The crucifying of the world

Moreover where the world is Crucified, A great deal of self-tormenting care and trouble of mind will be prevented. You will not live such a perplexed miserable life, as worldlings do. Even in your outward troubles you will have less inward trouble of soul, then they have in their abundance. They are like a man that is hanged up in chains alive, that gnaws upon his own flesh a while, and then must famish. What else do worldlings but tear and devour themselves with cares and sorrows, and scourge themselves with vexatious thoughts and troubles? If others did but the hundredth part as much to them, against their wills, as they wilfully do against themselves, they would account them the cruellest persons in the world. Paul saith of men that are in love with money, that while they covet after it, they do not only err from the faith, but also [Greek or Hebrew], they pierced themselves through and through, and stabbed their own hearts with many sorrows. A worldly mind and a melancholy are some kin: The daily work of both is self-vexation, and they are wilfully set upon the stabbing and destroying of themselves. But it is not thus with the Believer so far as he is mortified. Will he vex himself for nothing? Will he be troubled for the loss of that which he disregardeth? The dead world hath not power thus to disquiet his mind, and to toss it up and down in trouble. When it hath power on his body, it cannot reach his soul. As the soul of a dead man feeleth no pain, when the corpse is cut in pieces, or rotteth in the grave: So in a lower measure, the soul of a Believer, being in a sort as it were separated from the body by faith, and gone before to the heavenly inheritance, is freed from the sense of the calamities of the flesh. So far as we are Dead, we are insensible of sufferings.

MOreovor where the world is Crucified, A great deal of self-tormenting care and trouble of mind will be prevented. You will not live such a perplexed miserable life, as worldlings do. Even in your outward troubles you will have less inward trouble of soul, then they have in their abundance. They are like a man that is hanged up in chains alive, that gnaws upon his own flesh a while, and then must famish. What else do worldlings but tear and devour themselves with cares and sorrows, and scourge themselves with vexatious thoughts and troubles? If others did but the hundredth part as much to them, against their wills, as they wilfully do against themselves, they would account them the cruellest persons in the world. Paul saith of men that are in love with money, that while they covet after it, they do not only err from the faith, but also , they pierced themselves through and through, and stab'd their own hearts with many sorrows. A worldly mind and a melancholly are some kin: The daily work of both is self-vexation, and they are wilfully set upon the stabbing and destroying of themselves. But it is not thus with the Believer so far as he is mortified. Will he vex himself for nothing? Will he be troubled for the loss of that which he disregardeth? The dead world hath not power thus to disquiet his mind, and to toss it up and down in trouble. When it hath power on his body, it cannot reach his soul. As the soul of a dead man feeleth no pain, when the corpse is cut in pieces, or rotteth in the grave: So in a lower measure, the soul of a Believer, being in a sort as it were separated from the body by faith, and gone before to the heavenly inheritance, is freed from the sense of the calamities of the flesh. So far as we are Dead, we are insensible of sufferings.