Of Chastity
Reader, stay, and read not the advices of the following section,
unless thou hast a chaste spirit, or desirest to be chaste, or at least art apt
to consider whether you ought or no. For there are some spirits so atheistical,
and some so wholly possessed with a spirit of uncleanness, that they turn the
most prudent and chaste discourses into dirty and filthy apprehensions; like
choleric stomachs, changing their very cordials and medicines into bitterness,
and, in a literal sense, turning the grace of God into wantonness. They study
cases of conscience in the matter of carnal sins, not to avoid, but to learn
ways how to offend God and pollute their own spirits; and search their houses
with a sunbeam, that they may be instructed in all the corners of nastiness. I
have used all the care I could in the following periods, that I might neither
be wanting to assist those that need it, nor yet minister any occasion of fancy
or vainer thoughts to those that need them not. If any man will snatch the pure
taper from my hand and hold it to the devil, he will only burn his own fingers,
but shall not rob me of the reward of my care and good intention, since I have
taken heed how to express the following duties, and given him caution how to
read them.
Chastity is that duty which was mystically intended by God in the
law of circumcision. It is the circumcision of the heart, the cutting off all
superfluity of naughtiness, and a suppression of all irregular desires in the
matters of sensual or carnal pleasure. I call all desires irregular and sinful
that are not sanctified: 1. by the holy institution, or by being within the
protection of marriage; 2. by being within the order of nature; 3. by being
within the moderation of Christian modesty. Against the first are fornication,
adultery, and all voluntary pollutions of either sex. Against the second are
all unnatural lusts and incestuous mixtures. Against the third is all
immoderate use of permitted beds, concerning meats and drinks, there being no
certain degree of frequency or intention prescribed to all persons; but it is
to be ruled as the other actions of a man, by proportion to the end, by the
dignity of the person in the honour and severity of being a Christian, and by
other circumstances of which I am to give account.
Chastity is that grace which forbids and restrains all these,
keeping the body and soul pure in that state in which it is placed by God,
whether of the single or of the married life; concerning which our duty is thus
described by St. Paul: ‘For this is the will of God, even your sanctification,
that ye should abstain from fornication; that every one of you should know how
to possess his vessel in sanctification and honour, not in the lust of
concupiscence, even as the Gentiles which know not God.’
Chastity is either abstinence or continence. Abstinence is that
of virgins or widows; continence of married persons. Chaste marriage are
honourable and pleasing to God; widowhood is pitiable in its solitariness and
loss, but amiable and comely when it is adorned with gravity and purity, and
not sullied with remembrances of the past license, nor with present desires of
returning to a second bed. But virginity is a life of angels, the enamel of the
soul, the huge advantage of religion, the great opportunity for the retirements
of devotion;
and, being empty of cares it is full of prayers; being unmingled with the
world, it is apt to converse with God; and by not feeling the warmth of a too
forward and indulgent nature, flames out with holy fires till it be burning
like the cherubim and the most ecstasied order of holy and unpolluted spirits.
Natural virginity, of itself, is not a state more acceptable to
God; but that which is chosen and voluntary, in order to the conveniences of
religion and separation from worldly encumbrances, is therefore better than the
married life, not that it is more holy, but that it is a freedom from cares, an
opportunity to spend more time in spiritual employments. It is not allayed with
businesses and attendances upon lower affairs; and if it be a chosen condition
to these ends, it containeth in it a victory over lusts, and greater desires of
religion and self-denial, and therefore is more excellent than the married
life, in that degree in which it hath greater religion, and a greater
mortification, a less satisfaction of natural desires, and a greater fulness of
the spiritual: and just so is to expect that little coronet, or special reward,
which God hath prepared (extraordinary and besides the great crown of all
faithful souls) for those ‘who have not defiled themselves with women, but
follow the virgin Lamb for ever.’
But some married persons, even in their marriage, do better
please God than some virgins in their state of virginity: they, by giving great
example of conjugal affection, by preserving their faith unbroken, by educating
children in the fear of God, by patience, and contentedness, and holy thoughts,
and the exercise of virtues proper to that state, do not only please God, but
do in a higher degree than those virgins whose piety is not answerable to their
great opportunities and advantages.
However, married persons, and widows, and virgins, are all
servants of God, and co-heirs in the inheritance of Jesus, if they live within
the restraints and laws of their particular estate, chastely, temperately,
justly, and rigorously.
The evil Consequent of Uncleanness.
