omage to our God, and obeyed strange lords within, therefore are
we given up to the lust of strangers without.

I would have you thinking, and that seriously, that there are worse
masters you serve than those you most hate, and that there is a worse
bondage, whereof you are insensible, than that you fear most. You fear
strangers, but your greatest evil is within you. You might retire within,
and behold worse masters, and more pernicious and mortal enemies to your
well-being. This is the case of all men by nature, and of all men as far
as in nature; sin ruling, commanding in them, and lording it over them,
and they willingly following after the commandment, and so oppressed and
broken in judgment. If you could but rightly look upon other men, you
might see, that they who are servants of divers lusts, are not their own
men, so to speak; they have not the command of themselves. Look upon a man
given to drunkenness, and what a slave is he! Whither doth not his lust
drive him? Let him bind himself with resolutions, with vows, yet he cannot
be holden by them. Shame before men, loss of estate, decay of health,
temporal punishment, nay, eternal, all set together, cannot keep him from
fulfilling the desires of that lust, when he hath opportunity. A man given
to covetousness, how doth he serve that idol! How doth he forget himself
to be a man!--or to have a reasonable soul within him, he is so devoted to
it! And thus it is with every man by nature. There may be many petty
little gods that he worships upon occasion, but every unrenewed man hath
some one thing predominant in him, unto which he hath sworn obedience and
devotion. The man most civilized, most abstracted from the grosser outward
pollutions,--yet certainly, his heart within is but a temple full of idols,
to the love and service of which he is devoted. There are some of the
fundamental laws of Satan's kingdom, that rule in every natural
man,--either the lust of the eyes, or the lust of the flesh, or the pride
of life. Every man sacrificeth to one of these his credit and honour, or
his pleasure, or his profit. Self, whatever way refined and subtilized in
some, yet at best it is but an enemy to God; and without that sphere of
self cannot a man act upon natural principles, till a higher Spirit come
in, which is here spoken of.

Oh! that you would take this for bondage, to be under this woful necessity
of satisfying and fulfilling the desires of your flesh and mind, Eph. ii.