absolute demands of the law, and consider how you would stand before it. Dwell much on affecting your conscience with the terror of the Lord as expressed in the law, and on how just it would be for every one of your transgressions to receive its due punishment. Your conscience may try to deflect the force of this consideration with objections — such as: the condemning power of the law does not apply to you, you have been freed from it, and so on. Therefore, even if you are not conforming to it, you need not be so troubled. But:

1. Tell your conscience that it cannot produce any convincing evidence that you are freed from the condemning power of sin while your unmortified lust remains in your heart. So perhaps the law may yet have a valid claim against you — and if it does, you are a lost person. It is therefore best to weigh everything it has to say to the fullest.

Surely the person who pleads in the most secret corner of his heart that he is freed from the condemning power of the law — and uses that claim to quietly excuse granting even the slightest allowance to any sin or lust — is not in a position on Gospel grounds to produce any convincing spiritual evidence that he is genuinely freed from what he claims to be delivered from.

2. Whatever the outcome, the law has a commission from God to seize transgressors wherever it finds them and bring them before His throne to plead their case. This is your present situation: the law has found you out and will bring you before God. If you can plead a pardon, well and good. If not, the law will do its work.

3. In any case, this is the law's proper work: to expose sin in its guilt, to awaken and humble the soul for it, to serve as a mirror that shows sin in its true colors. If you refuse to deal with it on this account, the refusal does not come from faith but from the hardness of your heart and the deceitfulness of sin.

This is a door through which many professing Christians have walked out into open apostasy. They have claimed such a deliverance from the law that they will no longer let it guide or direct them, no longer measure their sin by it. Little by little this idea has moved imperceptibly from mere theory to shape their practical thinking — and having taken hold there, has set the will and affections loose to every kind of corruption.

By such means as these, then, persuade your conscience to listen carefully to what the law speaks in the Lord's name to you about your lust and corruption. If your ears are open, it will speak with a voice that makes you tremble — casting you to the ground and filling you with astonishment. If you ever want to mortify your corruptions, you must bind your conscience to the law, shut it off from all evasions and excuses, until it owns its guilt fully and clearly — so that as David says, your iniquity may ever be before you.

(2) Bring your lust to the Gospel — not for relief but for further conviction of its guilt. Look on Him whom you have pierced, and mourn deeply. Ask your soul: what have I done? What love, what mercy, what blood, what grace have I despised and trampled on? Is this the return I make to the Father for His love, to the Son for His blood, to the Holy Spirit for His grace? Is this how I repay the Lord? Have I defiled the heart that Christ died to wash, that the blessed Spirit has chosen to dwell in? And can I keep myself out of the dust? What can I say to the dear Lord Jesus? How can I hold up my head with any boldness before Him? Have I valued communion with Him so little that for the sake of this vile lust I have left Him almost no room in my heart? How shall I escape if I neglect so great a salvation? In the meantime, what shall I say to the Lord? Love, mercy, grace, goodness, peace, joy, consolation — I have despised them all and counted them as nothing, so that I might harbor a lust in my heart.

Did I obtain a view of God's fatherly face so that I might look upon it and provoke Him to His face? Was my soul washed so that room might be made for new defilements? Shall I labor to frustrate the purpose of the death of Christ? Shall I daily grieve the Spirit by whom I am sealed to the day of redemption? Keep your conscience engaged in this examination daily. If it can stand before this weight of aggravated guilt without sinking and being broken, I fear your condition is dangerous.

Second, come down to specific and personal considerations. Just as under the general law and Gospel all their benefits — redemption, justification, and the rest — are to be considered, so in particular, consider how God's love in those benefits has been personally expressed toward your own soul, and use this to make the guilt of your corruption feel even heavier.

1. Consider God's infinite patience and forbearance toward you personally. Consider how many opportunities He could have taken to expose you to shame and disgrace in this world and make you an object of His wrath forever. Consider how you have dealt treacherously and falsely with Him time after time — flattering Him with your lips while breaking every promise and commitment — and all through this very sin you are now pursuing. Yet He has spared you time after time, even when you seemed to be boldly testing just how long His patience would last. And will you still sin against Him? Will you still wear Him out and make Him serve under your corruptions?

