A supplement to The Morning-exercise at Cripple-Gate, or, Several more cases of conscience practically…

(1) To love the world, is to Lust after the pleasures of the flesh, as our last end, or sovereign Good, and so amiable for themselves. And, O! wh•t a brutish piece of Lust is this? And yet, Lo! how common, even among those, who would be accounted generous and noble? Yea, how many great Professors come under this condemnation? For by the Lusts of the flesh we must understand all inordinate love to, and delight in sensual pleasures of any kind, be it in eating, drinking, recreations, or unclean objects. What^(b) Empedocles said of the Agragantines, holds too true of many now adays: They give themselves to Luxury, as though they would die tomorrow; and yet they build houses, as if they were to live for ever. O! how happy would it be for England, if those Sumptuary Laws, commended by Plato ^(c)in his Commonwealth, were established amongst us, for regulating our excesses in feasts, Habits, Houses, and other sensual pleasures? O! what seeds and causes of sorrow are there in sensual pleasures? How is the Love of sensual Sinners inveigled with the worlds Golden Pleasures! Such there were in the Apostles times, even in the Churches. So Jam. 5.5. Ye have lived in Pleasures, i. e. as the Fish liveth in the water: Pleasures have been your Element, the food of your sensual life: your hearts have been steeped, immersed, drowned in them, as the spring of your life, and happiness. Thence it follows. Ye have ⟨p. 70⟩nourished your hearts, as in the day of slaughter. Or we may by a metonymy read it, as in the day of Feasting. So the Syriac, [Greek or Hebrew], which answers to the Hebrew [Greek or Hebrew], may be rendered. And so it alludes to the Solemn Feasts after Sacrifices, so common among the^(d) Gentiles as well as Jews. Their great days both of slaughter, and Feasting: For when the sacrifice was slain and offered, they Feasted on part, thereby to denote their communion with the God, they sacrificed unto. And so the sense is this: you nourish your sensual Appetites daily with Feasting, as those that feast on part of the Sacrifice, in the day of slaughter. O! how much doth this pampering of the flesh tend to the starving of the soul? And what is this but to make pleasures our God? So