154 FOURTH SERMON time and strength, and exhausts it in the services of lust. Sickness is a chargeable thing, a consumption at once to the person and to the estate. The poor woman in the gospel who had an issue of blood, spent all that she had on physicians and was never the better, Luke viii. 43. So poor sinners empty all the powers of soul, of body, of time, of estate, every thing within their reach upon their lusts, and are as unsatisfied at last as at the first, Ecc. i. 8. Like a silkworm which works out his bowels into such a mass wherein him- self is buried. It weareth them out, and sucketh away the radical strength in the service of it. and yet never giveth them over : but as Pharaoh's taskmasters exacted the brick when they had taken away the straw ; so lust doth consume and weaken natural strength in the obedience of it : and yet when nature is exhausted, the strength of lust is as great, and the commands as tyrannous as ever before, Isa. lvii. 10. Jer. ii. 25. We are to distinguish between the vital force of the faculties, and the activity of lust which sets them on work ; that decays and hastens to death, but sin retains its strength and vigour still ; nothing . kills that but the blood of Christ, and the decay of nature ariseth out of the strength of sin ; the more any man, in any lust whatsoever, makes himself a ser- vant of sin, and the more busy and active lie is in that service, the more will it eat into him and consume him ; as the hotter the fever is, the sooner is the body wasted and dried up by it. 4. Deformity. Sickness withereth the beauty of the body, maketli it of a glorious, a ghastly and loathsome spectacle. Come to the comeliest person living after a long and pining sickness, and you shall not find the man in his own shape ; a wan countenance, a shrivelled flesh, a lean visage, a hollow and standing
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