Have you not often been ready to conclude that it was utterly impossible He could bear with you any longer — that He would cast you off and be gracious no more, that all His forbearance was exhausted and that hell and wrath stood ready for you? And yet far beyond all your expectation He returned with fresh visits of love. And will you still continue provoking the eyes of His glory?

2. How many times have you been on the edge of being hardened by the deceitfulness of sin, and been brought back to communion with Him by God's infinitely rich grace?

Have you not found grace decaying — delight in duties, ordinances, prayer, and meditation vanishing — while inclinations toward careless, loose living grew stronger? Have you not found yourself almost beyond recovery, like those who were once similarly entangled? Have you not found yourself drawn into ways, communities, and friendships — with actual delight — that God abhors? And will you venture to the edge of hardness again?

3. All of God's gracious dealings with you in His providence — His deliverances, afflictions, mercies, and blessings — all must be brought to bear here. Through these and similar means, load your conscience and do not let it go until it is thoroughly affected by the guilt of your indwelling corruption — until it feels its wound and lies prostrate before the Lord. Unless this is accomplished fully, all other efforts will be useless. As long as the conscience has any means to soften the guilt of sin, the soul will never vigorously attempt its mortification.

Fourth, having been deeply affected by your sin in this way, your next step is to develop a steady longing and reaching after deliverance from its power. Do not let your heart be content for a single moment with your present condition. In natural and everyday things, longing desires are significant only insofar as they move the person to diligently use whatever means will bring about what is longed for. In spiritual things it is different. Longing, reaching, and thirsting after deliverance is itself a grace — and it has tremendous power to shape the soul into the likeness of the thing it longs for. When the apostle describes the repentance and godly sorrow of the Corinthians, he lists this as one of the outstanding graces at work in them: eager desire (2 Corinthians 7:11). And in the case of indwelling sin and its power, what frame does Paul himself express (Romans 7:24)? His heart bursts out in an intensely passionate cry of longing for deliverance. Now if this is the condition of saints under the general weight of indwelling sin, how much more should that longing be intensified when to it is added the tormenting power of some particular lust and corruption? Be assured: unless you long for deliverance, you will not receive it.

This longing will make the heart watchful for every opportunity to gain advantage over its enemy, and ready to embrace every help offered for its destruction. Deep desires are the very life of that unceasing prayer that is commanded of us in every condition — and no condition demands it more than this. Such desires set faith and hope to work, and are the soul's constant reaching after the Lord.

Get your heart into this condition of reaching and longing. Long, sigh, and cry out. You know David's example.

The fifth direction is:

Consider whether the disorder troubling you is not rooted in your natural temperament and nourished, fostered, and intensified by your constitution. Some people are undoubtedly inclined by their natural character to particular sins. If this is your case, consider:

1. This is in no way a lessening of the guilt of your sin.

Some people with open shamelessness attribute gross and terrible sins to their temperament. And whether others may not do the same thing more quietly — easing the pressing guilt of their disorders with this same excuse — is uncertain. It is from the fall, from the original corruption of our natures, that the fuel and nourishment of any sin abides in our natural character. David counts being shaped in iniquity and conceived in sin (Psalm 51:5) as an aggravation of his subsequent sin, not as a mitigation of it. The fact that you are especially inclined to some particular sinful disorder is simply a particular expression of original lust in your nature — and it should produce particular humility and lowliness in you.

2. What you must face on this account, with respect to your walk with God, is this: your natural temperament gives sin and Satan such a significant advantage that without extraordinary watchfulness, care, and diligence, they will surely prevail against your soul. Thousands have been hurried headlong to hell on this account who, at the very least, might otherwise have proceeded at a more measured, less openly provoking, and less destructive pace.

