is suitable to their nature. But a man hath a more
excellent taste and smell, and he savours finer and sweeter things. Truly
it cannot choose but that it must be a nature more swinish or brutish than
a swine, that can relish and savour such filthy abominable works of the
flesh as abound amongst some of you. "The works of the flesh are
manifest," Gal. v. 19. And indeed they are manifest upon you, acted in the
very day time, out facing the very light of the gospel. You may read them,
and see if they be not too manifest in you. Now, what a base nature, what
abominable and brutish spirits must possess men, that they apprehend a
sweetness and fragrancy in these corrupt and stinking works of the old
man! O how base a scent is it, to smell and savour nothing but this
present world, and satisfaction to your senses! Truly your scent and
smell, your relish and taste, argues your base, and degenerate, and
brutish natures, that you are on the worse side of this division,--"after
the flesh." But alas! it is not possible to persuade you that there is no
sweetness, no fragrancy, nothing but corruption and rottenness, such as
comes out of sepulchres opened, in all these works of the flesh, till once
a new spirit be put in you, and your natures changed, no more than you can
by eloquence persuade a sick man, whose palate is possessed with a
vitiated bitter humour, that such things as are suitable to his vitiated
taste, are indeed bitter, or make a swine to believe that the dunghill is
stinking and unpleasant. Truly it is as impossible to make the multitude
of men to apprehend, to relish or savour any bitterness or loathsomeness
in the ways and courses they follow, or any sweetness and fragrancy in the
ways of godliness, till once your tastes be rectified, your spirits be
transformed and renewed.

And indeed, when once the spirit is renewed, and dispossessed of that
malignant humour of corruption, and fleshly affection, that did present
all things, contrary to what they are, then it is like a healthful and
wholesome palate, that tastes all things as they are, and finds bitter,
bitter, and sweet, sweet, or like a sound eye, that beholds things just as
they are, both in colour, quantity, and distance, then the soul savours
the sweet smell of the fruits of the Spirit, ver 22: "Love, joy, peace,
long-suffering, meekness, temperance," &c. These are fragrant and sweet to
the soul, and as a sweet perfume, both to the person that hath them, and
to