the odds, that makes it active, beautiful, and comely,
but in the removal of the spirit, it becometh a piece of the most defiled
and loathsome dust in the world.

Now, I say, such a vast and wide difference there is between a true
Christian and a natural man, even taking him in with all his common
endowments and excellencies, the one is a man, the other a beast, the one
is after the flesh, the other is after the Spirit. It is the ordinary
compellation of the Holy Ghost, "Man being in honour, and understanding
not, is like the beasts that perish," Psal. xlix. 20, and xciv. 8,
"Understand, ye brutish among the people," &c., and Psal xcii. 6, "The
brutish man understands not this," and Eccles. iii. 18, "that they
themselves may know that they are but beasts." Therefore you find the Lord
often turning to beasts, to insensible creatures, thereby to reprove the
folly and madness of men, Isa. i. 2, and Jer. viii. 7. Man hath two parts
in him, by which he hath affinity to the two most distant natures, he
stands in the middle between angels and beasts. In his spirit he riseth up
to an angelic dignity, and in his body he falls down to a brutish
condition. Now, which of these hath the pre-eminency, _that_ he is. If the
spirit be indeed elevated above all sensual and earthly things, to the
life of angels, that is, to communion with God, then a man is one after
the spirit, an angel incarnate, an angel dwelling in flesh, but if his
spirit throw itself down to the service of the flesh, minding and
savouring only things sensual and visible, then indeed a man puts off
humanity, and hath associated himself to beasts, to be as one of them. And
indeed, a man made thus like a beast, is worse than a beast, because he
ought to be far better. It is no disparagement to a beast to mind only the
flesh, but it is the greatest abasement of a man, that which draws him
down from that higher station God hath set him into, to the lowest
station, that of beasts; and truly a Nebuchadnezzar among beasts is the
greatest beast of all, far more brutish than any beast. Now such is every
man by nature,--"that which is born of the flesh is flesh." Every man as he
comes out of the womb, is degenerated and fallen down into this brutish
estate, to mind, to savour, to relish nothing but what relates to this
fleshly or temporal being. The utmost sphere and comprehension of man, is
now of no larger extent than this visible world and this present life,--"he
is blind a