Which, by the way, is the most pregnant demonstration in the world, of that self-condemning sentence, that is perpetually sounding in every great sinner's breast; and of that inward, grating dislike of the very thing he practises, that he should abhor to see the same in any one, whose good he nearly tenders, and whose person he wishes well to. But if now, on the other side, we should chance to find a father corrupting his son, or a mother debauching her daughter, as (God knows such monsters have been seen within the four seas) we must not charge this barely upon an high predominance of vice in these persons, but much more upon a peculiar anomaly and baseness of nature: if the name of nature may be allowed to that which seems to be an utter cashiering of it; a deviation from, and a contradiction to, the common principles of humanity. For this is such a disposition, as strips the father of the man; as makes him sacrifice his children to Moloch; and as much outdo the cruelty of a cannibal or a Saturn, as it is more barbarous and unhuman to damn a child than to devour him. We sometimes read and hear of monstrous births, but we may often see a greater monstrosity in educations: thus when a father has begot a man, he trains him up into a beast, making even his own house a stews, a bordel, and a school of lewdness, to instill the rudiments of vice into the unwary, flexible years of his poor children, poisoning their tender minds with the irresistible, authentic venom of his base example; so that all the instruction they find within their father's walls shall be only to be disciplined to an earlier practice of sin, to be catechized into all the mysteries. of iniquity, and, at length, confirmed in a mature,

grown up, incorrigible state of debauchery. And this some parents call a teaching their children to know the world, and to study men: thus leading them, as it were, by the hand, through all the forms and classes, all the varieties and modes of villainy, till at length they make them ten times more the children of the devil, than of themselves. Now, I say, if the unparalleled wickedness of the age should at any time cast us upon such blemishes of mankind as these, who, while they thus treat their children, should abuse and usurp the name of parents, by assuming it to themselves; let us not call them by the low, diminutive term or title of sinful, wicked, or ungodly men; but let us look upon them as so many prodigious exceptions from our common nature, as so many portentous animals, like the strange unnatural productions of Africa, and fit to be publicly shewn, were they not unfit to be seen: for certainly where a child finds his own parents his perverters, he cannot be so properly said to be born, as to be damned into the world; and better were it for him by far to have been unborn, and unbegot, than to come to ask blessing of those whose conversation breathes nothing but contagion and a curse. So impossible, and so much a paradox is it, for any parent to impart to his child his blessing and his vice too.

And thus I have despatched the first general thing proposed for the handling of the words, and shewn in five several particulars, what it is that brings a man to such a disposition of mind, as to take pleasure in other men's sins. I proceed now to the

Second, which is, To shew the reasons why a man's being disposed to do so, comes to be attended with

such an extraordinary guilt. And the first shall be taken from this, that naturally there is no motive to induce or tempt a man to this way of sinning. And this is a most certain truth, that the lesser the temptation is, the greater is the sin. For in every sin, by how much the more free the will is in its choice, by so much is the act the more sinful. And where there is nothing to importune, urge, or provoke it to any act, there is so much an higher and perfecter degree of freedom about that act. For albeit the will is not capable of being compelled to any of its actings, yet it is capable of being made to act with more or less difficulty, according to the different impressions it receives from motives or objects. If the object be extremely pleasing, and apt to gratify it; there, though the will has still a power of refusing it, yet it is not without some difficulty: upon which account it is, that men are so strongly carried out to, and so hardly took off from, the practice of vice; namely, because the sensual pleasure arising from it is still importuning and drawing them to it.

But now, from whence springs this pleasure? Is it not from the gratification of some desire founded in nature? An irregular gratification it is indeed very often; yet still the foundation of it is, and must be, something natural: so that the sum of all is this, that the naturalness of a desire is the cause that the satisfaction of it is pleasure, and pleasure importunes the will; and that which importunes the will, puts a difficulty in the will's refusing or forbearing it. Thus drunkenness is an irregular satisfaction of the appetite of thirst; uncleanness an unlawful gratification of the appetite of procreation; and covetousness

a boundless, unreasonable pursuit of the principle of self-preservation. So that all these are founded in some natural desire, and are therefore pleasurable, and upon that account tempt, solicit, and entice the will. In a word, there is hardly any one vice or sin of direct and personal commission, but what is the irregularity and abuse of one of those two grand natural principles; namely, either that which inclines a man to preserve himself, or that which inclines him to please himself.

But now, what principle, faculty, or desire, by which nature projects either its own pleasure or preservation, is or can be gratified by another man's personal pursuit of his own vice? It is evident, that all the pleasure that naturally can be received from a vicious action, can immediately and personally affect none but him who does it; for it is an application of the pleasing object only to his own sense; and no man feels by another man's senses. And therefore the delight that a man takes from another's sin, can be nothing else but a fantastical, preternatural complacency arising from that which he has really no sense or feeling of. It is properly a love of vice, as such; a delighting in sin for its own sake; and is a direct imitation, or rather an exemplification of the malice of the devil; who delights in seeing those sins committed, which the very condition of his nature renders him uncapable of committing himself. For the devil can neither drink, nor whore, nor play the epicure, though he enjoys the pleasures of all these at a second hand, and by malicious approbation. If a man plays the thief, says Solomon, and steals to satisfy his hunger, Prov. vi. 30. though it cannot wholly excuse the

fact, yet it sometimes extenuates the guilt. And we know there are some corrupt affections in the soul of man, that urge and push him on to their satisfaction, with such an impetuous fury, that when we see a man overborne and run down by them, considering the frailty of human nature, we cannot but pity the person, while we abhor the crime. It being like one ready to drink poison, rather than to die with thirst.

But when a man shall, with a sober, sedate, diabolical rancour, look upon and enjoy himself in the sight of his neighbour's sin and shame, and secretly hug himself upon the ruins of his brother's virtue, and the dishonours of his reason, can he plead the instigation of any appetite in nature inclining him to this; and that would otherwise render him uneasy to himself, should he not thus triumph in another's folly and confusion? No, certainly; this cannot be so much as pretended. For he may as well carry his eyes in another man's head, and run races with another man's feet, as directly and naturally taste the pleasures that spring from the gratification of another man's appetites.

Nor can that person, whosoever he is, who accounts it his recreation and diversion to see one man wallowing in his filthy revels, and another made infamous and noisome by his sensuality, be so impudent as to allege for a reason of his so doing, that either all the enormous draughts of the one, do or can leave the least relish upon the tip of his tongue; or that all the fornications and whoredoms of the other, do or can quench or cool the boilings of his own lust. No, this is impossible. And if so, what can we then assign for the cause of this monstrous