EPISTLE DEDICATORY, ΤΟ A SERMON PREACHED BEFORE THE COURT, AT CHRIST CHURCH CHAPEL, OXFORD. TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE EDWARD, EARL OF CLARENDON, LORD HIGH-CHANCELLOR OF ENGLAND, AND CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXON, AND ONE OF HIS MAJESTY'S MOST HONOURABLE PRIVY-COUNCIL. MY LORD, Though to prefix so great a name to so mean a piece, seems like enlarging the entrance of a house that affords no reception; yet since there is nothing can warrant the publication of it, but what can also command it, the work must think of no other patronage than the same that adorns and protects its author. Some indeed vouch great names, because they think they deserve; but I, because I need such: and had I not more occasion than many others to see and converse with your Lordship's candour and proneness to pardon, there is none had greater cause to dread your judgment; and thereby, in some part, I venture to commend my own. For all know, who know your Lordship, that in a nobler respect than either that of government or patronage, you represent and head the best of universities, and have travelled over too many nations and authors to encourage any one that understands himself, to appear an author in your hands, who seldom read any books to inform yourself, but only to countenance and credit VOL. I.-1 1 A them. But, my Lord, what is here published pretends no instruction, but only homage: while it teaches many of the world, it only describes your Lordship, who have made the ways of labour and virtue, of doing, and doing good, your business and your recreation, your meat and your drink, and I may add also, your sleep. My Lord, the subject here treated of is of that nature that it would seem but a chimera, and a bold paradox, did it not in the very front carry an instance to exemplify it, and so by the dedication convince the world, that the discourse itself was not impracticable. For such ever was, and is, and will be the temper of the generality of mankind, that, while I send men for pleasure to religion, I cannot but expect, that they will look upon me as only having a mind to be pleasant with them myself; nor are men to be worded into new tempers or constitutions: and he that thinks that any one can persuade, but he that made the world, will find that he does not well understand it. My Lord, I have obeyed your command, for such must I account your desire; and thereby design, not so much the publication of my sermon as of my obedience: for, next to the supreme pleasure described in the ensuing discourse, I enjoy none greater, than in having any opportunity to declare myself, Your Lordship's very humble Servant, ROBERT SOUTH. SERMONS. SERMON I. THE WAYS OF WISDOM ARE WAYS OF PLEASANTNESS. [Preached before the Court at Christ Church Chapel.] PROV. III. 17. Her ways are ways of pleasantness. THE text, relating to something going before, must carry our eye back to the thirteenth verse, where we shall find, that 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 a one as it is for pleasure, in general, is the consequent apprehension of a suitable object, 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 3 little owned in pretence, as that it is an enemy to man'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, either in soul or body, 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 greatest and 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 devour and 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 nobody 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 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 r 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? For answer to which, 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 à peculiar relation and 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 caught 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 supernatural over-powering operation of God's Spirit. The difference of which two estates consists in this that in the former the sensitive appetites rule and 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, dawning in very imperfect essays and discoveries. Now it being most undeniably evident, that every faculty and 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 |