434 THE HAPPINESS OP-SEPARATE SPIRITS. [DISC. I! the shapes,, and colours, and appearances of it painted upon fancy. From our very infancy, our souls are imposed upon by the animal ; we draw in early many falsejudgments, and establish them daily. We are nursed up in prejudice against a hundred truths both in the philosophical, the moral, and the religious life ; and it is the labour of an age even for a wise and good man to wear off a few of them and to judge with any tolerable freedom, evidence and certainty. A great part of our life is spent in sleep, wherein the soul is bound up from exerting any regular thoughts, con- fined every night to a periodical delirium, subjected to all the fluttering tyranny of the animal spirits, and dragged away into all the wild wanderings of dreaming nature ; and indeed the thoughts of many of us always, and of all of us sometimes, even when we are awake, are but little better, because we perpetually dance after the motions of passion and fancy, and our reason seldom judges without them. Alas ! how imperfect is the best of us in knowledge here ! But knowledge is not the only good, of which the body deprives the spirit. The necessities of the body, hunger and thirst, weakness and weariness, and drowsy spirits, it very heavy upon the soul, and hinder it in the pursuit of holy and heavenly thoughts, break off many a divine meditation, and interrupt and spoil many a delightful Piece of worship. In sickness or in old age, what long and weighty troubles, what tiresome infirmities clog the soul, and what restless pains of nature overwhelm the spirit, and forbid the lively exercises of devotion ! And then also the sinful appetites and perverse affec- tions of nature are. very much seated in flesh and blood: So much, that the apostle in many places calls the prin- ciples of sin by the general name of flesh. Read the lat- ter end of the seventh chapter of his Epistle to the Ro- mans. IIow Both he complain of the flesh and members of the body, which arefatai instruments of sin and Satan ! Read the black catalogue ofiniquities, Gal. y. 19, 90, 1. and hear them called the works of the flesh. Pride and inaiiee, and envy, and lust,' and covetousness, and wrath, rind revenge, are found secretly working in flesh and blood. O how much are the springs of these sinful evils
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