Casuistical morning-exercises the fourth volume /

5. The Person tempted, Joseph, in the flower of his age, the season of sensuality, when innumerable by the force and swing of their vicious appetites are impelled to break the holy Law of God.

5. The Person tempted, Joseph, in the flower of his age, the season of sensuality, when innumerable by the force and swing of t•eir vicious appetites are impell'd to break the holy Law of God.

6. His Repulse of the temptation was strong and peremptory: How can I do this great wickedness? He felt no sympathy, n• sensual tenderness, but expressed an impossibility of consenting to her guilty desire. We have in Joseph exemplified that property of the Regenerate, He that is born of God cannot sin: by a sacred potent instinct in his breast, he is preserved not only from the consummate acts, but recoils from the first offers to it.

6. His Repulse of the temptation was strong and pere••tory: How can I do this great wickedness? He felt no sympathy, n• sensual tenderness, but exprest an impossibility of consenting to her guilty desire. We have in Joseph exemplified that property of the Regenerate, He that is born of God cannot sin: by a sacred potent instinct in his brest, he is preserved not only from the consummate acts, but recoils from the first offers to it.

7. The Reasons are specified of his rejecting her polluting motion. Behold my Master knows not what is with me in the House, and he hath committed all that he hath to my Hands, there is none greater in his House than I, neither hath he kept back any thing from me but thee, because thou art his Wife; How then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God? 'Twas a complicated crime of injustice and uncleanness: a most injurious violation of the strongest ties of duty and gratitude to his Master, and of the sacred marriage Covenant to her Husband, and the foulest blot to their persons: Therefore how can I commit a sin so contrary to natural Conscience, and supernatural grace, and provoke God? Thus I have briefly considered the narrative of Josephs temptation, and that Divine grace preserved him unspotted from that contagious fire, may be resembled to the miraculous preserving the three Hebrew Martyrs unsinged, in the midst of the flaming furnace. The patience of Job, and the Chastity of Joseph are transmitted by the Secretaries of the Holy Ghost in Scripture, to be in perpetual remembrance and admiration.