Quotes from The Excellency of a Gracious Spirit

These quotes come from chapter 3; A Discovery to the Men of the World, Whereby They May See that Their Spirits Are Not Like the Spirits of Godly Men. If that isn't a puritan chapter title, I don't know what is! This particular chapter can be found in The Excellency of a Gracious Spirit by Jeremiah Burroughs (Burroughs, Jeremiah. The Excellency of a Gracious Spirit: Delivered in a Treatise on Numbers 14:24. Morgan, PA: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 1995. Print.)

The point of this chapter is summed up succinctly in the chapter's opening sentence, "Hence, let the men of the world see there is a great difference between their spirits and the spirits of the godly." (57) From there, Burroughs continues to elaborate on the differences in their spirits.

Perhaps your lands, your houses may be worth something, but what are your hearts worth? They are worth nothing, full of chaff and dross. They are like children's pockets, full of stones and dirt, while the spirits of the godly are storehouses of the most choice and precious treasures. (58)

How many men or women have fair, comely bodies, a good complexion, and are beautifully dressed up, but within their spirits are most ugly and horrid, full of filth, full of venom and loathsome distemper? (58)

If the Lord should give men a view of the horrid deformity and filthiness of their spirits, it would amaze them and sink their hearts in woeful horror. (58)

If men's bodies were deformed, and ran with loathsome issues and putrefied sores, how dejected would they be in their own thoughts! But certainly this spirit defilement is worse. If men's bodies were so putrefied that they bred vermin continually, how grievous would it be to them? Their spirits have these loathsome diseases upon them by which they are infinitely more miserable. If they had such a distemper of body that their excrements came from them when they knew not of it, this would be accounted a grievous evil. But their spirits are so corrupt that much filth comes from them and they know not of it. Many of them are so deeply putrefied in their spirits that they usually swear and speak filthily and know not of it. (59)

Soul diseases, of all disease, are the greatest evils and usually prove deadly. Yea, the least spirit-corruption would certainly prove deadly were it not for the application of that blood that is more precious than ten thousand worlds. (59)