The Works of Thomas Secker, Ll D

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SERMON III. EPHESIANS IV. 26. Be ye angry, and sin not. The nature of Almighty God being absolutely perfect and uncompounded, neither passions nor affections, properly so called, have any place in it: but his actions all proceed from uniform and unmixed regard to truth and equity. His creatures, incapable of attaining to be in any respect what he is, fall short of it in different degrees, from those spirits above, that approach nearest to pure intelligence, though infinitely distant from it, to the lowest inhabitants of earth, which have no other guide than appetites and instincts. Man is of a middle rank; and partakes, almost equally, of inferior principles to excite and move him, where reason would be insufficient, and of reason to direct and restrain these, where else they would take a wrong course, or exceed proper bounds. Our proportion therefore of lower faculties, though a proof that we are very imperfect, contributes to our being on the whole less so, than we should have been; and a due regulation of them by the higher, will make us continually more perfect than we are. This is the great employment allotted us by our Maker here on earth: which indeed we often find much pain in attempting, but should suffer much greater by neglecting, and shall be rewarded eternally for performing. Now, according to the several kinds of our inward dispositions, the moral discipline of them varies. Some, as the benevolent sort, require chiefly to be strengthened: some again, as the irascible, to be kept in subjection. And indeed our anger is so hard to be governed, and the cause of such dreadful evils, when it is not governed; that no wonder, if great and wise men have seemed to speak of it, as totally and essentially vicious: as requiring to be, not only moderated but rooted out...