distinct from a regard to him : since the fear of God, if ope- rating at all, would operate as much to the suppression of the desire, as to the non-indulgence of the act. Hence the mere looking on a woman to lust after her, is declared, on infallible authority, to be an actual commission of adultery with her in the heart. Now all these acts and dispositions proceed from a corrupt principle within us, even from that principle which is called " flesh," and which is the true source of all the other evils we commit.]
2. Those which more properly have their seat in the mind —
[Of these, some have a more immediate reference to God, and others are called forth only in our intercourse with men. Of the former kind are " idolatry and witchcraft," which being specified as " works of the flesh," clearly shew what we are to understand by " flesh," namely, not merely any corporeal propensity, but that general propensity to evil which operates throughout the whole extent of our fallen nature.
"Idolatry" is a total rejection of God; and "witchcraft" is an application to evil spirits, to impart to us something which we have no hope of obtaining from the true God : and both the one and the other of these is properly a " work of the flesh," inasmuch as it betrays a total alienation of heart from God, and an entire subjection to that " carnal mind," which, as God himself declares, " is enmity against himc."
The other evils which are called forth by our intercourse with men, as " hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like," form such a picture of our fallen nature as may well humble us in the dust before God. It is unnecessary to enter into a distinct consideration of them : it is in the aggre- gate only that we can stop to notice them at this time : but what an accumulation of evil do they present to our view ! Yet is it no other than what we may see in every community under heaven. Look at the seditions that agitate states ; the divisions and heresies that disturb the Church ; the feuds and quarrels that set man against his fellow man, and often termi- nate even in "murder" itself: whence do they all arise? Come they not hence, even from the lusts that war in our members'1 ? or, in other words, from the corruption of the human heart? There are some evils which pass under the milder name of good fellowship, and conviviality ; some which, like the " revellings " that were common among the heathen, consist of feastings, dancings, and excess of every kind : but, however we may soften them down by specious names, and
e Rom. viii. 7. d Jam. iv. 1.