though he will only awake to the perfect misery of it after death,
when his body and fleshly nature have mouldered away in the grave,
and can no longer pamper and stupify him and make him forget his own
misery. Ay, there has been many a man in this life who had every
fleshly enjoyment which this world can give, riches and pleasure,
banquets and palaces, every sense and every appetite pampered,--his
pride and his vanity flattered; who never knew what want, or
trouble, or contradiction, was on the smallest point; a man, I say,
who had every carnal enjoyment which this earth can give to a man's
selfish flesh, and yet whose spirit was in hell all the while, and
who knew it; hating and despising himself for a mean selfish
villain, while all the world round was bowing down to him and
envying him as the luckiest of men. I am trying to make you
understand the infinite difference between a man's flesh and his
spirit; how a man's flesh can take no pleasure in spiritual things,
while man's spirit of itself can take no pleasure in fleshly things.
Now, the spirit and the flesh, body and soul, in every man, are at
war with each other,--they have quarrelled; that is the corruption
of our nature, the fruit of Adam's fall. And as the Article says,
and as every man who has ever tried to live godly well knows, from
experience, "that infection of nature does remain to the last, even
in those who are regenerate." So that as St. Paul says, the spirit
lusteth against the flesh, and the flesh against the spirit; and it
continually happens that a man cannot do the things which he would;
he cannot do what he knows to be right; thus, as St. Paul says
again, a man may delight in the law of God in his inward man, that
is, in his spirit, and yet all the while he shall find another law
in his members, I.E. in his body, in his flesh, in his brain which
thinks, and his heart which feels, and his senses which are fond of
pleasure; and this law of the flesh, these appetites and passions