A Continuation of morning-exercise questions and cases of conscience practically resolvedA Continuation of morning-exercise questions and cases of conscience practicaly resolved

3. Their misery is, that what they think, they cannot choose but think: You may almost as well persuade a man not to shake in an Ague, or not to feel when he is pained, as persuade them to cast away their self-troubling thoughts, or not to think all the enormous confounding thoughts as they do, they cannot get them out of their heads night or day: tell them that they must forbear long musing, which disturb them, and they cannot: tell them that they must cast out false imaginations out of their minds, when Satan casts them in, and must turn their thoughts to something else, and they cannot do it: Their thoughts, and troubles, and fears are gone out of their power, and the more, by how much the more, melancholy and crazed they are.

3. Their misery is, that what they think, they cannot choose but think: You may almost as well perswade a man not to shake in an Ague, or not to feel when he is pained, as perswade them to cast away their self-troubling thoughts, or not to think all the enormous confounding thoughts as they do, they cannot get them out of their heads night or day: tell them that they must forbear long musing, which disturb them, and they cannot: tell them that they must cast out false imaginations out of their minds, when Satan casts them in, and must turn their thoughts to something else, and they cannot do it: Their thoughts, and troubles, and fears are gone out of their power, and the more, by how much the more, melancholly and crased they are.

4. And when they are grown to this, usually they seem to feel something besides themselves, as it were speaking in them, and saying this and that to them, and bidding them do this or that, and they will tell you now it s•ith this or that, and tell you when and what it hath said to them, and they will hardly believe how much of it is the disease of their own imagination.