if we were debtors to our own flesh, to fulfil its lusts, and to please our own appetites, fancies, and tempers, instead of remembering that we are debtors to God, who made us, and blesses us all day long;—­debtors to our Lord Jesus Christ, who bought us with His own blood, that we might please Him and obey Him;—­debtors to God’s Holy Spirit, who puts into our minds good desires;—­debtors to our baptism vows, in which we were consecrated to God, that He, and not this flesh of ours, might be our Master for ever?

This is sin; to give way to those selfish and evil tempers, against which I warned you in the beginning of my sermon, and which, if any man indulges in them, will surely and steadily, bit by bit, kill that man’s soul within him, and leave the man dead in trespasses and sins, while his body walks this earth.

My friends, do not fancy these are merely farfetched words out of a book, made to sound difficult and terrible in order to frighten you.  God forbid!  When Scripture says this, it speaks a plain and simple truth, and one which I know to be a truth from experience.  I speak that which I know, and testify that which I have seen.  I have seen (and what sadder or more fearful sight?) dead men and dying walk this earth in flesh and blood; men busy enough, shrewd enough upon some points, priding themselves, perhaps, upon their cleverness and knowledge of the world, of whom all one could say was, The man is dead; the man is lost, unless God brings him to life again by His quickening Spirit:  for goodness is dead in him; the powers of his soul are dead in him; the hope of being a better man is dead in him; all that God wishes to see him be and do, is dead; God’s likeness and glory in him is dead:  he thinks himself wise, and he is a fool in God’s sight; for he sees not God’s law, which is the only wisdom:  he thinks himself strong, but he is utterly weak and helpless; for he is the slave of his own tempers, the slave of his own foul lust, the slave of his own pride and vanity, the slave of his own covetousness.  Oh, my friends, people are apt to be afraid of what they call seeing a ghost—­that is, a spirit without a body:  they fancy that it would be a very shocking thing to meet one; but as for me, I know a far more dreadful sight; and that is, a careless and a hardened sinner—­a body without a spirit.  Which is uglier and ghastlier—­a spirit without a body, or a body without a spirit?  And yet such one meets, I dare not think how often.

What sadder sight, if you recollect that men need not be thus; that God hates seeing them thus; that they become thus, and die down in sin, in spite of God, with all heaven above, and God the Lord thereof, crying to them, Why wilt thou die?  What sadder sight?  How many have I seen, living, to all intents and purposes, as if they had no souls; as if there were no God, no Law of God, no Right, no Wrong; caring for nothing, perhaps, but drink and bad women; or caring for nothing but scraping together