There is a law in heaven that the heavenly Bride may, at one time, have but one Husband. The first marriage on earth was a pattern of this law, for then God gave one woman to one man. God, who made this first marriage, gave not two women to one man, nor two men to one woman, but He gave one to one—that two (not three or four) might be one flesh. Accordingly, the heavenly marriage-makers espouse the Church to one Husband, and that they may do so (2 Cor. 12:2), they teach that the former husband must be dead before the soul can marry another. No soul can marry Christ Jesus but a widow; for she must be freed from the law of her old husband by his death before she can come to be subject to the law of the new.
Her old husband was concupiscence, to whom she was married in carnal generation, and this husband must be slain and put off by death if Christ Jesus, the new and true Husband of the soul, is to be put on in regeneration. Indeed, if the soul will give her consent, this new and true Husband will kill the old—not so much a husband as a thief and an adulterer. A thief he is, for he has stolen the soul from her first Lord and Husband, even the Lord who made her; and an adulterer he is, for he lives with her who belongs to another, and while he lives with her, he keeps her not for love but for lust. Wherefore, let the soul give her consent to his death, that thereby her true Husband may recover His right in her, and that she may receive her true Husband, and in Him, life, liberty, and felicity.
Indeed, she may well be weary of the old, for her living with him is most unreasonable, most slavish, and most miserable. It is most unreasonable, for there is no sense in the marriage of a soul with lust. What good can lust do to a soul, there being no likeness but a mere contrariety between them? And we know that things are cherished and strengthened by their like, but they are destroyed by their contraries. The soul is light, and lust is darkness—and can darkness give any increase of being or well-being to light? Does not darkness go about to lessen, quench, and kill light? Again, lust has in it a venom contrary to goodness, and can evil give any increase or addition of goodness to the soul? Indeed, this venom has in it a force and power to draw the will and affections away from that sovereign Good, who is the true and only beatific object of the soul, and to glue and fasten her to objects of vanity—yes, even of death and misery.
Again, the soul in her substance is a spirit—and what natural pleasure or profit can a spiritual essence receive from gross and fleshly lust? The soul has no taste for the rank and gross pleasures of the flesh, but they are to her as the onions and garlic of Egypt to a dainty and delicate palate. Surely, as well may the earth give light to the sun, and a tempest give rest to the sea, as lust can give light, or life, or rest, or happiness to the soul. Rather, darkness, death, and misery it can and does give, and thus, under the shape of a husband, it proves a cruel enemy and a very murderer of the soul.
And surely, he who made such a marriage between the soul and her mortal enemy could be no other than a mortal enemy of the soul himself. He must have been as cunning as he was malicious to put any show of reason upon a match so absurd and unreasonable.
If we now consider, in a second place, the slavery of the soul in this marriage with lust, the tears that bewailed the virginity of Jephthah’s daughter are not sufficient to bewail this slavish marriage. The body commands the soul, earth commands heaven, and dust commands that noble and divine essence which was breathed into man from God’s own mouth and had His own image imprinted on it. Neither is it merely the body of dust that commands the heavenly soul, but the body itself, being commanded by lust, commands the soul—so that lust becomes the chief lord of both body and soul, being a certain venom, itch, and fury dwelling in this earth of man.
There may be some proportion between the dust which God turned into a body and that soul which God made with His breath, though in a large and remote distance and difference. But between the soul, which God made after His own image, and this blind and wild lust—which God did not make in man—there is no portion or part of proportion upon which any right or power of command may be grounded. Yet, in this base and wretched marriage, vile and odious lust spurs the soul with its commands and makes her trudge up and down in businesses of darkness, filthiness, and wretchedness. The soul is set to work in things that are no kin to her, no good to her—indeed, things that are contrary to her being and well-being, for they are contrary to that image of God which is in her, and consequently contrary to the God whose image this is and to whom this image points and leads her as to her sovereign Good.
Thus we have a third mischief of this marriage—misery annexed to slavery. For as the image of God in the soul turns the eye and heart of the soul to look toward God, her chief happiness, so lust turns the eye and heart of the soul away from her happiness. And what can her prospect or object be but misery? And if the eye of the soul happens to cast some glances toward heaven and happiness, yet the heart—the will and affections—are hurried away by lust to objects and works of vanity and misery. So that the soul can only say, I see the better things and follow the worse; I see happiness and run after misery.
Thus, by slavery she buys misery—and slavery itself being misery, she by misery earns misery. Indeed, is it not the very misery of an Egyptian bondage, that the soul should be continually set to work by lust in a fiery furnace, and be beaten and tormented when she does not work—though her work concerns her not at all, except to strengthen her own bondage and increase her own misery? Indeed, she is kept so hard at work precisely so that she may have no leisure to think beyond bondage and misery.