3. For the mortification of any disorder so deeply rooted in a person's nature, there is one remedy especially suited, in addition to all other ways and means already named or to be mentioned later. It is what the apostle speaks of (1 Corinthians 9:27): 'I discipline my body and make it my slave.' Bringing the very body into subjection is an ordinance of God that contributes to the mortification of sin. It checks the natural root of the disorder and weakens it by taking away its rich soil. Perhaps because Roman Catholics — people ignorant of the righteousness of Christ, the work of His Spirit, and the whole matter at hand — have placed the entire weight and substance of mortification in voluntary bodily disciplines and penances, knowing neither the true nature of sin nor of mortification, some on the other side may be tempted to neglect means of humiliation which God Himself has authorized and appointed. Bringing the body into subjection in the case described — by cutting short natural appetite through fasting, watchfulness, and similar means — is undoubtedly acceptable to God, provided the following conditions are observed.

(1) That the outward weakening and impairing of the body must not be looked on as something good in itself, or as if mortification consisted in it — that would be to bring us back under bodily regulations. It is to be viewed only as a means toward the proposed end: weakening any particular disorder at its natural root and seat. A man may have leanness of body and soul together.

(2) That the means by which this is done — fasting, watchfulness, and the like — must not be viewed as things that by their own power can produce true mortification of any sin. If they could, sin could be mortified without any help of the Spirit in any unregenerate person in the world. They are to be seen only as ways through which the Spirit may — and sometimes does — put forth His strength for the accomplishing of His own work, especially in the case described. Failure to properly understand and apply this, along with similar principles, has produced a Roman Catholic mortification more suitable to horses and other animals than to believers.

This is the sum of what has been said: when the disorder complained of seems rooted in natural temperament and constitution, in applying ourselves to a participation in the blood and Spirit of Christ, an effort should also be made — in God's way — to check that disorder's natural root.

Sixth, consider what occasions and advantages your disorder has used to express and assert itself, and watch against all of them. This is one part of the duty our blessed Savior commends to His disciples under the name of watching (Mark 13:37): 'And what I say to you I say to all: Watch.' In Luke 21:34 this is expressed as: 'Be on guard, so that your hearts will not be weighed down.' Watch against all eruptions of your corruptions. I mean the duty David described when he said: 'I have kept myself from my iniquity' — he watched all the ways and workings of his iniquity to prevent them and rise up against them. This is what we are called to under the name of examining our ways: consider what ways, what companions, what opportunities, what studies, what activities, and what circumstances have at any time given — or usually give — advantages to your disorders, and set yourself carefully against them all. People do this for bodily ailments and disorders — they avoid the seasons, foods, and environments that have proven harmful. Are the things of the soul of less importance? Know that the person who dares to play with the occasions of sin will dare to sin. The person who ventures into the temptations of wickedness will venture into wickedness itself. Hazael thought he would not be as wicked as the prophet told him he would be. To show him otherwise, the prophet simply said, 'You will be king of Syria.' If he ventures into the temptations of cruelty, he will become cruel. Tell a person he will commit certain sins, and he will recoil at it. But if you can convince him that he will put himself into the occasions and temptations of those sins, he will have little ground left for his confidence.

Seventh, rise up powerfully against the first stirrings of your disorder — its earliest movements; do not allow it to gain even the smallest foothold. Do not say, 'It may go this far and no further.' If it has any allowance at all, it will take more. It is impossible to draw clear boundaries around sin. It is like water in a channel: once it breaks through, it will have its course. Preventing it from acting at all is easier than trying to contain it once it has started. This is why James traces the progress and stages of lust (James 1:14-15) — so that we may stop at the very entrance. When you find your corruption beginning to entangle your thoughts, rise up against it with all your strength — with no less indignation than if it had already accomplished what it aims at. Consider what an impure thought is really after — it wants you to wallow in folly and filth. Ask what envy is after — murder and destruction are at its end. Set yourself against it with no less determination than if it had already dragged you into the worst wickedness. Without this, you will not prevail. As sin gains ground in the affections by breeding delight in it, it also gains ground in the understanding by breeding contempt of it.