FROM AN 1855 sermon:

In the first place, then, my brethren, as men, as the offspring of a corrupted stock, self-denial is indispensably necessary for us. No sooner did our first parents transgress the divine command than labours and sufferings were declared to be their inseparable lot. Their descendants, born in pangs and in sorrow, were to eat their bread in the sweat of their brow: the earth was to yield them thorns and briars; and all nature was in some measure to disclaim the sovereignty of its fallen lord. But, if the effects of man’s disobedience were thus widely felt in the objects around him, it was in his own breast, that his transgression occasioned the most baneful revolution. From that moment, a furious and interminable war arose within him. His inferior appetites, rebellious to reason, incessantly demanded gratification at the expence of duty. All the powers of his soul were corrupted and brutalized. His will became perverse, sluggish to good, impetuous to evil: his understanding was overclouded with error, his heart was elated with pride, his affections were either fixed and centered on himself, or chained and enslaved to the objects around him; virtue from that moment assumed, in his jaundiced eye, a repulsive aspect, and the service of his Creator, which in innocence had been his sweetest occupation, became in guilt an employment of toil and restraint.

From this unhappy train of evils no one, of all the children of Adam, could in justice claim exemption. And it is not necessary for any one to go farther than his own heart, to witness these sad consequences of that first transgression. All have felt desires, which their better reason forbade them to gratify ; all have felt within themselves that domestic warfare, described by St. Paul; all have experienced the rebellion of the flesh, which lusteth against the spirit, and all might, with truth, apply to themselves those words of the Apostle, The good which I will, I do not, but the evil which I will not, that I do.

Here, then, my brethren, from this fatal propensity to evil, we learn the necessity of the unsavoury doctrine of mortification.

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