July 15

For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.—Romans 8:13.

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: "An 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 license in things lawful, lest it be tempted to things unlawful; it kills the lusts of the flesh by taking away its fuel and incentives, and 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.

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 neighbors 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 desires and natural promptness break the bands asunder: here, therefore, we must deny our own wills, our appetites of gluttony and drunkenness, and our prurient sensual 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.

For it is a sad consideration, and of secret reason, that since prayer, of all duties, is certainly the sweetest and the easiest, it having in it no difficulty or vexatious labor, 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 the duty of mortification, hath taught us to know, that mortification 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 for 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 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 would not do well at Syracuse, 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 cloying our beastly appetites; the second the offering up of 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.