9. Yea, lust corrupteth the mind of the person himself, if it be not very much restrained and moderated. It turneth it from the only excellent pleasure, by the force of that brutish kind of pleasure.[450] It carrieth away the thoughts, and distempereth the passions, and corrupteth the fantasy, and thereby doth easily corrupt the intellect and heart. Pleasure is so much of the end of man, which his nature leadeth him to desire, that the chief thing in the world to make a man good and happy, is to engage his heart to those pleasures which are good, and make men happy. And the chief thing to make him bad and miserable, is to engage him in the pleasures which make men bad and end in misery. And the principal thing by which you may know yourselves or others, what you are, is to know what your pleasures are; or at least, what you choose and desire for your pleasure. If the body rule the soul, you are brutish, and shall be destroyed: if the soul rule the body, you live according to true human nature and the ends of your creation. If the pleasures of the body are the predominant pleasures which you are most addicted to, then the body ruleth the soul, and you shall perish as traitors to God, that debase his image, and turn man into beast, Rom. viii. 13: if the pleasures of the soul be your most predominant pleasures, which you are most addicted to, (though you attain as yet but little of it,) then the soul doth rule the body, and you live like men: and this cannot well be, till faith show the soul those higher pleasures in God and everlasting glory, which may carry it above all fleshly pleasures. By all this set together you may easily perceive that the way of the devil to corrupt and damn men, is to keep them from faith, that they may have no heavenly, spiritual pleasure, and to strengthen sensuality, and give them their fill of fleshly pleasures, to imprison their minds that they may ascend no higher: and that the way to sanctify and save men, is to help them by faith to heavenly pleasure, and to abate and keep under that fleshly pleasure that would draw down their minds. And by this you may see how to understand the doctrine of mortification, and taming the body, and abstaining from the pleasures of the flesh: and you may now understand what personal mischief lust doth to the soul.
10. Your own experience and consciences will tell you, that if it be not exceedingly moderated, it unfitteth you for every holy duty. You are unfit to meditate on God, or to pray to him, or to receive his word or sacrament: and therefore nature teacheth those that meddle with holy things to be more continent than others; which Scripture also secondeth, 1 Sam. xxi. 4, 5. Such sensual things and sacred things do not well agree too near.[451]
11. And as by all this you see sufficient cause why God should make stricter laws for the bridling of lust, than fleshly, lustful persons like; so when his laws are broken by the unclean, it is a sin that conscience (till it be quite debauched) doth deeply accuse the guilty for, and beareth a very clear testimony against. Oh the unquietness! the horror! the despair that I have known many persons in, even for the sin of self-pollution, that never proceeded to fornication! And how many adulterers and fornicators have we known that have lived and died in despair, and some of them hanged themselves! Conscience will condemn this sin with a heavy condemnation, till custom or infidelity have utterly seared it.[452]