The blessings and proper effects of chastity we shall best
understand, by reckoning the evils of uncleanness and carnality.
1. Uncleanness, of all vices, is the most shameful. ‘The eye of
the adulterer waiteth for the twilight, saying, No eye shall see me; and
disguiseth his face. In the dark they dig through houses, which they had marked
for themselves in the day-time; they knew not the light, for the morning is to
them as the shadow of death. He is swift as the waters; their portion is cursed
in the earth; he beholdeth not the way of the vineyards.’
Shame is the eldest daughter of uncleanness.
2. The appetites of uncleanness are full of cares and trouble,
and its fruitation is sorrow and repentance. The way of the adulterer is hedged
with thorns;
full of fears and jealousies, burning desires and impatient waitings,
tediousness of delay, and sufferance of affronts and amazements of discovery.
3. Most of its kinds are of that condition that they involve the
ruin of two souls, and he that is a fornicator or adulterous steals the soul,
as well as dishonours the body of his neighbour; and so it becomes like the sin
of falling Lucifer, who brought a part of the stars with his tail from heaven.
4. Of all carnal sins, it is that alone which the devil takes
delight to imitate and counterfeit; communicating with witches and impure
persons in the corporal act, but in this only.
5. Uncleanness, with all its kinds, is a vice which hath a
professed enmity against the body, ‘Every sin which a man doth is without the
body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.’
6. Uncleanness is hugely contrary to the spirit of government
by embasing the spirit of a man, making if effeminate, sneaking, soft, and
foolish, without courage, without confidence. David felt this after his folly
with Bathsheba; he fell to unkingly acts and stratagems to hide the crime; and
he did nothing but increase it, and remained timorous and poor spirited, till
he prayed to God once more to establish him with a free and a princely spirit.
And no superior dare strictly observe discipline upon his charge, if he hath
let himself loose to the shame of incontinence.
7.The gospel hath added two arguments against uncleanness which
were never before used, nor, indeed, could be; since God hath given the Holy
Spirit to them that are baptized, and rightly confirmed and entered into
covenant with him, our bodies are made temples of the Holy Ghost, in which he
dwells; and therefore uncleanness is sacrilege, and defiles a temple. It is St.
Paul’s argument, ‘Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost?’
and ‘He that defiles a temple him will God destroy.
Therefore glorify God in your bodies; that is, flee fornication. To which, for
the likeness of the argument, add, that our bodies are members of Christ; and
therefore God forbid that we should take the members of Christ and make them
members of a harlot.’ So that uncleanness dishonours Christ, and dishonours the
Holy Spirit: it is a sin against God, and in this sense, a sin against the Holy
Ghost.
8. The next special argument which the gospel ministers,
especially against adultery, and for the preservation of the purity of
marriage, is, that marriage is by Christ hallowed into a mystery, to signify
the sacramental and mystical union of Christ and his church.
He, therefore, that breaks this knot, which the church and their mutual faiths
have tied, and Christ hath knit up into a mystery dishonours a great rite of
Christianity, of high, spiritual, and excellent signification.
9. St. Gregory reckons uncleanness to be the parent of these
monsters, blindness of mind, inconsideration, precipitancy, or giddiness in
actions, self-love, hatred of God, love of the present pleasures, a despite or
despair of the joys of religion here, and of heaven hereafter. Whereas, a pure
mind in a chaste body is the mother of wisdom and deliberation, sober counsels
and ingenuous actions, open deportment and a sweet carriage, sincere principles
and unprejudicate understanding, love of God and self-denial, peace and
confidence, holy prayers and spiritual comfort, and a pleasure of spirit
infinitely greater than the sottish and beastly pleasures of unchastity. “For
to overcome pleasure is the greatest pleasure; and no victory is greater than
that which is gotten over our lusts and filthy inclinations.”
10. Add to all these, the public dishonesty and disreputation
that all the nations of the world have cast upon adulterous and unhallowed
embraces. Abimelech, to the men of Gerar, made it death to meddle with the wife
of Isaac, and Judah condemned Thamar to be burnt for her adulterous conception;
and God, besides the law made to put the adulterous person to death, did
constitute a settled and constant miracle to discover the adultery of a
suspected woman, that her bowels should burst with drinking the waters of
jealousy. The Egyptian law was to cut off the nose of the adulteress, and the
offending part of the adulterer. The Locrians put out both the adulterer’s
eyes. The Germans (as Tacitus reports) placed the adulteress amidst her
kindred, naked, and shaved her head, and caused her husband to beat her with
clubs through the city. The Gortynaeans crowned the man with wool, to shame him
for his effeminacy; and the Cumani caused the woman to ride upon an ass, naked,
and hooted at, and for ever after called her by an appellative of scorn, “a
rider upon the ass.” All nations, barbarous and evil, agreeing in their general
design, of rooting so dishonest and shameful a vice from under heaven.
