ne of them must be,) and whether or not you be not
more obliged to God the Father, and his Son Jesus Christ, to "live after
the Spirit," though for the present it should be painful to beat down your
body. You are debtors indeed, but you owe nothing to the flesh but
stripes and mortification.

Sermon XXXIV.

Verse 13.--"For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die, but if ye
through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall
live."

Though the Lord, out of his absolute sovereignty, might deal with man in
such a way, as nothing should appear but his supreme will and almighty
power, he might simply command obedience, and without any more persuasions
either leave men to the frowardness of their own natures, or else
powerfully constrain them to their duty, yet he hath chosen that way that
is most suitable to his own wisdom, and most connatural to man's nature,
to lay out before him the advantages and disadvantages, and to use these
as motives and persuasives of his Spirit. For since he hath by his first
creation implanted in man's soul such a principle as moveth itself upon
the presentation of good or evil, that this might not be in vain, he
administers all the dispensations of the law and gospel in a way suitable
to that, by propounding such powerful motives as may incline and persuade
the heart of man. It is true, there's a secret drawing withal necessary,
the pull of the Father's arm and power of the Holy Ghost, yet that which
is visible or sensible to the soul is the framing of all things so as to
engage it upon rational terms. It is set between two contraries, _death_
and _life_,--death which it naturally abhorreth, and life which it
naturally loveth. An even balance is holden up before the light of the
conscience, in which obedience and sin are weighed, and it is found even
to the convincing of the spirit of man, that there are as many
disadvantages in the one as advantages in the other.

This was the way that God used first with man in paradise. You remember
the terms run so,--"'What day thou eatest thou shalt die." He hedged him in
on the one side by a promise of life, on the other by a threatening of
death. And these two are very rational restraints, suited to the soul of
man, and in the inward principles of it, which are a kind of instinct to
that which is apprehended good or gainful.

Now, this verse runs even so in the form of words "If ye live after the
flesh ye shall die