Hold this therefore, _Academicus_, as a certain truth, that the heresy of all heresies is a worldly spirit. It is the whole nature and misery of our fall; it keeps up the death of our souls; and, so long as it lasts, makes it impossible for us to be born again. It is the greatest blindness and darkness of our nature, and keeps us in the grossest ignorance both of heaven and hell. For we feel neither the one nor the other, so long as the spirit of this world reigns in us. Light, and truth, and the gospel, so far as they concern eternity, are all empty sounds to the worldly spirit. His own good, and his own evil, govern all his hopes and fears; and therefore he can have no religion, farther than as it can be made serviceable to the life of this world. _Publicans_ and _Harlots_ are all of the spirit of this world; but its highest birth are _Scribes_, the _Pharisees_, and _Hypocrites_, who turn godliness into gain, and serve God for the sake of mammon; these live, and move, and have their being in and from the spirit of this world.――Of all things therefore my friends, detest the spirit of this world, or you must live and die an _utter stranger_ to all that is divine and heavenly. You will go out of the world in the same poverty and death in which you entered into it. For a worldly spirit can know nothing, feel nothing, taste nothing, delight in nothing but with earthly senses, and after an earthly manner. _The natural man_, saith the apostle, _receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, they are foolishness unto him. He cannot know them, because they are spiritually discerned_; that is, they can only be discerned by that Spirit, which he hath not. Now the true reason of the absolute impossibility of the natural man, how polite, and learned, and acute soever he be, is this; so far as our life reaches, so far we understand, and feel, and know, and no farther. All after this is, only the play of our imagination, amusing itself with the _dead pictures_ of its own ideas. Now this is all that the natural man can possibly do with the things of God. He can only contemplate them as so many _dead ideas_, that he receives from books, or hearsay; and so can learnedly dispute and quarrel about them, and laugh at those as Enthusiasts, who have a living sensibility of them. He is only the worse for his _dead ideas_ of divine truths; they become bad nourishment to all his natural tempers: he is proud of his ability to discourse about them, and loses all humility, thro’ a vain and haughty contention for them. His _zeal_ for religion is envy and wrath, his orthodoxy is pride and obstinacy, his love of the truth is hatred and ill-will to those who dare to dissent from him. This is the constant effect of the religion of the natural man, who is under the dominion of the spirit of this world. He cannot make a better use of his knowledge than this; and all for this plain reason, because he stands at the _same distance_ from a _living sensibility_ of the truth,