The great and primary object of a good man's fear is sin; and, in proportion to the atrociousness of the crime, he will shrink from it with more horrour. When he meditates on the infinite perfection of his Maker and his Judge; when he considers, that the heavens are not pure in the sight of God, and yet remembers, that he must in a short time appear before him; he dreads the contamination of evil, and endeavours to pass through his appointed time, with such cautions, as may keep him unspotted from the world.
The dread of sin necessarily produces the dread of temptation: he, that wishes to escape the effect, flies likewise from the cause. The humility of a man truly religious, seldom suffers him to think himself able to resist those incitements to evil, which, by the approach of immediate gratifications, may be presented to sense or fancy; his care is not for victory, but safety; and, when he can escape assaults, he does not willingly encounter them.
The continual occurrence of temptation, and that imbecility of nature, which every man sees in others, and has experienced in himself, seems to have made many doubtful of the possibility of salvation. In the common modes of life, they find that business ensnares, and that pleasure seduces; that success produces pride, and miscarriage envy; that conversation consists too often of censure or of flattery; and, that even care for the interests of friends, or attention to the establishment of a family, generates contest and competition, enmity and malevolence, and at last fills the mind with secular solicitude.
Under the terrours which this prospect of the world has impressed upon them, many have endeavoured to secure their innocence, by excluding the possibility of crimes; and have fled for refuge, from vanity and sin, to the solitude of deserts; where they have passed their time in woods and caverns; and, after a life of labour and maceration, prayer and penitence, died at last in secrecy and silence.
Many more, of both sexes, have withdrawn, and still
