Hold this therefore, _Academicus_, as a certain truth, that the heresy of all heresies is a worldly spirit. It is the whole nature and misery of our fall; it keeps up the death of our souls; and, so long as it lasts, makes it impossible for us to be born again. It is the greatest blindness and darkness of our nature, and keeps us in the grossest ignorance both of heaven and hell. For we feel neither the one nor the other, so long as the spirit of this world reigns in us. Light, and truth, and the gospel, so far as they concern eternity, are all empty sounds to the worldly spirit. His own good, and his own evil, govern all his hopes and fears; and therefore he can have no religion, farther than as it can be made serviceable to the life of this world. _Publicans_ and _Harlots_ are all of the spirit of this world; but its highest birth are _Scribes_, the _Pharisees_, and _Hypocrites_, who turn godliness into gain, and serve God for the sake of mammon; these live, and move, and have their being in and from the spirit of this world.――Of all things therefore my friends, detest the spirit of this world, or you must live and die an _utter stranger_ to all that is divine and heavenly. You will go out of the world in the same poverty and death in which you entered into it. For a worldly spirit can know nothing, feel nothing, taste nothing, delight in nothing but with earthly senses, and after an earthly manner. _The natural man_, saith the apostle, _receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, they are foolishness unto him. He cannot know them, because they are spiritually discerned_; that is, they can only be discerned by that Spirit, which he hath not. Now the true reason of the absolute impossibility of the natural man, how polite, and learned, and acute soever he be, is this; so far as our life reaches, so far we understand, and feel, and know, and no farther. All after this is, only the play of our imagination, amusing itself with the _dead pictures_ of its own ideas. Now this is all that the natural man can possibly do with the things of God. He can only contemplate them as so many _dead ideas_, that he receives from books, or hearsay; and so can learnedly dispute and quarrel about them, and laugh at those as Enthusiasts, who have a living sensibility of them. He is only the worse for his _dead ideas_ of divine truths; they become bad nourishment to all his natural tempers: he is proud of his ability to discourse about them, and loses all humility, thro’ a vain and haughty contention for them. His _zeal_ for religion is envy and wrath, his orthodoxy is pride and obstinacy, his love of the truth is hatred and ill-will to those who dare to dissent from him. This is the constant effect of the religion of the natural man, who is under the dominion of the spirit of this world. He cannot make a better use of his knowledge than this; and all for this plain reason, because he stands at the _same distance_ from a _living sensibility_ of the truth, as the man that is born blind, does from a living sensibility of light.
_Academicus._ You know, Sir, that in the morning you told me of a first step, that must be the _beginning_ of a spiritual life; you gave me till to-morrow to speak my mind and resolution about it. But you have now extorted my answer from me: with all the strength that I have, I turn from every thing that is not God, and his holy will; with all the desire of my heart, I give up myself wholly to the light and Holy Spirit of God; pleased with nothing in this world, but as it gives time and place, and occasions of doing and being that, which my heavenly Father would have me to do and be; seeking for no happiness from this earthly fallen life, but that of overcoming all its spirit and tempers. But I believe, _Theophilus_, you had something farther to say.
_Theophilus._ Indeed, _Academicus_, there is hardly any knowing when one has said enough of the evil effects of a _worldly spirit_. It is the canker that eateth up all the fruits of our other good tempers; it leaves no degree of goodness in them, but transforms all that we are to do, into its own earthly nature. The philosophers of old, began all their virtue in a total renunciation of the spirit of this world. They saw with the eyes of heaven, that darkness was not more contrary to light, than the wisdom of this world to the spirit of virtue; therefore they allowed of no progress in virtue, but so far as a man had overcome himself, and the spirit of this world.
But the doctrine of the cross of Christ, the last, the highest, the most finishing stroke given to the spirit of this world, that speaks more in _one word_ than all the philosophy of voluminous writers, is yet professed by those, who are in more friendship with the world than was allowed to the disciples of _Pythagoras_, _Socrates_, _Plato_, or _Epictetus_.