8. Remember what a beastly life it is to be a sensualist. It is an unmanning of yourselves. Sensual pleasures are brutish pleasures; beasts have them as well as men. We have the higher faculty of reason, to subdue and rule the beastly part. And reason is the man; and hath a higher kind of felicity to delight in. Do you think that man is made for no higher matters than a beast? and that you have not a more noble object for your delight than your swine or dog hath, who have the pleasure of meat, and lust, and play, and ease, and fancy, as well as you? Certainly where sensual pleasures are preferred before the higher pleasures of the soul, that man becomes a beast, or worse, subjecting his reason to his brutish part.
9. Think what an inconsiderable, pitiful felicity it is that fleshly persons choose; how small and short, as well as sordid. Oh how quickly will the game be ended! and the delights of boiling lust be gone! How quickly will the drink be past their throats, and their delicate dishes be turned into filth! How short is the sport and laughter of the fool! And how quickly will that face be the index of a pained body, or a grieved, self-tormenting mind! It is but a few days till all their stately greatness will be levelled; and the most adorned, pampered flesh will have no more to show of all the pleasure which was so dearly bought, than a Lazarus, or the most mortified saint. A few days will turn their pleasure into anguish, and their jollity into groans, and their ostentation into lamentation, and all their glory into shame. As every moment puts an end to all the pleasures of their lives that are past, and they are now to them as if they had never been; so the last moment is at hand, which will end the little that remains. And then the sinner will with groans confess, that he hath made a miserable choice, and that he might have had a more durable pleasure if he had been wise. When the skull is cast up with the spade, to make room for a successor, you may see the hole where all the meat and drink went in, and the hideous seat of that face, which sometime was the discovery of wantonness, pride, and scorn; but you will see no signs of mirth or pleasure.
10. Lastly, consider that there is scarce a sin in the world more unexcusable than this. The flesh-pleaser seeth the end of all his sensual delights, in the faces of the sick, and in the corpses that are daily carried to the earth, and in the graves, and bones, and dust of those that sometime had as merry a life as he. His reason can say, All this is gone with them, and is as if it had never been; and so it will shortly be with me. He knoweth that all the pleasure of his life past is now of no value to himself. His warnings are constant, close, and sensible; and therefore he hath the greater sin.
[Sidenote: The plea of flesh-pleasers.]
IV. _Object._ I. What hurt is it to God, or any one else, that I please my flesh? I will not believe that a thing so harmless will displease him. _Answ._ Merely as it is pleasure, it hath no hurt in it: but as it is inordinate or immoderate pleasure; or as it is over-loved, and preferred before God and your salvation; or as it is greater than your delight in God; or as it wants its proper end, and is loved merely for itself, and not used as a means to higher things; and as it is made a hinderance to the soul, and to spiritual pleasure, and the service of God; and as it is the brutish delight of an ungoverned, rebellious appetite, that mastereth reason, and is not under obedience to God. Though sin can do God no hurt, it can do you hurt, and it can do him wrong. I think I have showed you what hurt and poison is in it already. It is the very rebellion of corrupted nature; the turning of all things upside down; the taking down God, and heaven, and reason, and destroying the use of all the creatures, and setting up flesh-pleasing instead of all, and making a brute your god and governor. And do you ask what harm there is in this? So will your child do, when he desireth any play, or pleasure; and the sick, when they desire to please their appetite. But your father, and physician, and reason, and not brutish appetite, must be judge.