68. And indeed the state of sin lieth both in man's fall from God to self, and in the mistake of his own felicity, preferring even for himself a sensible good before a spiritual, and the creature before the Creator: and therefore he must be rectified in both.
69. And the hypocrite's uneffectual love to God and holiness is much discovered in this, that, as he loveth dead saints, and their images and holidays, because they trouble him not, so he best loveth (opinionatively) and least hateth (practically) the saints in heaven, and the holiness that is far from him, and God as he conceiveth of him as one that is in heaven to glorify men; but he hateth (practically, though not professedly) the God that would make him holy, and deprive him of all his sinful pleasures, or condemn him for them: and he can better like holiness in his pastor, neighbour, or child, than in himself.
70. Therefore sincerity much consisteth in the love of self-holiness; but not as for self alone, but as carrying self and all to God.
71. As the sun-beams do without any interception reach the eye, and by them without interception our sight ascendeth and extendeth to the sun; so God's communicated goodness and glorious revelation extend through and by all inferior mediums, to our understandings, and our wills, and our knowledge and love ascend and extend through all and by all again to God. And as it were unnatural for the eye illuminated by the sun, to see itself only, or to see the mediate creatures, and not to see the light and sun by which it seeth (nay, it doth least see itself); so it is unnatural for the soul to understand and love itself alone, (which it little understandeth and should love with self-denial,) and the creatures only, and not to love God, by whom we know and love the creature.
72. It is possible to love God, and holiness, and heaven, as a conceited state and means of our sensual felicity, and escape of pain and misery; but to love God as the true felicity of the intellectual nature, and as our spiritual rest, and yet to love him only or chiefly for ourselves, and not rather for himself as our highest end, implieth a contradiction. The same I say of holiness, as loved only for ourselves. The evidence whereof is plain, in that it is essential to God to be not only better than ourselves and every creature, but also to be the ultimate end of all things, to which they should tend in all their perfections. And it is essential to holiness to be the soul's devotion of itself to God as God, and not only to God as our felicity: therefore to love God only or chiefly for ourselves, is to make him only a means to our felicity, and not our chief end; and it is to make ourselves better, and so more amiable than God, that is, to be gods ourselves.
73. This is much of the sense of the controversy between the Epicureans and the sober philosophers, as is to be seen in Cicero, &c. The sober philosophers said, that virtue was to be loved for itself more than for pleasure; because if pleasure as such be better than virtue as such, then all sensual pleasure would be better than virtue as such. The Epicureans said, that not all pleasure, but the pleasure of virtue was the chief good, as Torquatus's words in Cicero show. And if it had been first proved, that a man's self is his just, ultimate end, as the _finis cui_ or the personal end, then it would be a hard question, whether the Epicureans were not in the right as to the _finis cujus_ or the real end (which indeed is but a medium to the personal, _cui_). But when it is most certain, that no man's person is to be his own ultimate end, as _cui_, but God, and then the universe, and societies of the world as before said, it is then easy to prove that the sober philosophers were in the right, and that no man's pleasure is his ultimate end, _finis cujus_; because no man's pleasure is either such a demonstration of the divine perfection as virtue is, as such; nor yet doth it so much conduce to the common good of societies or mankind, and so to the pleasing and glorifying of God. And this way Cicero might easily have made good his cause against the Epicureans.