DISCOURSE II.* * THE PLEASURES OF RELIGIOUS WISDOM. PROV. iii. 17. Her ways are ways of pleasantness. THE thing, of which these words are affirmed, is wisdom; a name by which the Spirit of God was here pleased to express to us religion, and thereby to tell the world, what before it was not aware of, and perhaps will not yet believe, that those two great things that so engross the desires and designs of both the nobler and ignobler sort of mankind, are to be found in religion; namely, wisdom and pleasure; and that the former is the direct way to the latter, as religion is to both. That pleasure is man's chiefest good (because indeed it is the perception of good that is properly pleasure) is an assertion most certainly true, though, under the common acceptance of it, not only false, but odious; for, according to this, pleasure and sensuality pass for terms equivalent; and therefore, he that takes it in this sense alters the subject of the discourse. Sensuality is indeed a part, or rather one kind of pleasure, such an one as it is; for pleasure, in general, is the consequent apprehension of a suitable object, [*"This charming discourse has in it whatever wit and wisdom can bring together."-Tatler, No. 205.-Ed.] suitably applied to a rightly disposed faculty, and so must be conversant both about the faculties of the body and of the soul respectively, as being the result of the fruitions belonging to both. Now amongst those many arguments, used to press upon men the exercise of religion, I know none that are like to be so successful, as those that answer and remove the prejudices that generally possess and bar up the hearts of men against it; amongst which there is none so prevalent in truth, though so little owned in pretence, as that it is an enemy to men's pleasures, that it bereaves them of all the sweets of converse, dooms them to an absurd and perpetual melancholy, designing to make the world nothing else but a great monastery; with which notion of religion, nature and reason seem to have great cause to be dissatisfied. For since God never created any faculty, but withal prepared for it a suitable object, and that in order to its gratification, can we think that religion was designed only for a contradiction to nature? And with the most irrational tyranny in the world, to tantalize and tie men up from enjoyment, in the midst of all the opportunities of enjoyment? To place men with the furious affections of hunger and thirst in the very bosom of plenty, and then to tell them, that the envy of Providence has sealed up every thing that is suitable, under the character of unlawful? For certainly, first to frame appetites fit to receive pleasure, and then to interdict them with a touch not, taste not, can be nothing else, than only to give them occasion to prey upon themselves, and so to keep men under the perpetual torment of an unsatisfied desire; a thing hugely contrary to the natural felicity of the creature, and consequently to the wisdom and goodness of the great Creator. He therefore that would persuade men to religion, both with art and efficacy, must found the persuasion of it upon this, that it interferes not with any rational pleasure, that it bids no body quit the enjoyment of any one thing that his reason can prove to him ought to be enjoyed. It is confessed, when through the cross circumstances of a man's temper or condition, the enjoyment of a pleasure would certainly expose him to a greater inconvenience, then religion bids him to quit it; that is, it bids him prefer the endurance of a lesser evil before a greater, and nature itself does no less. Religion therefore intrenches upon none of our privileges, invades none of our pleasures; it may indeed sometimes command us to change, but never totally to abjure them. But it is easily foreseen, that this discourse will in the very beginning of it be encountered by an argument from experience, and therefore not more obvious than strong; namely, that it cannot but be the greatest trouble in the world for a man thus, as it were, even to shake off himself, and to defy his nature, by a perpetual thwarting of his innate appetites and desires, which yet is absolutely necessary to a severe and impartial prosecution of a course of piety; nay, and we have this asserted also by the verdict of Christ himself, who still makes the disciplines of self-denial and the cross, those terrible blows to flesh and blood, the indispensable requisites to the being of his disciples; all which being so, would not he that should be so hardy as to attempt to persuade men to piety from the pleasures of it, be liable to that invective taunt from all mankind, that the Israelites gave to Moses: Wilt thou put out the eyes of this people? Wilt thou persuade us out of our first notions? Wilt thou demonstrate, that there is any delight in a cross, any comfort in violent abridgments, and, which is the greatest paradox of all, that the highest pleasure is to abstain from it? It must be confessed, that all arguments whatsoever against experience are fallacious; and therefore, in order to the clearing of the assertion laid down, I shall premise these two considerations. 1. That pleasure is in the nature of it a relative thing, and so imports a peculiar correspondence to the state and condition of the person to whom it is a pleasure. For as those who discourse of atoms, affirm, that there are atoms of all forms, some round, some triangular, some square, and the like; all which are continually in motion and never settle till they fall into a fit circumscription or place of the same figure; so there are the like great diversities of minds. and objects. Whence it is, that this object striking upon a mind thus or thus disposed, flies off, and rebounds without making any impression; but the same luckily happening upon another of a disposition, as it were, framed for it, is presently catched at, and greedily clasped into the nearest unions and embraces. 2. The other thing to be considered is this: That the estate of all men by nature is more or less different from that estate, into which the same persons do, or may pass, by the exercise of that which the philosophers called Virtue, and into which men are much more effectually and sublimely translated by that which we call Grace; that is, by the overpowering operation of God's Spirit; the difference of which two estates consists in this; that in the former, the sensitive appetites domineer; in the latter, the supreme faculty of the soul, called Reason, sways the sceptre, and acts the whole man above the irregular demands of appetite and affection. That the distinction between these two is not a mere figment, framed only to serve an hypothesis in divinity; and that there is no man but is really under one, before he is under the other, I shall prove, by showing a reason why it is so, or rather indeed why it cannot but be so. And it is this; because every man in the beginning of his life, for several years, is capable only of exercising his sensitive faculties and desires, the use of reason not showing itself till about the seventh year of his age; and then at length but, as it were, dawn Now it ing in very imperfect essays and discoveries. being most evident, that every power grows stronger and stronger by exercise, is it any wonder at all, when a man for the space of his first six years, and those the years of ductility and impression, has been wholly ruled by the propensions of sense, at that age very eager and impetuous, that then, after all, his reason, beginning to exert itself, finds the man prepossessed and under another power? So that it has much ado, by many little steps and gradual conquests, to recover its prerogative and so to subject the whole man to its dictates; the difficulty of which is not conquered by some men all their days. And this is one true ground of the difference between a state of nature and a state of grace, which some are pleased to scoff at in divinity, who think that they confute all that they laugh at, not knowing that it may be solidly evinced by mere reason and philosophy. These two considerations being premised, all that objection levelled against the foregoing assertion is very easily resolvable. For there is no doubt, but a man, while he resigns himself up to the brutish guidance of sense and appetite, has no relish at all for the spiritual, refined delights of a soul clarified by grace and virtue. The pleasures of an angel can never be the pleasures of a hog. But this is the thing that we contend for; that a man having once advanced himself to a state of superiority over the control of his inferior appetites, finds an infinitely more solid and sublime pleasure in the delights proper to his reason, than the same person had ever conveyed to him by the bare ministry of his senses. His taste is absolutely changed, and therefore that which pleased him formerly becomes flat and insipid to his appetite, now grown more masculine and severe. For as age and maturity passes a real and a marvellous change upon the diet and recreations of the same person, so that no man, at the years and vigour |