The middle ages of the church were not pleased that the
adulteress should be put to death: but in the primitive ages, the civil laws by
which Christians were then governed gave leave to the wronged husband to kill
his adulterous wife if he took her in the fact; but because it was a privilege
indulged to men, rather than a direct detestation of the crime, a consideration
of the injury rather than of the uncleanness, therefore it was soon altered;
but yet hath caused an inquiry, Whether is worse, the adultery of the man or
the woman?
The resolution of which case, in order to our present affair, is
thus: in respect of the person, the fault is greater in a man than in a woman,
who is of a more pliant and easy spirit, and weaker understanding, and hath
nothing to supply the unequal strengths of men, but the defensative of a
passive nature and armour of modesty, which is the natural ornament of that
sex. “And it is unjust that the man should demand chastity and severity from
his wife which himself will not observe towards her,
said the good Emperor Antoninus: it is as if the man should persuade his wife
to fight against those enemies to which he had yielded himself a prisoner.
In respect of the effects and evil consequents, the adultery of the woman is
worse, as bringing bastardly into a family, and disinherisons or great injuries
to the lawful children, and infinite violations of peace, and murders, and
divorces, and all the effects of rage and madness. But in respect of the crime,
and as relating to God, they are equal, intolerable, and damnable: and since it
is no more permitted to men to have many wives than to women to have many husbands,
and that in this respect their privilege is equal, their sin is so too. And
this is the case of the question in Christianity. And the church anciently
refused to admit such persons to the holy communion, until they had done seven
years penances in fasting, in sackcloth, in severe inflictions and instruments
of charity and sorrow, according to the discipline of those ages.
Acts of Chastity in general.
The actions and proper office of the grace of chastity in
general, are these:
1. To resist all unchaste thoughts: at no hand entertaining
pleasure in the unfruitful fancies and remembrances of uncleanness, although no
definite desire or resolution be entertained.
2. At no hand to entertain any desire, or any fantastic
imaginative loves, though by shame, or disability, or other circumstance, they
be restrained from act.
3. To have a chaste eye and hand:
for it is all one with what part of the body we commit adultery: and if a man
lets his eye loose and enjoys the lust of that, he is an adulterer. Look not
upon a woman to lust after her. And supposing all the other members restrained,
yet if the eye be permitted to lust, the man can no otherwise be called chaste
than he can be called severe and mortified that sits all day long seeing plays
and revellings, and out of greediness to fill his eye, neglects his belly.
There are some vessels which, if you offer to lift by the belly or bottom, you
cannot stir them, but are soon removed if you take them by the ears. It matters
not with which of your members you are taken and carried off from your duty and
severity.
4. To have a heart and mind chaste and pure; that is, detesting
all uncleanness; disliking all its motions, past actions, circumstances,
likenesses, discourses: and this ought to be the chastity of virgins and
widows, of old persons and eunuchs especially, and generally of all men,
according to their several necessities.
5. To discourse chastely and purely;
with great care declining all indecencies of language, chastening the tongue
and restraining it with grace, as vapours of wine are restrained with a bunch
of myrrh.
6. To disapprove by an after-act all involuntary and natural
pollutions: for, if a man delights in having suffered any natural pollution, and
with pleasure remembers it, he chooses that which was in itself involuntary;
and that which, being natural, was innocent, becoming voluntary, is made
sinful.
7. They that have performed these duties and parts of chastity
will certainly abstain from all exterior actions of uncleanness, those noonday
and midnight devils, those lawless and ungodly worshippings of shame and
uncleanness, whose birth is in trouble, whose growth is in folly, and whose end
is in shame.
But besides these general acts of chastity which are common to
all states of men and women,there are some few things to the severals.
Acts of Virginal Chastity.
1. Virgins must remember, that the virginity of the body is only
excellent in order to the purity of the soul; who therefore must consider, that
since they are in the some measure in a condition like that of angels, it is
their duty to spend much of their time in angelical employment: for in the same
degree that virgins live more spiritually than other persons, in the same
degree is their virginity a more excellent state. But else, it is no better
than that of involuntary or constrained eunuchs; a misery and a trouble, or
else a mere privation, as much without excellency as without mixture.