Accordingly, if the soul at any time so much as lifts up her eyes above her present bondage to that Lord of life, liberty, and happiness, who would once have married her and still makes new offers to her, this tyrannous husband—like a taskmaster—strikes deep lashes into her side and tells her she is idle, though she thinks on her nearest business and dearest happiness. If it be in the morning, there is a bargain of profit imposed on her, and this quota of bricks must be made that day. And about this must the soul go, being pierced through with the thorns of covetousness by the violent hand of her false husband, so that she may have no leisure, respiration, or rest.
And if at night the soul is weary of the day’s work and would gladly go to bed with the body, the night is lust’s day (as it is the owl’s—for both are blind), and then there is a wife whose husband is away from home. The poor soul, being a spirit, must traffick in this errand for the flesh—to contrive a wary but wicked meeting between her own lewd husband and another man’s wife. And while she plots it, she does a work of slavery, and when she has done it, she receives no other reward than the wages of misery.
But it would be endless to set forth the whole story of this Egyptian bondage. Let the carnal man read over the story of his own life, and he may see the one in the other. When all is summed together, it amounts to this: that the marriage between the soul and lust is monstrous—as between a woman and a beast; slavish—as between a woman and a tyrant; mischievous and mortal—as between a woman and a serpent.
I wish that all this were sufficient to persuade the soul to consent to the divorce and death of this usurping and bloody husband—without whose death there can be no marriage between her and happiness. For though all reason and right join for his removal, yet power, possession, and union work mightily for him.
The friends of the Bridegroom cry aloud, Put off the old man, corrupt through deceitful lusts (Eph. 4), and put on the new, created in righteousness and holiness. And, If you live after the flesh, you shall die, but if you mortify the deeds of the flesh by the Spirit, you shall live (Rom. 8:13). And, Abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul (1 Pet. 2:11). The authority, love, and reasons of these voices deserve to be heard, persuading the soul to nothing other than separation from a deadly enemy who can give her no dowry but eternal death.
And I wish that thus the soul may indeed be persuaded.
But when the soul is come even to the very point of persuasion, then will lust come weeping after the soul, like the false husband of Michal. He will raise up in her remembrance the images of gross and filthy pleasures, to awaken the old unhappy love, and to stir up a cruel and unmerciful pity. For a cruel pity it is when the soul pities her own murderer and not her own murder. Rather, put on a merciful cruelty—being merciful to yourself by killing him who would kill you.
It is better that he should endure one death (who is not worthy to live) than that a soul should be ever dying, which should live forever. If you do not kill lust now, he must shortly die with the death of the body—and this short life of his will cost you everlasting death. But if you kill him presently, who must die shortly, by this small difference of death, you preserve for yourself everlasting life.
Wherefore, that which shall shortly be necessary, make it presently voluntary—and so shall you turn necessity into a sacrifice, even a freewill offering. And by his death, you shall change your own death into life eternal.
Know that they are but false tears which lust sheds, and his cries are lies—for there is no such happiness in his union as his tears would make you believe. Your happiness is greatest when you are freed from lust—when lust is dead and the soul is newly married to her Savior.
For the first soul was happy before she was married to lust, and miserable only after that accursed marriage. To be without lust is a true paradise; for man had not this lust when he was first placed in Paradise, and neither could Paradise endure man when this lust was placed in him. Therefore, the true way to return to Paradise (or to that state of happiness of which Paradise was a type) is to put off this lust, by which our misery began.
When lust is put off from the soul by death, and she is newly married to the Lord of life, she will say she was never happy until then—and that her former, imaginary happiness was but painted and glittering misery. She will look upon dead lust as upon a loathsome carcass, and she will loathe the remembrance of her former not-loves but adulteries.
She will be like one awakened from a foolish dream or from an enchanted love—and she will wonder that she has been so long bewitched with vanity, folly, sin, and misery. But withal, in her new marriage, having tasted how sweet her Lord is, she will both wonder and lament that she has lacked this sweetness so long.
The excess of her joy will itself be a cause of sorrow, for her joy is now so great that she is sorry she was not sooner a partaker of this joy. In this joyful sorrow, she will kiss the feet of her Lord and weep on them while she kisses them. The feet of her Lord are now more precious to her than the head and crown of lust—for she kisses them because she loves them, and she weeps because she has loved lust so long and her Lord so little.
For lust, which once falsely appeared to her as her greatest joy, now truly appears as her greatest sorrow; and her now-Lord, in whom before she took no delight, now appears to be her chief and truest joy—and both of these truths her tears declare.
