*Hence it is that sin rides in triumph over church and state, and from the court to the cottage all is over-run with sensuality, guile, falseness, pride, wrath, selfishness, and every form of corruption. Every one swims away in this torrent, but he who hears and attends to the voice of the Son of God, calling him to die to this life, to take up his cross and follow him. Much learned pains has been often taken to prove _Rome_, or _Constantinople_, to be the seat of the beast, the antichrist, the scarlet whore. But, alas! they are not at such a distance from us, they are the properties of fallen human nature, and are all of them alive in our ownselves, till we are dead to all the spirit and tempers of this world. They are every where, in every soul, where the heavenly nature, and the Spirit of the holy Jesus is not. But when the human soul turns from itself, and turns to God, dies to itself, and lives to God in the Spirit, tempers, and inclinations of the holy Jesus, loving, pitying, suffering, and praying for all its enemies, and overcoming all evil with good, as Christ did; then, but not till then, are these monsters separate from it. This, _Academicus_, is the fallen human nature, which is alive in every one, though in various manners, till he is born again. To think therefore of any religion, or to pretend to real holiness without dying to this old man, is building castles in the air; and can bring forth nothing, but _Satan_ in the form of an angel of light. Would you know, _Academicus_, whence it is, that so many false spirits have appeared in the world, who have deceived themselves and others with false fire, and false light? It is this; they endeavoured to have turned to God, without turning from themselves; would be alive in God, before they were dead to their own nature; a thing as impossible in itself, as for a grain of wheat to be alive before it dies. Now religion in the hands of corrupt nature, serves only to discover vices of a worse kind, than in nature left to itself. Hence are all the disorderly passions of religious men, which burn in a worse flame, than passions only employed about worldly matters; pride, hatred, and persecution, under a cloak of religious zeal, will sanctify actions, which nature, left to itself, would start at.