2. Virgins must contend for a singular modesty; whose first part
must be an ignorance in the distinction of sexes, or their proper instruments;
or if they accidentally be instructed in that, it must be supplied with an
inadvertency or neglect of all thoughts and remembrances of such difference;
and the following parts of it must be pious and chaste thoughts, holy language,
and modest carriage.
3. Virgins must be retired and unpublic: for all freedom and
looseness of society is a violence done to virginity, not in its natural, but
in its moral capacity; that is, it loses part of its severity, strictness, and
opportunity of advantages, by publishing that person whose work is religion,
whose company is angels, whose thoughts must dwell in heaven, and separate from
all mixtures of the world.
4. Virgins have a peculiar obligation to charity: for this is the
virginity of the soul; as purity, integrity, and separation is of the body:
which doctrine we are taught by St. Peter: ‘Seeing ye have purified your souls
in obeying the truth through the Spirit unto unfeigned love of the brethren,
see that ye love one another with a pure heart, fervently.’
For a virgin that consecrates her body to God, and pollutes her spirit with
rage, or impatience, or inordinate anger, gives him what he most hates, a most
foul and defiled soul.
5. These rules are necessary for virgins that offer that state to
God, and mean not to enter into the state of marriage; for they that only wait
the opportunity of a convenient change are to steer themselves by the general
rules of chastity.
Rules for Widows or Vidual Chastity.
For widows, the fontanel of whose desires hath been opened by the
former permissions of the marriage-bed, they must remember,
1. That God hath now restrained the former license, bound up
their eyes, and shut up their heart into a narrower compass, and hath given
them sorrow to be a bridle to their desires. A widow must be a mourner; and she
that is not cannot so well secure the chastity of her proper state.
2. It is against public honesty to marry another man so long as
she is with child by her former husband: and of the same fame it is, in a
lesser proportion, to marry within the year of mourning; but anciently it was
infamous for her to marry till by common account the body was dissolved into
its first principle of earth.
3. A widow must restrain her memory and her fancy, not recalling
or recounting her former permissions and freer licenses with any present
delight: for then she opens that slice which her husband’s death and her own
sorrow have shut up.
4. A widow that desires her widowhood should be a state pleasing
to God, must spend her time as devoted virgins should, in fastings and prayers
and charity.
5. A widow must forbid herself to sue those temporal solaces,
which in her former estate were innocent, but now are dangerous.
Rules for Married Persons, or Matrimonial Chastity.
Concerning married persons, besides the keeping of their mutual
faith and contract with each other, these particulars are useful to be
observed:
1. Although their mutual endearments are safe within the
protection of marriage, yet they that have wives or husbands must be as though
they had them not; that is, they must have an affection greater to each other
than they have to any person in the world, but not greater than they have to
God: but that they be ready to part with all interest in each other’s person
rather than sin against God.
2. In their permissions and license they must be sure to observe
the order of nature, and the ends of God. “He is an ill husband that uses his
wife as a man treats a harlot,” having no other end but pleasure. Concerning
which our best rule is, that although in this, as in eating and drinking, there
is an appetite to be satisfied which cannot be done without pleasing that
desire, yet, since that desire and satisfaction was intended by nature for
other ends, they should never be separate from those ends, but always be joined
with all or one of these ends, “with a desire of children, or to avoid
fornication, or to lighten and ease the cares and sadnesses of household
affairs, or to endear each other: “but never with a purpose, either in act or
desire, to separate the sensuality from these ends which hallow it. Onan did separate
his act from it proper end, and so ordered his embraces that his wife should
not conceive, and God punished him.
3. Married persons must keep such modesty and decency of treating
each other, that they never force themselves into high and violent lusts, with
arts and misbecoming devices; always remembering, that those mixtures are most
innocent which are most simple and most natural, most orderly and most safe.
