irmities, which promise, in the first
covenant, was only annexed to perfect and absolute obedience.

You heard, in the preceding verse, a strong inducement taken from the
bond, debt, and duty we owe to the Spirit, to walk after it, and the want
of all obligation to the flesh. Now, if honesty and duty will not suffice
to persuade you, as you know in other things it would do with any honest
man, plain equity is a sufficient bond to him. Yet, consider what the
apostle subjoins from the damage, and from the advantage which may of
itself be the topics of persuasion, and serves to drive in the nail of
debt and duty to the head. If you will not take with this debt you owe to
the Spirit, but still conceive there is some greater obligation lying on
you, to care for your bodies and satisfy them, then, I say, behold the end
of it, what fruit you must one day reap of the flesh and service of sin.
"If ye live after the flesh, you shall die." But then, consider the fruit
you shall reap of the Spirit, and holy walking "you shall live." It is
true the flesh may flatter you more for the present, but the end of it
will lie bitter as death, _amplectitur ut strangulet_, "the flesh embraces
you that it may strangle you." And so if you knew all well you would not
think you owed it any thing but enmity and hatred and mortification. If
your duty will not move you, let the love of yourselves and your souls
persuade you, for it is an irrepealable statute: "The wages of sin is
death." Every way you choose to fulfil the lusts of your flesh, and to
make provision for it, neglecting the eternal welfare of your souls,
certainly it shall prove to you "the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil," it shall be as the forbidden fruit, which instead of performing
that which was promised will bring forth death,--the eternal separation of
the soul from God. Adam's sin was a breviary or epitome of the multiplied
and enlarged sins of mankind. You may see in this tragedy all your
fortunes (so to speak,)--you may behold in it the flattering insinuations
and deceitful promises of sin and Satan, who is a liar and murderer from
the beginning, and murdered man at first by lying to him. You find the
hook covered over with the varnished bait of an imaginary life and
happiness, satisfaction promised to the eye, to the taste, and to the
mind. And upon these enticements, man bewitched and withdrawn from his
God, after these vain and empty shadows, which, when he catched