A treatise of original sin ... proving that it is

2. These sudden motions of sin, sometimes arise from the imagination and fancy of a man. And truly, how often do displeasing and sinful imaginations disturb the peace and quiet of thy soul? Is it not thy fancy thou complainest of? how volatique and roving is that? It stayeth no where, it is not fixed in holy duties. It is like a market place, where there is a crowd of people, so that the imagination doth very often help this original lust and sin to bring forth. What a quiet, serene and blessed life should a man live, if his imagination could be kept in an holy fixed frame, if he could bid it go, and it goeth, do this, and it did it?

2. These suddain motions of sinne, sometimes arise from the imagination and fancy of a man. And truly, how often do displeasing and sinful imaginations disturb the peace and quiet of thy soul? Is it not thy fancy thou complainest of? how volatique and roving is that? It stayeth no where, it is not fixed in holy duties. It is like a market place, where there is a croud of people, so that the imagination doth very often help this original lust and sinne to bring forth. What a quiet, srene and blessed life should a man live, if his imagination could be kept in an holy fixed frame, if he could bid it go, and it goeth, do this, and it did it?

3. The perturbation of the body by distempers, that many times causeth this original sin to be working in us: Though the body be corporeal, and the soul a spirit, and so cannot act physically upon it; yet because they are both the essential parts of a man immediately united together, there is by sympathy an acting and affecting of one another, especially the body being instrumental to the soul in many operations: Hence it is when that is disturbed and indisposed, ⟨p. 467⟩the soul also is hindered in its operations, and therefore from the distemper of the body we are easily moved to anger, to sorrow, to fear, to lusts: So that the motions of the soul are many times according to the motions of the body, as Gerson instanceth (Compend. Theol.) in a simile, which he saith some use concerning the water, when the Sun-beams are upon it, as the water moveth or danceth up and down, so do the Sun-beams which are upon the water. Thus as the body is in any commotion, so the soul which is more immediately united to the body, then the beams of the Sun are to the water, doth work according as it finds this instrument disposed.