4. It is a duty of matrimonial chastity to be restrained and
temperate in the use of their lawful pleasures: concerning which, although no
universal rule can antecedently be given to all persons, any more than to all
bodies one proportion of meat and drink, yet married persons are to estimate
the degree of their license according to the following proportions. 1. That it
be moderate, so as to consist with health. 2. That it be so ordered as not to
be too expensive of time, that precious opportunity of working out our
salvation. 3. That when duty is demanded, it be always paid (so far as is in
our powers and election) according to the foregoing measures. 4. That it be
with a temperate affection, without violent transporting desires, or too
sensual applications. Concerning which a man is to make judgment by proportion
to other actions, and the severities of his religion, and the sentences of
sober and wise persons; always remembering, that marriage is a provision for supply
of the natural necessities of the body, not for the artificial and procured
appetites of the mind. And it is a sad truth, that many married persons,
thinking that the flood-gates of liberty are set wide open without measures or
restraint, (so they sail in that channel,) have felt the final rewards of
intemperance and lust, by their unlawful using of lawful permissions. Only let
each of them be temperate, and both of them be modest. Socrates was wont to
say,that those women to whom nature hath not been indulgent in good features
and colours, should make it up themselves with excellent manners; and those who
were beautiful and comely should be careful that so fair a body be not polluted
with unhandsome usages. To which Plutarch adds, that a wife, if she be
unhandsome, should consider how extremely ugly she would be if she wanted
modesty: but if she be handsome, let her think how gracious that beauty would
be if she super adds chastity.
5. Married persons by consent are to abstain from their mutual
entertainments at solemn times of devotion; not as a duty of itself necessary,
but as being the most proper act of purity, which, in their condition, they can
present to God, and being a good advantage for attending their preparation to
the solemn duty and their demeanour in it. It is St. Paul’s counsel, that ‘by
consent for a time they should abstain, that they may give themselves to
fasting and prayer.’ And though when Christians did receive the holy communion
every day, it is certain they did not abstain but had children; yet, when the
communion was more seldom, they did with religion abstain from the marriage-bed
during the time of their solemn preparatory devotions, as anciently they did
from eating and drinking, till the solemnity of the day was past.
6. It were well if married persons would, in their penitential
prayers, and in their general confessions, suspect themselves, and accordingly
ask a general pardon for all their indecencies, and more passionate
applications of themselves in the offices of marriage; that what is lawful and
honourable in its kind may not be sullied with imperfect circumstances; or, if
it be, it may be made clean again by the interruption and recallings of such a
repentance, of which such uncertain parts of action are capable.
But, because of all the dangers of a Christian, none more
pressing and troublesome than the temptations to lust, no enemy more dangerous
than that of the flesh, no accounts greater than what we have to reckon for at
the audit of concupiscence, therefore it concerns all that would be safe from
this death to arm themselves by the following rules, to prevent or to cure all
the wounds of our flesh made by the poisoned arrows of lust.
Remedies against Uncleanness.
1. When a temptation of lust assaults thee, do not resist it by
heaping up arguments against it and disputing with it; considering its offers
and its dangers, but fly from it;
that is, think not at all of it, lay aside all consideration concerning it, and
turn away from it by any severe and laudable thought of business. Saint Jerome
very wittingly reproves the Gentile superstition, who pictured the
virgin-deities armed with a shield and lance, as if chastity could not be
defended without war and direct contention. No; this enemy is to be treated
otherwise. If you hear it speak, though but to dispute with it, it ruins you;
and the very arguments you go about to answer, leave a relish upon the tongue.
A man may be burned if he goes near the fire, though but to quench his house;
and by handling pitch,though but to draw it from your clothes, you defile your
fingers.
2. Avoid idleness, and fill up all the spaces of thy time with
severs and useful employment; for lust usually creeps in at those emptinesses
where the soul is unemployed, and the body is at ease. For no easy, healthful,
and idle person was ever chaste, if he could be tempted. But of all employments
bodily labour is most useful, and of greatest benefit for the driving away the
devil.
3. Give no entertainment to the beginnings, the first motions and
secret whispers of the spirit of impurity: for if you totally suppress it, it
dies; if
you permit the furnace to breathe its smoke and flame out at any vent, it will
rage to the consumption of the whole. This cockatrice is soonest crushed in the
shell; but if it grows, it turns to a serpent, and a dragon, and a devil.
4. Corporal mortification, and hard usages of our body, hath, by
all ages of the church, been accounted a good instrument, and of some profit
against the spirit of fornication. A spare diet, and a thin course table,
seldom refreshment, frequent fasts, not violent, and interrupted with returns
to ordinary feeding, but constantly little, unpleasant, of wholesome but
sparing nourishment: for by such cutting off the provisions of vectorial, we
shall weaken the strengths of our enemy. To which if we add lyings upon the
ground, painful postures in prayer, reciting our devotions with our arms
extended at full length, like Moses praying against Amalek, or our blessed
Saviour hanging upon his painful bed of sorrows, the cross, and (if the lust be
upon us, and sharply tempting) by inflicting any smart to overthrow the
strongest passion by the most violent pain, we shall find great ease for the
present, and the resolution and apt sufferance against the future danger. And
this was St. Paul’s remedy. ‘I bring my body under;’ he used some rudenesses
towards it. But it was a great nobleness of chastity which St. Jerome reports
of a son of the king of Nicomedia,
who, being tempted upon flowers and a perfumed bed with a soft violence, but
yet tied down to the temptation, and solicited with circumstances of Asian
luxury by an impure courtesan, lest the easiness of his posture should abuse
him, spit out his tongue into her face; to represent that no virtue hath cost
the saints so much as this of chastity.
5. Fly from all occasions, temptations, loosenesses of company,
balls and revellings, indecent mixtures of wanton dancings, idle talk, private
society with strange women, starings upon a beauteous face, the company of
women that are singers, amorous gestures, garish and wanton dresses, feasts and
liberty, banquets and perfumes,
wine and strong drink, which are made to persecute chastity; some of these being
the very prologues to lust, and the most innocent of them being but like
condited or pickled mushrooms, which if carefully corrected and seldom tasted
may be harmless, but can never do good: ever remembering, that it is easier to
die for chastity than to live with it; and the hangman could not extort a
consent from some persons from whom a lover would have entreated it. For the
glory of chastity will easily overcome the rudeness of fear and violence; but
easiness and softness and smooth temptations creep in, and, like the sun, make
a maiden lay by her veil and robe, which persecution, like the northern wind,
makes her hold fast and clap close about her.
6. He that will secure his chastity must first cure his pride and
his rage. For oftentimes lust is the punishment of a proud man, to tame the
vanity of his pride by the shame and affronts of unchastity; and the same
intemperate heat that makes anger does enkindle lust.
7. If thou beest assaulted with an unclean spirit, trust not
thyself alone; but run forth into company whose reverence and modesty may
suppress, or whose society may divert thy thoughts: and a perpetual witness of
thy conversation is of especial use against this vice, which evaporates in the
open air like camphier, being impatient of light and witnesses.
8. Use frequent and earnest prayers to the King of purities, that
first of virgins, the eternal God, who is of an essential purity, that he would
be pleased to reprove and cast out the unclean spirit. For beside the blessings
of prayer by way of reward, it hath a natural virtue to restrain this vice:
because a prayer against it is an unwillingness to act it; and so long as we
heartily pray against it our desires are secured, and then this devil hath no
power. This was St. Paul’s other remedy: ‘For this cause I besought the Lord
thrice.’ And there is much reason and much advantage in the use of this
instrument; because the main thing that in this affair is to be secured is a
man’s mind. He that goes about to cure lust by bodily exercises alone(as St.
Paul’s phrase is) or mortifications, shall find them sometimes instrumental to
it, and incitations of sudden desires, but always insufficient and of little
profit: but he that hath a chaste mind shall find his body apt enough to take
laws; and let it do its worst, it cannot make a sin, and in its greatest
violence can but produce a little natural uneasiness, not so much trouble as a
severe fasting-day, or a hard night’s lodging upon boards. If a man be hungry
he must eat; and if he be thirsty he must drink in some convenient time, or
else he dies; but if the body be rebellious, so the mind be chaste, let it do
its worst, if you resolve perfectly not to satisfy it, you can receive no great
evil by it. Therefore the proper cure is by application to the spirit and
securities of the mind, which can no way so well be secured as by frequent and
fervent prayers, and sober resolutions, and severe discourses. Therefore,
9. Hither bring in succor from consideration of the Divine
presence and of his holy angels, mediation of death, and the passions of Christ
upon the cross, imitation of his purities, and of the Virgin Mary, his
unspotted and holy mother, and of such eminent saints, who, in their
generations, were burning and shining lights, unmingled with such uncleannesses,
which defile the soul, and who now follow the Lamb, withersoever he goes.
10. These remedies are of universal efficacy, in all cases
extraordinary and violent; but in ordinary and common, the remedy which God
hath provided, that is, honourable marriage,
hath a natural efficacy, besides a virtue by Divine blessing, to cure the
inconveniences which otherwise might afflict persons temperate and sober.